31 July 2009: "WTF is ‘art’?"

This post is about G.G. Allin. Here we are presented with the customary Carlesian complex of interwoven themes: the role of the artist in capitalist society, the evolution of media forms and how that shapes the public sphere, the nature of art itself and its parameters, metaphor vs. metonymy, the parasitical relationship of art to life, performativity and its natural boundaries, libido and its destructive potential with regard to civilization, scatology as epistemology. It begins with Carles rejecting the role of the artist: "A lot of people tell me ‘Carles, ur an artist’ but I have to tell them, ‘I’m not an artist. I’m a blog.’" Unlike blogging, making art has become a mere alibi for unrestrained self-expression devoid of theoretical content. Art has been reduced to diary-keeping:

Feel overwhelmed by ‘art.’ As we continue to move forward in time, there are just more&more ways 2 express yourself–more tools, more ways 2 communicate, and more metaphors to be showcased. Kinda makes u wonder what is ‘art’ and what is ‘just being alive.’

In other words, Carles, echoing the Frankfurt school philosophers, is complaining about art having lost its critical function. In his essay "Art and Mass Culture" Max Horkheimer writes:

The gradual dissolution of the family, the transformation of personal life into leisure and of leisure into routines supervised to the last detail, into the pleasures of the ball park and the movie, the best seller and the radio, has brought about the disappearance of the inner life. Long before culture was replaced by these manipulated pleasures, it had already assumed an escapist character. Men had fled into a private conceptual world and rearranged their thoughts when the time was ripe for rearranging reality. The inner life and the ideal had become conservative factors. But with the loss of his ability to take this kind of refuge -- an ability that thrives neither in slums nor in modern settlements -- man has lost his power to conceive a world different from that in which he lives. This other world was that of art.

Faced with an art that has lost its power to criticize and represent an alternate (or, as Carles would say, an "alt") ideal, Carles theorizes instead a kind of post-art that supersedes any mimetic or critical functions.

It’s kinda weird how art is supposed to ‘represent life’, and challenge u to think about some aspect of humanity/society is ‘kinda fucked up.’ I am not sure why people think expression is so important.

Carles seems to be advocating an art that moves beyond expression, and perhaps beyond abstract expressionism, to a different artistic mode, but he also accepts that this pursuit of transgression, of new ground for art to colonize, inevitably turns atavistic, degenerating into the most primitive forms of human interaction. His imaginary artist reaches the impasse where his pursuit of authenticity culminates in a polymorphously perverse infantile regression: "Just want to ‘jack off’ and ’shit’ on objects, but not because I want it to be ‘art’, but because I sincerely have the desire to ‘tug off’ and ‘defecate’ on stuff." The artist can no longer distinguish his creative impulses from his masturbatory or excretory ones, "art" and "shit" have become synonymous at the symbolic and literal levels. This solves the dilemma that had made conventional art history so meaningless to Carles: "I never went to Art History class during undergrad, and actually failed because of my poor attendance. Maybe if I had attended, I would have a better eye for ‘what is art’ and what is ‘bullshit.’" But of course Carles knew all along that there is no difference; no refinement of the beholder's aesthetic can lead to a tenable differentiation at this particular juncture in art's decline.

The only guarantor of artistic authenticity, once the artist has reached this level of disaffection, is his own ejaculate or feces, personal products that are uncontaminated with symbolic ideas which make reference to the work of others and hence become derivative. No artist of the late 20th century epitomized this conundrum more than Kevin "G.G." Allin, whose performances were frequently sanctified in the eyes of his admirers by the spilling of his own fluids.

So the pursuit of purity or originality is an unsustainable course for the development of art -- G.G. Allin, after all, is dead. Carles then consdiers a different kind of post-art: the possibly of wedding the aesthetic impulse to the commercial context of capitalism, in keeping with the way in which digitization has made once intangible ideas into commodified, tradable "memes": "Not sure how ‘the internet’ has changed art. It seems like u shouldn’t try to make ‘art’ n e more, maybe we should just focus on ‘designing and branding streams of memes.’" The process of branding itself becomes the substance of artistic practice -- artists will work with the tools of marketing, rather than with paint or pencil. The artistic product will not be a discrete work but the evocation of influence qua influence. In this way, the pejorative connotations of selling out the idea art to corporate design are sublated; corporate art frees the artist of the inhibitions of his own ego, design becomes a medium for pure craft, unpolluted by the mediocrity of ideas that fail by being too original.

29 July 2009: "Indie Buzzbands 2 watch in 2k10: Hooting@TheBlowfish"

This post is about the uncanny. Unusually for Carles, he draws heavily upon a Biblical source for the substance of these humorous theses about a once popular band from the 1990s. He seems to have in mind chapter one of the Book of Ecclesiastes, particularly these verses:

9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

Of course, by speculating about a return to prominence for Hootie and the Blowfish, Carles is suggesting that whatever the next popular musical group with broad trans-subcultural appeal should be, it will be essentially no different from the bands that have achieved similar success in previous years. That is to say that no aesthetic progress is marked at the mass level. Instead, an entropy reigns at the level of popular culture; no new spiritual energy enters the closed circuit; there is only a repeat of the same forms and the same tired appeals. Hence Carles's incisive irony, along with a telling reference to our postmodern condition: "As you can see by their post-modern album cover, Cracked Rearview is surely going to change the way that music + album art are created for the rest of time." But his entire point is that nothing changes and nothing is new under the sun. Popular culture has traveled into a blind cul-de-sac, and the appropriative strategies of the postmodern only underscore the generalized poverty of inspiration.

Carles's repeated references to the music media indicates his general skepticism of their ability to breathe new life into exhausted tropes through the tactics of marketing. With cutting sarcasm, he notes, "I am excited about the Pitchfork magazine picking up on this band. I think that with the right amount of blog buzz, and coverage from magazines and Pitchforks, they will be around for a long time to come." In a sense, this is more true than true, as bands in this mold will always be with us, though their faces and names will be superficially altered. Hype, always histrionic about the possibility of the new, perpetually repeats itself, reduces to an undifferentiated "buzz," and effaces novelty itself. When Carles urges "Please friend this band on myspace, so that if they get big, we can say that we wrote about them first, and found out about them because of blogs" he shows how the so-called new mnedia forms have already been co-opted and been made to succor the status quo.

Confronted with such an artistic impasse, Carles suggests, culture collapses in on itself, and blandness (represented here by his selection of a quintessentially dull band) becomes the only means of expressing aesthetic energy. "A lot of people say that the music industry is ‘in the shitter’, but I honestly believe these next 10 years are going to be the ‘Golden Age’ of Pop + Indie music." He is perhaps hoping here that the event horizon of mediocrity will be shattered, that in the quiescence of boredom, in the very outhouse of recycled and regurgitated pop excrement, a new cultural form can emerge that finds dynamism in stasis, gold in dross, sublimity in the monolithic sameness. In the post-backlash cultural era, about which Carles barely dares to theorize and can only imply through various mechanisms of negative theologistics, an audience's aesthetic responsiveness will be perfected in its ability to ignore altogether the contradictions involved in the safe and familiar being represented as the new. Familiarity itself will become deeply unfamilar. An unheimlichkeit will leave its indelible mark on all experience.

26 July 2009: "This is a metaphor abt growing older / ur innerchild being dead."

This post is about the uselessness of introspection. Carles declares: "Sad that my innerchild is ‘dead and gone, dead and gone.’" His psychic murder of the idea of a childlike aesthetics of innocence, of authentic responsiveness, is part of a more sweeping rejection of self-reflection as it pertains to aesthetic being.

Srsly feel like the only thing that could have made my childhood better would have been ‘having the opportunity to listen to Animal Collective without even knowing what pitchfork/music blogs were.’ Feel like I would have really ‘enjoyed it’ in an organic way.

The prefacing word srsly calls into question even the ability to articulate a critique, at this particular juncture of constructed reflexive subjectivity, without it automatically becoming ironized. So it is unclear if his mediated tastes in poipular culture are truly to be lamented, or if he is sardonically acknowledging that media outlets such as Pitchfork actually enable the enjoyment of culture rather than preempt it, that the fantasy of an "organic" response is in truth the most crippling legacy of the Romantic delusion of individual taste. It is no mistake that Carles provides the phrase "'enjoyed it'" with another layer of distanciation and irony with a set of quotation marks. Organic enjoyment is a fiction. Pleasures are produced socially, via a saturation of media commentary.

Thus introspection, the searching of one's soul for one's authentic being through the substantiating medium of expressed and recognized personal tastes, also leads one down a blind alley. We discover that our presupposed uniqueness is founded on a shallow base of mass-consumed trivia:

I had always thought that my childhood was special. I thought that me + my brother/sister had a more meaningful childhood than any1 else in the world. However, as I grew older, I found out that the people who lived around me generally had the same experience as me (they possibly had more lenient parents).

With regard to this point, Carles likely has in mind Schopenhauer's aphorisms on philosophy and the intellect. Schopenhauer declares:

The simplest unprejudiced self-observation, combined with the facts of anatomy, leads to the conclusion that intellect, like its objectivization the brain, is, together with its dependent sense-apparatus, nothing other than a very intense receptivity to influences from without and does not constitute our original and intrinsic being.

Carles translates this sentiment into a coruscating repudiation of nostalgia.

Sad abt growing up, losing touch with my innerchild, experiencing things like ‘joy’ or smiling for a reason other than ‘laughing @ some1.’ Sad that most of my connxns are so inauthentic. Sad that I can’t enjoy things. Sad that whenever I ‘connect’ with some1, I just feel like a ‘nostalgic fggt.’ H8 when ppl connect abt things that they used 2 watch/listen 2. Wish there was some way to connect with ppl abt who we will become in the future.

The key word is, naturally, "will" -- the determining force that renders the future malleable and differentiates being at a level above and beyond the circumscribed intellect, the limited circle of remembrance and experience that Carles indelicately suggests has unmanned him. The will is figured as masculine force; here Carles may be parodying Schopenhauer's notorious misogyny. Schopenhauer asserts that "the child receives from its father will and character, from its mother intellect" because "coitus is chiefly an affair of the man" and "coitus is the sign that, despite every increase in illumination through the intellect, the will to live continues to exist in time." Carles suggests that will is denatured and directed fruitlessly -- into a metaphorically homosexual relation that can produce no offspring -- by nostalgia and trivia. Instead the will must be directed toward vigorous expressions of future potentialities -- i.e. coital ejaculations, the only authentic objective expression of pleasure Carles is prepared to recognize philosophically.

Postscript: I just realized that the comments link on this blog was not working. It should be fixed now. Please use the comments to elucidate the analysis provided here as you see fit. Thank you.

23 July 2009: " Is M.I.A. continuing to exploit her child as a meme?"

This post is about the Verneinung. Is it too obvious to state that the child of Sri Lankan performing artist MIA may struggle with developing an autonomous ego formation, and that the very idea of subjectivity may remain objectively ungraspable for this particular bundle of aggressive desires? Remember that MIA also functions as a "producer" in many different sense of the word: As Deleuze and Guattari have declared, "Producing, a product: a producing/product identity. It is this identity that constitutes a third term in the linear series: an enormous undifferentiated object. Everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place -- and then the whole process will begin all over again." This seems an apt description of both this pregnant cultural moment vis-a-vis MIA, on the cusp of a level of success that will permanently deprive her of anonymity and the integrity of her desires qua desires, and of her infant, the undifferentiated object/abject par excellance. One can easily imagine this child thinking along the same track as Deleuze and Guattari when they continue: "From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual birth and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no anus to shit through." That is to say, the constitution of MIA's child as a subject means also depriving it of its freedom from the socially produced mechanics of contrived desire.

When MIA dresses her baby in clothes designed to mimic her own most-famous wardrobe item, is she merely making a metaphor of the mirror stage famously promulgated by Lacan or actually trying to forestall the inevitable (and inevitably flawed) ego separation between child and mother? Is she trying to prevent her child from an unstable and unsuitable relation with language itself, the medium of her own achievements? Carles notes, "Lil bro seems lost, like he is unsure of what is happening, not confident in his lil personal brand." He is having trouble negotiating subjectivity even on the terms established by late capitalist self-branding imperatives. Carles is empathetic, rendering his sympathy at once as a command to the reader: "Feel bad for the kid. Seems like he is being branded to become an ‘independent spirit’, but u can’t be independent if your parents make free-spirited decisions for you, particularly when it comes to zany fashion decisions." The point here is that a child born into a certain level of notoriety will struggle with finding appropriate imagos to permit him to differentiate the real from the unreal, the self from the other from the Other. To wit: If the child recognizes his famous mother in the mirror when the crisis of identity comes, one can only imagine the myriad deformations incumbent upon such a misrecognition, the méconnaissance; the I/eye will remain in a state of atavistic immaturity, a purer consciousness perhaps, but a kind of incompetency for social being as currently constituted. He may not succeed in achieving the alienation that allows for social being and may stay suspended in a womb-like state of semi-selfhood, reliant ultimately on the mother as a filter for all experience. As Lacan notes, "We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of the I and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis -- just as the captation of the subject by the situation gives us the general formula for madness, not only the madness that lies behind the walls of asylums [or the impenetrable wall of psychic security afforded by ubiquity in the gossip pages?] but also the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury." Anyone who has listened to MIA's recordings will know the applicability of that last clause to our subject.

21 July 2009: "Is Wavves ‘ripping off’ AnCo / the ‘Panda Bear aesthetic’?"

This post is about alterity. Carles begins by admitting that "I have never actively listened to a Wavves song," by which he means much more than he seems at first to be declaring, calling into question what it means to actively listen as opposed to passively absorb. Is there a sense, he implicitly asks, in which active listening is appropriation? This post, as we know from the title, is about appropriation, "ripping off," whether intentionally or not. Carles wants to resituate the artist's supposed anxiety of influence within a Levinasian frame, investigating the radical responsibility we have to the otherness of another artist's work, whether this demands behavior that approaches the asymptotic limit of a blind and total passiveness in order to accord appropriate ethical respect.

Hence, it is no wonder that listening the musical work he brings under study here, he becomes "very confused." This confusion is an ethical mandate. Any less would evince the machinations of a mind not entirely reconciled to radical tolerance. Though the work in question "seems like a very ’simple song’, like to the point that you could say it is ’stupid,’ " Carles is unwilling to adopt a subject position of judgment, and instead commits himself to the far more trying philosophical position of patience, openness. He acknowledges the "cryptic metaphor" of the song, without forcefully arguing for a specific interpretation. Rather the gesture of metaphoricity alone is noted, with figuration serving as a mental key to unlock a door not yet conceptualized.

Carles then demonstrates the vertiginous and ultimately cannibalizing lines of reasoning a hermaneutics of suspicion can unfold:

Feel like he possibly might be ‘making fun of every1′ for ‘liking AnCo’, and made this song to say ‘this type of song is easy to make, I can shit out a song like this as a joke.’ Suddenly felt insecure, like he is making fun of me for wearing a Merriweather Post Pavvy tshirt. Not sure if he just ‘deconstructed’ the state of the modern indie-musicsphere with this song, or if he is ‘trying to break into it.’

The lesson here is that interpretation by reference to another's motives degrades the other and assimilates the pure alterity to a diminished and faulty instrumentalism. Ontological insecurity, a destabilizing of one's own reflexive consciousness can only ensue, as the positionality implied by prescribing the motives of the Other ultimately redounds on the self as proscriptions. For as Carles shows, this culminates in a demoralized cathexis, self-loathing, and infantile projection: "Wavves seems to h8 everything." Or in other words, "I hate myself."

20 July 2009: "Understanding the significance of ur semi-ironic athletic jersey"

This post is about false-flag operations. Often international espionage requires the recruitment of patsies who believe they are fighting for their own often ill-conceived cause while being fed orders that serve a larger purpose about which they remain entirely ignorant. They fight under a false flag, but in which they sincerely believe, making the masterminds behind this sort of operation safe from exposure should the operative fail. In his novel The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad laid out the scheme for an archetypal false-flag operation. Perhaps inspired by that work, Carles presents a hapless youth in an athletic jersey, and intends to call our attention to a cultural false-flag operation. He wants to enlist our aid in determining who or what is responsible. (Or maybe Carles himself is unaware of who is pulling his own strings. Or maybe once we begin to do as he wishes we fail to understand the nature of the intellectual work we are performing at his behest, under a false flag of our own. There are levels within levels.)

Spycraft of this nature was once limited to state-affiliated entities, but the rise of the culture industry and its supremacy over politics in regions where it retains control of media outlets has allowed celebrities and athletic stars to be recruited into this most dangerous game. Carles protests this development and issues a warning: "I think that it is irresponsible to wear the jersey of an athlete who you know nothing about. Much like any celebrity, there is a point where an athlete no longer ’stands for himself’" The athletes no longer represent themselves or their teams or their own statistics in any straightforward way, but have become counters in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse, where everything is not as it seems and the movement of the trace is quicker than the speed of light. What is irresponsible is to don a article of clothing so laden with significance that one can't possibly hope to control the various messages that one will be sending out to different audiences, each with its own interpretation and agenda. This hints at a much deeper problematic. How does one wear any sort of apparel whatsoever without losing control over the signs with which one associates oneself? Is fashion itself one gigantic, ongoing false-flag operation?

Carles details the uneventful career of failed professional athlete Grant Hill to make the point that the cover story always seems inconsequential and possibly even innocuous. "Grant Hill represents failed expectations," Carles suggests, but that is merely the alibi for the mobilization of untold millions in and around the idea that he represented. His failure masks a far greater success, but whose success that is remains unknowable to the extent that we remember Hill. The youth wearing his jersey, by extension, lays claim to this same ambiguous mantle. He perpetuates Hill's memory (as does Carles himself) further shrouding in mystery the machinations by which professional sports launders near uncountable sums, amassing mroe and more clout to the culture industry in the process.

So when Carles advises, "Always do ur research, and learn about what a brand means," we can't be sure if he is being ironic, and actually warning us that no amount of research will reveal the hidden significance of social symbols, and in fact research will only strengthen the cover stories, tighten our allegiance to our false flag. In a subtle, deeply freighted epigram, Carles concludes that failing to perform due diligence would be "like wearing a t-shirt that says ‘I <3 cock’ even if ur not ghey. Yall know what I mean?" Here sexual identity prefigures allegiance of all kinds, and Carles calls into question whether our patriotic impulses are genetic, beyond our control, as homosexuality is presumed to be, or whether, conversely, sexuality is a matter of preference, of prerogatives adopted for tactical advantages in given circumstances. Carles teases us with is final question, knowing full well that it is impossible for us to know what he means; that in fact the phenomenological status of all our impressions has been deeply destabilized. To wit: There are instances when feigning a love of cock will shroud one's sexual identity in the deepest of mysteries. Carles suggests one of the most nefarious paradoxes of all, one beloved of all double and triple agents: Who can fail to trust the man whose shirt declares "I'm a Liar"?

19 July 2009: "What does it mean when a kute indie girl has ‘bruises’?"

This post is about the theater of cruelty. In another effort to shock his readers out of their complacency, Carles deploys depictions of domestic abuse and self-harm in a faux facetious manner, hoping to prompt a response of shock, disgust, and most important, alertness. On the face of things, he seems to be proposing that bruises have become a new form of tattooing, a new social means of marking, in the alternative youth culture he so frequently draws upon: "Think that bruises on kute lil indie girls are sorta make the girls seem ‘more intriguing.’ Like there is a story behind her that u want 2 ‘find out.’" But the sensational and offensive subject matter here merely gives salience and potency to the underlying point, that storytelling itself is bruising, that self-created mysteries always amount to a sort of metaphysical self-harm, inflicting an epistemological wound on the surface of the skin of reality. The chart of violence Carles supplies actually serves as a travesty of a sort of story-spinner, not unlike the fiction-writing machines in George Orwell's 1984 (one of which, incidentally, wounds Julia). To tell a story is to inflict a wound, to enact a moment of violence, to fashion a site where violence can erupt, as different parties struggle to seize control of the interpretation of a story. When Carles tauntingly asks, "Do yall ever use any of the tactics to keep ur relationship alive?" he is passing judgment on all demagoguery, all attempts to motivate a response through careful control of rhetorical effects. The "relationship" here stands in for any number of social relations, between individuals as well as between social classes, and the state and its institutions.

Carles adds, to reinforce the point, "There’s just something rlly sexie about ‘the unknown.’" Storytelling is a matter of manipulating that curiosity and harnessing it to a particular agenda; leveraging it in the general struggle. It is also about wounding. He seems to have in mind Antonin Artaud's dictum that "a violent and concentrated action is a kind of lyricism; it summons up supernatural [utopian?] images, a bloodstream of images, a bleeding spurt of images in the poet's head and the spectator's as well." That is, narrative must wound the audience; the bruises we show must make others hurt and show spontaneous stigmata, on their hearts if not on their actual flesh. Carles writes, "bruises are a ’seal or approval’/'certificate of authenticity’, demonstrating that you are not just ‘living a lifestyle’, you are immersed in a true alternative life." And so the theater of cruelty transcends the boundaries of the performance space and spills into the performance of everyday life, only with everything and nothing at stake. If a story/bruise is well told, it bleeds its own authenticity from which an audience may drink, vampire-like.

The question: Can this power be harnessed safely to progressive movements, or do we all get "bruised" in this process. Mao declared that "works or art which lack artistic quality have no force, however progressive they are politically." Likewise, Carles seems to be suggesting with this distasteful but important post, works that may appear aesthetically backward and morally reprehensible still may contain politically progressive content.