This post is about canonicity. The question of whether the works of the late 20th Century American author J.D. Salinger belong in the literature canon, Carles reveals, is a meaningless question if not an intentionally misleading and distracting one. The question Salinger's novel must make us consider is the politics of the canon itself and the identity investments that have been made by those who have made it their duty to police it.
Obviously reading novels is no longer the axiomatic locus of enculteration for youth, an idea Carles gently but pointedly mocks: "We must judge books by their covers in the modern world because of the rapid production output of the information economy," he notes, pointing out that cultural consumption for display and for show has by and large trumped earlier modes of consumption that supplied solace, instruction or even escape. Literature is now no more than a "brand extension," Carles suggests, and in those terms, the canon is a repository of dead trademarks, inefficiently leveraged as they are shackled to the anti-marketing ideologies of the academy. "I am not sure if ‘the brand’ of the book was very marketable," Carles proclaims, suggesting that the means of judging a work have dramatically shifted, that a fair appraisal must take into account the mediation of the market and of the media itself. "Catcher in the Rye should have been re-made/adapted into a modern alt tween flick/MTV series in order to see if the elements of the story truly stood the test of time.’" The new canons are unfolding before our eyes, perhaps, each on everyone's screen, in the programming we choose to extricate from the long and short tails.
Carles's analysis of the novel centers on the narratological mode: "Holden Caulfield seemed like he was a ’snarky’ bro." He then contextualizes the issue of the protagonist's defiantly univocality within the problematic of technology, which has endorsed a disseminated and decentralized heteroglossia, epitomized by the open discourses of the internet sphere: "Unfortunately, they didn’t have blogs back then, so he wasn’t able to become a snarkblogger and escape from society by ’sitting at home on his laptop and commenting abt how sillie stuff/people are.’"
Technology is implicated in the discourse of freedom and the freedom of discourse. The negation that Salinger sought to express or condemn in Holden Caulfield is rendered indeterminate in the passage of historical time and radically destabilized by the transmission through many vectors of subjective responses to the novel's interpolation of subjectivity. Many voices, one voice? Who speaks the speaker? Can Holden's "voice" be decoded by readers now familiar with a much different and instantaneous projection of negativity and resistance, of "angst" as such transsubstantiated in the consumerist cauldron of online self-fashioning. Or does he speak a self-consuming discourse whose skepticism undercuts its own legitimacy -- complaints about complainers cancelling themselves out,as they do in today's online welter of opinion, conveniently nullifying dissent in a chorus of rejectionism.
To quote French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser, "The idea of a 'pure and simple' non-overdetermined contradiction is, as Engels said of the economist turn of phrase, 'meaningless, abstract, senseless.' That it can serve as a pedagogical model, or rather that it did serve as a polemical and pedagogical instrument at a certain point in history does not fix its destiny for all time." Carles implicitly refers to this passage when he raises the question of whether Salinger's lasting influence may be supplanted by children's writer R.L. Stine, the author of the popular "Goosebumps" series of novels.
Carles suggests that online sociability may be destroying the ability to maintain a canon's impermeability: "Do yall think that books will play an important role in carving the ‘alternative spirit of tomorrow’? Or will most tweens just chill on the internet forever?" That is, will the sharing imperative of online presence banish the "alternative" spirit, which the humanist canon sought to reify and dignify as the transcendent respect for the uniqueness of every individual, from the world of the future. Has Salinger's death heralded the beginning of the post-humanist age in earnest?
Friday, January 29, 2010
Monday, December 14, 2009
14 December 2009: "Who did Tiger Woods let down more: black ppl or white ppl?"
This post is about one-dimensional man. Carles uses the lens of the Tiger Woods tragedy to examine the contested problematics of race, class, and gender in American society, and how these are interpolated by the commercial imperatives of multinational corporations and the neoliberal attitudes they wish to sponsor and personify through the use of athletic champions as spokespersons. Is Tiger Woods a fallen übermensch or merely a highly visible exemplar of late capitalism's propensity to produce one-dimensional men, who internalize the dictates of a hypercompetitive and hyperrational economic system and administer their lives in unsustainable ways. Woods constituted himself through his athletic remorselessness as "the human brand" and let the prerogatives of capital accumulation dictate his public behavior.
His racial heritage cast this accomplishment in a particularly postcolonial light, serving as an alibi for the unstriated transition from colonial to independent regimes. His success as global brand mirrored the hegemony of the Washington Consensus, while attaching a person of color to its ubiquitous dominance. Carles claims that Tiger Woods white-washes (pun intended) the trouble history of race politics, with his success serving as a vindication and a closing of the books on the history of the subject: "This is why we love Tiger Woods. He is an African-American+miscellaneous other races, without all of the baggage of traditional coloured athletes."
But Woods's deviation from the imposed social norms somewhat hypocritically imposed by his corporate masters in the world of sponsorship marks the potential for an epistemic break, in which the repressed politics of race return with a vengeance to radicalize practices in the post-neoliberal order that is only now just beginning to emerge. Carles suggests that Woods's "transgressions" are actually nothing more than the vehement response of the established order to the threat Woods was beginning to represent.
Having fixed Woods's saga within the Saussurean structure of late capitalist sign-play and attenuated its relations to international structures of economic power, Carles shifts perspective to consider Woods as a cautionary figure, an example of the metastasized techno-rational principle gone awry. Woods, by personifying the "champion" in the post-Fordist era, put a human face on this question of Marcuse's: "At the advanced stage of industrial civilization, scientific rationality, translated into political power, appears to be the decisive factor in the development of historical alternatives. The question then arises: does this power tend toward its own negation -- that is, toward the promotion of the 'art of life'?" Woods, in turning to personal hedonistic satisfaction apparently warranted by his mastery of the technological means of his field, manifested one such historical alternative, one such expression of political power as a shattering of the contractual arrangements which have hitherto held together the hierarchical organization of family life under the sign of "romantic love" since the 18th century. As Carles points out, Woods domination of the sports field betokened and modeled new forms of expression in the social field generally: The integrity of contracts "doesn’t always apply to people who experience levels of joy that are way better than ‘finding solace in a relationship’" -- instead a new kind of relation is implied, a reflexive one engaged with one's one sense of accomplishment, a mimetic desire for the self as it appears socially, a way of interfacing with one's own ambition through the means of docile bodies. Carles notes that "Woods may or may not be able to ‘love’ other people" but underscores the irrelevance of the question to the post-love libidinal economy Woods was attempting to pioneer from the position of significatory surplus: "you could really ‘get banged’ by a true champion, instead of the same loser bro who thinks he is ‘fucking rich/hot/special,’ and that he is the one doing you a favor by giving u the opportunity to sleep with him." In the social arrangement that Woods was beginning to flesh out through his praxis, the circuit of authority and mastery that Woods represented could valorize all the human capital it touched and invalidate the pretenses of those operating according to moribund economic imperatives.
But the immediate backlash in the media suggests the negation of the negation, a reinscription of power at the expense of a regime's now-deposed champion, his mastery redirected in the guise of humility and futility to serve the order he had come to challenge in his ceaseless pursuit of "winning" for its own sake. Though "We want Tiger to live the life that he wants to live," the social order can no longer afford it. Woods's victories, once they cease to indicate the triumph of the status quo and instead intimate the triumph of the will, must be prevented by all means necessary. It would not be shocking if Woods's quasi-vacation fromthe public sphere is an extended one.
His racial heritage cast this accomplishment in a particularly postcolonial light, serving as an alibi for the unstriated transition from colonial to independent regimes. His success as global brand mirrored the hegemony of the Washington Consensus, while attaching a person of color to its ubiquitous dominance. Carles claims that Tiger Woods white-washes (pun intended) the trouble history of race politics, with his success serving as a vindication and a closing of the books on the history of the subject: "This is why we love Tiger Woods. He is an African-American+miscellaneous other races, without all of the baggage of traditional coloured athletes."
But Woods's deviation from the imposed social norms somewhat hypocritically imposed by his corporate masters in the world of sponsorship marks the potential for an epistemic break, in which the repressed politics of race return with a vengeance to radicalize practices in the post-neoliberal order that is only now just beginning to emerge. Carles suggests that Woods's "transgressions" are actually nothing more than the vehement response of the established order to the threat Woods was beginning to represent.
I feel like this white world that he conquered has turned his back on him. No longer is he a white person with black skin who white people are comfortable letting into their metaphorical club house.Carles notes that Tiger began to exceed his function of serving as "a representative of corporate america, some1 who we expect to ‘have values’" -- the meaning of his "evolution into a human brand" had led to his accumulating too much capital in his image, a superfluity of meaning attached to his persona which could find investment in ideas and movements outside the control of the multinationals who made him. So it became imperative for the stability of the order to decathect him as signifier and signified. Woods as transcendental signifier? It was not to be borne. Just as the media interests had worked to "enable" the "dream worlds" of figures like Woods, it could be turned against them, to recapture them within the distributed economy of signs.
Having fixed Woods's saga within the Saussurean structure of late capitalist sign-play and attenuated its relations to international structures of economic power, Carles shifts perspective to consider Woods as a cautionary figure, an example of the metastasized techno-rational principle gone awry. Woods, by personifying the "champion" in the post-Fordist era, put a human face on this question of Marcuse's: "At the advanced stage of industrial civilization, scientific rationality, translated into political power, appears to be the decisive factor in the development of historical alternatives. The question then arises: does this power tend toward its own negation -- that is, toward the promotion of the 'art of life'?" Woods, in turning to personal hedonistic satisfaction apparently warranted by his mastery of the technological means of his field, manifested one such historical alternative, one such expression of political power as a shattering of the contractual arrangements which have hitherto held together the hierarchical organization of family life under the sign of "romantic love" since the 18th century. As Carles points out, Woods domination of the sports field betokened and modeled new forms of expression in the social field generally: The integrity of contracts "doesn’t always apply to people who experience levels of joy that are way better than ‘finding solace in a relationship’" -- instead a new kind of relation is implied, a reflexive one engaged with one's one sense of accomplishment, a mimetic desire for the self as it appears socially, a way of interfacing with one's own ambition through the means of docile bodies. Carles notes that "Woods may or may not be able to ‘love’ other people" but underscores the irrelevance of the question to the post-love libidinal economy Woods was attempting to pioneer from the position of significatory surplus: "you could really ‘get banged’ by a true champion, instead of the same loser bro who thinks he is ‘fucking rich/hot/special,’ and that he is the one doing you a favor by giving u the opportunity to sleep with him." In the social arrangement that Woods was beginning to flesh out through his praxis, the circuit of authority and mastery that Woods represented could valorize all the human capital it touched and invalidate the pretenses of those operating according to moribund economic imperatives.
But the immediate backlash in the media suggests the negation of the negation, a reinscription of power at the expense of a regime's now-deposed champion, his mastery redirected in the guise of humility and futility to serve the order he had come to challenge in his ceaseless pursuit of "winning" for its own sake. Though "We want Tiger to live the life that he wants to live," the social order can no longer afford it. Woods's victories, once they cease to indicate the triumph of the status quo and instead intimate the triumph of the will, must be prevented by all means necessary. It would not be shocking if Woods's quasi-vacation fromthe public sphere is an extended one.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
10 December 2009: "Create your own HRO Post with this bloggable photo."
This post is about multitude. The text Carles has supplied for this post may disappear, consumed by its own premise, so I reproduce the salient portion below:
Then Carles demands labor from readers without offering wage compensation, promising instead the uncertain reward of notoriety within the discursive space he himself controls entirely. The readers' immaterial labor serves to enhance the value of the Carles brand, to which Carles slyly begins his post with a paean.
The circuit Carles traces here is that of capital in the post-Fordist era. The culture and communications industry (represented with some irony in this depiction by Carles himself) produces the means of production for a new kind of labor force that works for no pay to produce its own notoriety, seeking its own distinction within mediatized reality to stand out from the teeming crowd of individuals. These efforts are harvested by the overarching industries and used to enhance the value of their capital. Readers become more insecure as they compete for attention; Carles becomes even more preeminent in his chosen matrix of cultural production.
So there is more than a little sarcasm in his admission that "Even though a lot of other ppl could probs write my blog, there is only 1 Carles." Carles wants to point out that "Carles" has become a corporate entity, an efficient synthesis of the immaterial labor of the cultural producers the weblog sets out to satirize. This of course is the meaning of the title Carles has chosen for his enterprise -- the "runoff" from the behavior of "hipsters" -- the value they create through their public acts of consumeption and self-fashioning -- becomes the precious fuel for the unlimited accumulation of capital under the banner of the Carles brand.
Since HRO has become so formulaic, I was gonna give yall an opportunity to ‘make ur own post.’ The Carles brand has been successful, embedding itself as the subconscious voice of so many people across the world. Even though a lot of other ppl could probs write my blog, there is only 1 Carles. I thought I would give yall a chance to ‘get ur creativity on; this is an opportunity to construct your own HRO post.This pseudo-democratic ploy is Carles's way of instantiating the end of democracy, and not merely because he goes on to provide the substance of the post pre-emptively, circumscribing the creative gesture he has solicited from readers. More significantly, Carles posits an audience of subjects who have merged to speak univocally rather than each in their own voice. The "formulaic" nature of Carles's discourse has provided a model through which a diverse body of individuals can unite as a "people" in the Hobbesian sense of the word.
Then Carles demands labor from readers without offering wage compensation, promising instead the uncertain reward of notoriety within the discursive space he himself controls entirely. The readers' immaterial labor serves to enhance the value of the Carles brand, to which Carles slyly begins his post with a paean.
The circuit Carles traces here is that of capital in the post-Fordist era. The culture and communications industry (represented with some irony in this depiction by Carles himself) produces the means of production for a new kind of labor force that works for no pay to produce its own notoriety, seeking its own distinction within mediatized reality to stand out from the teeming crowd of individuals. These efforts are harvested by the overarching industries and used to enhance the value of their capital. Readers become more insecure as they compete for attention; Carles becomes even more preeminent in his chosen matrix of cultural production.
So there is more than a little sarcasm in his admission that "Even though a lot of other ppl could probs write my blog, there is only 1 Carles." Carles wants to point out that "Carles" has become a corporate entity, an efficient synthesis of the immaterial labor of the cultural producers the weblog sets out to satirize. This of course is the meaning of the title Carles has chosen for his enterprise -- the "runoff" from the behavior of "hipsters" -- the value they create through their public acts of consumeption and self-fashioning -- becomes the precious fuel for the unlimited accumulation of capital under the banner of the Carles brand.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
8 December 2009: "Meme Content Breakdown: “The Evolution of the Hipster.”"
This post is about homo sacer. Giorgio Agamben has written about the plight of the exiled, the persons who are excluded from the customary protections of the law that come from belonging to a state and thus attaining a sanctioned personhood. Such persons are reduced to "bare life," devoid of rights. Carles, in retracing the steps of a promulgated taxonomy of the hipster, attempts to reveal how such categorization is perhaps the first stage in an effort to purge the hipster from the social field, to make the hipster into homo sacer in preparation for an ultimate liquidation. "Will the US Government ever decide to eliminate us?" Carles asks, in a gesture of radical solidarity with the threatened class. He admits to being "worried" about this possibility. The growing tide of tribalistic, reactionary rage across countries suffering economic setbacks seems to make such an outpouring of violence against a privileged class that prefers to set itself apart all too thinkable. A "breakdown" in the meme content is tantamount to a breakdown in the social fabric.
This "scientific/sociological/cultural timeline," as Carles designates it, epitomizes the "annihilation of space through time" that Marx attributed to the specific relations of production under capitalism. A teleology of the development of the hipster is posited and the uneven development and distribution of the cultural capital that hipsterism represents is suppressed. But this suppression serves to exacerbate the perception that hipsters have achieved a hegemonic condition of domination instead of themselves being dominated, in the sense of being determined and stripped of autonomous development from within the given social order, as is precisely the case. Carles notes with euphemistic discretion that "mainstreamers who don’t consume the internet and fringe alts who ‘would like to be more culturally relevant’ use exposes like this to plan their future adventures into the heartland of Altmerica" -- naturally those "future adventures" may include any and all of the repressive measures used to stifle dissent in totalitarian regimes throughout the 20th century. By rendering the hipster as Other, to be zoologically classifed and mocked, publications catering to the malcontented medocrity in our midst can symbolically declare open season on "alts", tacitly encouraging atrocities and brutality. Carles seems to be worrying: Can a Krystallnacht of vinyl record stores and American Apparel outlets be far behind?
This "scientific/sociological/cultural timeline," as Carles designates it, epitomizes the "annihilation of space through time" that Marx attributed to the specific relations of production under capitalism. A teleology of the development of the hipster is posited and the uneven development and distribution of the cultural capital that hipsterism represents is suppressed. But this suppression serves to exacerbate the perception that hipsters have achieved a hegemonic condition of domination instead of themselves being dominated, in the sense of being determined and stripped of autonomous development from within the given social order, as is precisely the case. Carles notes with euphemistic discretion that "mainstreamers who don’t consume the internet and fringe alts who ‘would like to be more culturally relevant’ use exposes like this to plan their future adventures into the heartland of Altmerica" -- naturally those "future adventures" may include any and all of the repressive measures used to stifle dissent in totalitarian regimes throughout the 20th century. By rendering the hipster as Other, to be zoologically classifed and mocked, publications catering to the malcontented medocrity in our midst can symbolically declare open season on "alts", tacitly encouraging atrocities and brutality. Carles seems to be worrying: Can a Krystallnacht of vinyl record stores and American Apparel outlets be far behind?
Monday, December 7, 2009
29 November 2009: "Should Carles retire?" and 3 December 2009: "My Name is Carles. I was Born 2 Blog"
These posts are about the ecstasy of communication. Carles attempts an escape from postmodernity by announcing a retreat from his online persona. But as Baudrillard asks, "These fatal strategies, do they exist?... Faced with a delirious world, there is only the ultimatum of realism. This means that if you want to get away from the madness of the world yo have to sacrifice all of its charm as well.... In order to survive, we need to approach ever closer to the nullity of the real." Once, Carles appeared to flirt with nullity by choosing an intentionally impoverished texting-based language with which to express his nihilistic philosophy, so that form and content would approach each other asymptotically the more he would write, making the blogs extension in duration itself demonstrate that philosophy's the most significant tenet: We can continue to speak in clipped and debased language, but thought so expressed seems ever to mock itself more. Irony becomes a prerequisite condition for expression with such a set of linguistic tools. Now he must up the ante and promise silence, in his discursive efforts to theorize the end of discourse as it dissolves in incessant communication, in the palpable pressure of perpetual realtime expression.
As with Carles's earlier attempts at retirement and "digital suicide", Carles expresses an ultimately unfulfilled intention of retiring from blogging to expose how such intentions are in danger of becoming mere fantasies. It is no accident that the intention is presented as a question in the title of the first post linked above. The digital self is no longer autonomous, if it ever was autonomous in the first place. Our intentions are now subject to real-time referenda in the digital agora formed by mandatory social networking. Carles reduces this to a succinct formula: "This blog is me." What is "blogged" or expressed online in some other way is not lived or experienced from within our subjectivity. Our subjectivity is no longer stored in our brains but in water-cooler server farms located close to hydrelectric dams all across the world. Hence the preposterous premise of the film The Matrix -- we do not choose btween the real and the Real, but between no existence and digitally encoded ecstasy of the social network.
We can now only at best wish to remove ourselves from the digitization and social mediatization of our lives. We can only dream of not broadcasting the quotidian details of our lives and such and as such over the channels fashioned for us online. When Carles writes that "maybe my future is in ‘real life’ instead of the internet," the pivotal word is maybe. We are no longer in a position to see whether this is so for ourselves or not, no longer in a position to make the determination in the final analysis of whether real life and the internet can be extricated from each other.
In his return, Carles acknowledges the "readers who take this blog very seriously," of which this writer is admittedly one. Thereby Carles has cleverly forced one to consider one's own culpability in perpetuating the digital trap of consciousness. Is the act of reading itself, the digitally enhanced hermaneutics of the identity relation and its various levels of decoding, the consumer of discourse in the sense of consummating it, committing it to a great final conflagration? Is Carles really going silent precisely by continuing to blog?
As with Carles's earlier attempts at retirement and "digital suicide", Carles expresses an ultimately unfulfilled intention of retiring from blogging to expose how such intentions are in danger of becoming mere fantasies. It is no accident that the intention is presented as a question in the title of the first post linked above. The digital self is no longer autonomous, if it ever was autonomous in the first place. Our intentions are now subject to real-time referenda in the digital agora formed by mandatory social networking. Carles reduces this to a succinct formula: "This blog is me." What is "blogged" or expressed online in some other way is not lived or experienced from within our subjectivity. Our subjectivity is no longer stored in our brains but in water-cooler server farms located close to hydrelectric dams all across the world. Hence the preposterous premise of the film The Matrix -- we do not choose btween the real and the Real, but between no existence and digitally encoded ecstasy of the social network.
We can now only at best wish to remove ourselves from the digitization and social mediatization of our lives. We can only dream of not broadcasting the quotidian details of our lives and such and as such over the channels fashioned for us online. When Carles writes that "maybe my future is in ‘real life’ instead of the internet," the pivotal word is maybe. We are no longer in a position to see whether this is so for ourselves or not, no longer in a position to make the determination in the final analysis of whether real life and the internet can be extricated from each other.
In his return, Carles acknowledges the "readers who take this blog very seriously," of which this writer is admittedly one. Thereby Carles has cleverly forced one to consider one's own culpability in perpetuating the digital trap of consciousness. Is the act of reading itself, the digitally enhanced hermaneutics of the identity relation and its various levels of decoding, the consumer of discourse in the sense of consummating it, committing it to a great final conflagration? Is Carles really going silent precisely by continuing to blog?
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
23 Nov 2009: " “Going Home for Thanksgiving.” -A Reflection by Carles"
This post is about the singularity. The predictable approach to Thanksgiving would be to critique it from a postcolonialist perspective as voicing the aegis of empire, of rearticulating the hegemony first sought by the invading Europeans in the 15th century and achieved with all-too-forgotten bloodshed, oppression, merciless forced marches along countless trails of tears both metaphoric and literal. Carles is content to allow such a critique to form the deep structure of his investigation of the U.S.'s equinoctial holiday as a psychological rite inculcating governmentality, planting it into the rich soil of postconsumerist, late-capitalist identity. In other words, Carles attempts a postmodern hermaneutics of the self, following the path blazed by seminal French historian and thinker Michel Foucault in his late work on the axiology of the self.
Fittingly, Carles begins with an assault on the Cartesian ego.
As Carles notes, foremost of these is the discourse of the brand, adopted as a generative language of self:
Hence Carles is able to posit the identification of unlike subjects as branded object:
The connection to the family then is vestigial, an obstacle to overcome in pursuit of the posthuman destiny:
Fittingly, Carles begins with an assault on the Cartesian ego.
I am one of youSubjectivity, in its situatedness in the family is problematized, with the radical positionality of containing multitudes while retaining a discrete atomization of the self foregrounded. The self is at once Other and its self, in an unmediated and unresolved tensional paradox. Lacan's mirror stage is evoked and sublated in a few dozen words as the subjectivization process is opened to a wider scope, a more diverse array of discursive practices.
I am one of many
I am the only ‘me’ in the world
As Carles notes, foremost of these is the discourse of the brand, adopted as a generative language of self:
Feeling anxiousThe syntax is obscure here, but in a radical reversal of agency, Carles argues that the brand itself will not comprehend its deployment in the familial context -- an allusion to Deleuze and Guattari's rejection of the Oedipal drama as determinant in the last instance. Anxiety has leapt from the castration complex squarely into the field of exchange -- to the commercialized positioning within a discourse of competing objects. Though the family will attempt to "comment" and interpret the personal brand, the brand itself will transcend such commentary, leaving its mark, as it were on those who sought to master its code. It will objectify those who come into contact with it, reifying a living relation into the frozen gesture of mutual misrecognition (méconnaissance).
about my extended family
‘commenting’ on my new personal brand
that that won’t understand
Hence Carles is able to posit the identification of unlike subjects as branded object:
New personal BrandThe human and the lifeless thing are converging at a point that suggest cybernetic posthumanity, in which all emotions, all attempts at connection, must have their "genuine" qualities affirmed in the face of impassive skepticism. In the networked world, as Carles suggests here, connection requires no genuineness; it merely requires compatible interfaces, automated protocols of informational exchange, a suitable markup language of the soul. The systems and institutions in which the human cyborg is deployed are no longer distinguishable from one another: "I just want to live inside of a living mishmash of humans/architecture/public transportation." This, Carles implies, is what we have made of our "New World".
Finding out about new bands
Genuinely connecting with fascinating humans
Who want the same life that I do.
The connection to the family then is vestigial, an obstacle to overcome in pursuit of the posthuman destiny:
Afraid to see my family now that it is 100% impossible for them to ‘get’ meTo reject the family, to reject origins, to efface the biological connection in favor of digital "alternative" ones being built out by the ruling technocracy -- these are the sad remnants of old festival rituals that once bound the community, the tribe. Now there is only ritual rejections, a negative dialectics that carves out a space of pure negativity, in which one consists of only that one remembers and discards:
But maybe I need to ‘get’ them
to understand what I don’t want to be
Momentarily I will get ‘caught up’ in the momentCarles's fable pointedly reveals that what lives on is a rootless, zombified shell with corpses in its mouth.
and start to reconnect with zany high school stories
but then will remember
‘That’s not who I am any more. That bro is dead.’
Monday, November 23, 2009
22 November 2009: "We were alts. We were dreamers."
This post is about capitalist roaders. In Carles's parlance, as has become amply obvious, an "alt" is someone who has reified their attempts at defying the mainstream and has become a false revolutionary, a creature whose identity depends on the very practices it putatively rejects. Here Carles dissects a photograph of a small sample of such alts lying in a New York City street as interrogates the paucity of their ambitions, the craven ways in which he imagines they will service the existing economy of symbolic goods with their immaterial labor all while lauding themselves for their own imagined defiance.
The alts, as Carles notes ruefully by adopting their voice, mean to use us as their running dogs:
Carles asks in conclusion, "What is ur biggest alternative dream?" His implied answer: purging the world of the the very concept of alt and forging a truly transformative revolutionary praxis that involves a sterner commitment beyond a willingness to lie in a gutter.
One boy dreams of starting a buzzband which garners critical acclaim from multiple blogsites.And on and on extends the list of entirely predictable modalities of selling out. The pursuit of personal credibility in the circles Carles here anatomizes is nothing more than the amassing of social capital deemed valuable by the culture industry. The success of these alts in developing their own personalities to their heart;s content is proportional to the degree that everyday life is stripped of its meaning, its revolutionary potential for the rest of us.
One girl dreams of becoming an alt model
One boy dreams of starting a t-shirt line
One girl dreams of ‘becoming the next Karen O/M.I.A.’
One alt dreams of opening up the best alternative nightclub in town
One alt dreams of starting the blogosphere’s next great influential website, making millions of AmAppy dollars from banner ads
One alt dreams of starting a zany twitter/tumblr meme blog and getting a book deal...
The alts, as Carles notes ruefully by adopting their voice, mean to use us as their running dogs:
We moved to this cityIf we can't be assimilated into their networks and sapped of our creative ideas for new trends and new uses for consumer goods -- flattery will be their bait (we are after all, as Carles imagines them saying, "fascinating human beings with similar interests being inspired by life") -- then we will be run out of their neighborhoods in their town.
to ‘run this town’
and I gotta feeling
(that 2nites gonna be a good nite)
and also
that if we keep networking
having fun
meeting fascinating human beings with similar interests
being inspired by life
good things will come our way.
Carles asks in conclusion, "What is ur biggest alternative dream?" His implied answer: purging the world of the the very concept of alt and forging a truly transformative revolutionary praxis that involves a sterner commitment beyond a willingness to lie in a gutter.
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