10 November 2009: "Carles Completes the New York City Marathon."

This post is about the consolation of philosophy. Is philosophy inspiring? Carles's own work at times exemplifies philosophy's reputation of pursing a negative dialectic and mounting an assault on the received traditional wisdom and the metaphysical spiritual edifice. While not a "dismal science" like economics, philosophy is frequently cold comfort for souls in bondage. Hence in this post wonders if philosophy can supply the uplift of commercial messaging -- if it can become a form of feel-good marketing.

I am Carles.
I am a Brand.
I am Hope.
This Brand Wants You to Be Happy.
This Brand Will Enable You to Accomplish Your Dreams.

This is Carles's effort to return philosophy to its Platonic/Aristotalian mission of teaching humans about the "good life", only filtered through the contemporary consumerist ideology of equating fulfillment with self-branding. "I truly believe that a brand can inspire a human to do something that they never thought they could accomplish," he writes drily. Hope is a matter of being able to conceive of a brand that could mark one as at once unique and preapproved. The brand is both ubiquitous and singular -- everyone is marked by brands, but the metaphorical flesh-scoring is felt by each as a wholly personal growing pain.

The good life for contemporary purposes, as Carles points out, is a matter of making an achievement of acquiring a personal brand. In an exquisite example of form and content harmonizing, Carles himself feigns an exuberance over his own brand's salience in this post. But as the post implies, the journey of self-branding is a marathon: "Life is sorta like a marathon. There’s a lot of other people competing against u, but u sorta just need 2 run ur own race, and u can sorta convince yourself that you some how ‘won.’" This addresses the underlying contradictions involved in making identity life's purpose. It is at once both competitive and transcendental, positional and ineffable. We need to win by convincing ourselves we are not in a competition.

2 November 2009 :"Should I attend my local community’s most prestigious Hair and Makeup College?"

This post is about technologies of the self. In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes's important intervention into the semantic production system of contemporaneity, the French thinker writes that language "shatters" fashion's "rudimentary structure into a thousand significant species, thus building a system whose justification is no longer utilitarian...but only semantic; it thus constitutes a true luxury of the mind." Carles clearly has this dictum in mind in investigating the intellectual situation of haberdashery in late capitalism and its close connection with the sociocultural capital of its practitioners and of its educational institutions as they stand contradistinct to traditional universities. Imagining the dilemma facing a youthful member of the emerging creative class, Carles writes, "I don’t wanna go to normal college, learning the same bullshit over and over… I have always been more of a creative spirit." Traditional education institutions do not confront the paradigmatic nature of fashion for current information industries, the way in which trends and memes now drive epistemology, human understanding. They are trapped in a repetitive, redundant cycle, repeating sterile tautologies -- "the same bullshit over and over." Later he notes, "I want a real education."

And this institutionalized learning negates the true import and efficacy of the emerging knowledge industries, those that equip the self with advanced iterations of signaling, teach the self how to display itself to its best advantage to enhance its ontological heft: "I really want to learn something that will help me help other people in ways that people don’t usually appreciate," Carles has his novice philosopher state, commenting on the academy's underappreciation of the fashion system and its ramifications.

Barthes notes fashion's integral function in introducing diachrony into the system of meanings, offering a "dialectical solution" to the conflict between "event and structure." Carles grasps this implication, noting that one must be "using cutting-edge techniques to achieve some of the world’s most alt haircuts." The haircut must be achieved as event and rupture, harmonizing the social with the individual's need to experience novelty through the body, to embody the diachronic component of the social itself, as it were. Of course, this has Lacanian implications: Carles notes in conjunction with the fantasmic aspect of fashion that "some of the best highs I have experienced in life happen when I look in the mirror." Fashion brings the euphoria of jouissance to play in everyday flux of grooming --in confronting the Real of the self as routed through the spectral other, when the Other is properly coiffed in accordance to the implicit law of the father. (It's no accident that we speak of a hair cut, and that the threat of castration is mimicked many times over in the endurance of such an operation.)

In order to play such an important role in the construction of social reality, a would-be technologist of the self must be able to navigate liminal spaces with minimal dislocation: Hence Carles notes that his novice is "a bisexual emo tween" -- strung between sexualities, between emotion and reason, between demographics, and possibly between genders. Carles offers a telling prediction: "I honestly believe 1 day men and women will merge into 1 human." This androgyny will present a challenge to fashion, which plays off gender difference to achieve its semiotic effects. The question Carles leaves unanswered here, along with his usual red herring interrogatories, is precisely this, whether the self can survive a technology that efficiently does away with gender, or does gender constitute a fundamental category which fashion structurally requires in order to operate discursively. Carles, if he is reading, will hopefully clarify on this point further.

28 October 2009: "Indie Bro Obsession & the Objectification of Female Indie Alt Celeb Musicians."

This post is about libidinal cathexes. An especially rich piece of theorizing from Carles, taking on narcissism, phallologocentrism, writing from the body, the balance of ego-cathected and libidinally cathected forces in the neurotic male subject, sublimation and onanism, the fantasy of sexual purification through art, inherently gendered criticism and its biases, archetypal hero worship, initiation rituals, the reproduction of patriarchal bias through subcultural formations, and so on.

Carles asks a question that has haunted psychoanalysts since the time of Freud, the master himself: "Does some sort of subconscious sexual desire impact the acceptance of all females?" Can male subjectivity be deemed "healthy" without the subordination of female desire, or does it rely on that subordination in patriarchy? Or in Carles' preferred formulation, "Will men ever see women as ‘anything more than a fuck doll’?"

Carles's primary thesis is that the subculture associated with independent rock music is dictated by the vagaries of male psychopathology, with celebrated female performers serving fundamentally as cathexes for excess, semi-sublimated libidinal forces.

Will an ugly/not cute girl ever ‘make it’ as an indie artist? It seems like indie bros who ’shape’ the indie world will always have trouble evaluating female artists. I think the first thing men look at is ‘how attractive is the female.’ That seems to be ‘the most important element’ when evaluating a woman in any profession (strippers, actresses, accountants, secretaries, etc).

The sexual role the female plays in the fantasy scheme of the male arbiters of cultural taste in this particular subculture occludes the appreciation of the women's efforts at sublimation; instead their artistic efforts are recast as estrual posturings. Though Carles concedes that it is "important for indie females to ’seem like they are real musicians,’ " this pretense serves merely to help men circumvent their own superegos in developing strong libidinal attachments. The artistic performance in the woman becomes understood as projection -- a reflection of the man's own talent, which is laid over (so to speak) the woman's primary carnality. The man can then achieve a purified form of narcissism, which routes his wish to love his own creativity through the woman, who is reduced to a vessel for the man's ego-defenses. Typically this plays out in the medium of music-fan commentary: "All blurbs about female artists by men are unintentional manifestos in which we ’search 4 a sexual identity.’" That is, sexual identity is secured through the cathexis with an idealized female performer, who is part male-performer-in-drag and part redeemed, nonthreatening sexual object.

All that matters, as Carles notes, is the "the level of ‘into-it-ness’ of her presence" -- the feigned commitment to the satisfaction of the desires of her male onlookers. The female indie musician becomes the ultimate example of the woman who forgoes her own orgasmic capabilities to protect that of the men who objectify her, and enable her to satisfy her own narcissistic needs to love herself as object qua object. She embraces this degraded form of alienated self-love in lieu of the capacity for jouissance, which is surrendered once her creative talents are injected/introjected into the commercial-art nexus. As Carles explains, her performance no longer emanates from her body authentically, that is, in a way incomprehensible to men. "It seems impossible for men to ‘actually like’ music by women, since many of the lyrical themes are coming from the ‘fucking dreamworld’ that exists inside of a girl’s head." But when men embrace a female performer, this is prima facie evidence that the woman has submitted to phallologocentristic imperatives.

Carles leaves many questions unresolved here; he is willing to grant that male subjectivty is derived from female cooperation with male needs, but does not explain why women consent to subordination, given their primary significance as cathected objects.

27 October 2009: "I AM CARLES shirts are ‘almost dead.’"

This post is about the identity function. Carles here reprises his gambit of objectifying his philosophy in the form of an ambiguous slogan embossed on a tee-shirt. In a stroke Carles reifies identity and commercializes it, commenting on precisely the intervention capitalism perpetrates through mass psychologization of identity formation in the crucible of consumerism.

The identity, that is the equation of two like parts in a logical statement, the S=S, is both reaffirmed and denied by the proliferation of the cogito-like slogan "I am Carles." But I does not equal I in all instances; "Carles" becomes a transitive term between subjects, producing a manageable intersubjectivity open to corporate manipulation. "Maybe there’s a lil bit of Carles in every1 of us after all," Carles explains.

By limiting the run of the shirt, Carles hopes to symbolically kill this form of interpolation, as the title of the post indicates. "R I P I AM CARLES. u were a good meme. u did ur best," Carles writes, offering his tentative assessment of this particular tactic against social homogenization.

What Carles intends is that the "bro-est" of times will indeed be in the past, and friendship via conformity and affiliation with any partivular milieu (all of which, as the Invisible Committee declared, are inherently counter-revolutionary and timidly self-protective) will be consigned to the dust-bin of history once all possible "I am..." statements must remain contingent is not perpetually incomplete.

26 October 2009: "Should I invade my local mall dressed as a ‘zombie’ 2 scare consumer tweens+mnstrms?"

This post is about the pharmakon. Carles looks at the contemporary trend of zombie adulation and, as always, moves beyond the obvious interpretation. One would expect the phenomenon of zombies at a shopping mall to prompt an analysis linking the rudimentary costumes to an inchoate expression of revolt with regard to the death-in-life of late capitalist consumerism. With every desire always already co-opted by retailing interests, our own libido is turned against us, and every new pleasure we imagine is a new trap to cage us into the prison-house of consumerist subjectivity.

Carles grants all that from the outset. "Is ‘consumerism’ bullshit?" he asks mockingly, knowing precisely what answer his readers will give. But Carles is testing a new problematic, in which consumerism is not merely a metaphysical enemy, a parasite on authentic humanity, but is insteada medium, a dialiectic opportunity.

Posturing as a participant in the retail zombie parade, he makes this cutting comment about current economic praxis: "It was rlly crowded. It made me feel like I was finally chilling with a group of like-minded people, who just wanted to break free of their meaningless existences and participate in an event that would generate an internet meme/bloggable photos/etc." Desire have prompted an endless pursuit of self-marketing opportunities, of public behaviors that will make this cohort resemble the products which materially manifest the circumscribed desires they are now limited to conceiving. This common impulse has made them all "like-minded" in that they are without mind, much like the zombies whose guise they have adopted. Rather than feeding on "brains" as zombies are troped to do in popular film representations, this retail zombies subsist on online attention, for which they will stop at nothing.

Carles then recounts in images the way stations of the American retail center and exposes them as lifeless, soulless. But this merely sets the stage for his true analytical insights. In a very important and deceptively facile statement, Carles declares in the persona of the retail zombie:

I felt like I was a part of something larger than myself. It felt good to transcend this space that was meant to ’sell personal branding tools’ 2 humans.

Here we see Carles attempt to assimilate the parasitical discourse of branding and marketing and sublate it. He argues that identity as such can be purified through a devotion to the its prostitution in the cash nexus. By embracing mass consumerism as a kind of living death one is paradoxically freed from its vampiristic drain Thus, though "the vampire brand made us lose 23% of our fan base [via post-Twilight]" Carles believes "the zombie brand is still strong".

The zombie, overdetermined as both brainless and full of brains, alive and dead, animated and lifeless, is reminiscent of the figure of the pharmakon, as theorized by Derrida, drawing on the seminal works of the Greek philosopher Plato. Self-zombification is both poison and remedy to the retail sickness; it is presence in the midst of absence -- an absent presence, or as it were a present absence. Of course, as Derrida asks in "Différance"

are not the thought of the meaning or truth of Being, the determination of différance as the ontico-ontological difference, difference thought within the horizon of the question of Being, still intrametaphysical effects of différance?

That's easy for Derrida to ask, but less simple to resolve definitively. Carles would perhaps agree that the ontic-ontological difference implied by zombies vis-a-vis living creatures, vis-a-vis living creatures simulating zombies, is the "transcending" space imagined in the shopping mall -- the blissful utopian fantasy of eternal life and eternal desire -- much like the striving gods of Keats's famous Grecian urn -- dreamed by late capitalism itself. "I guess in a way, antiquated indoor malls are kinda like zombies…" Carles surmises, suggesting that both are liminal spaces and fatal strategies simultaneously, occupying an uncertain and indeterminate status in the current socioeconomic striation.

18 October 2009: "Is Target ‘ripping off’ American Apparel?"

This post is about la perruque. Important French sociologist Michel De Certeau defined la perruque in his seminal 1974 work The Practice of Everyday Life as "the worker's own work disguised as work for his employer" -- a way for labor to reappropriate valorized capital from within the site of exploitation, wresting away from capital the control of time. Carles admits, confronted with the collapsing of hierarchies of social capital within the sector of branded retailers, that he is "having a huge crisis." The nature of this crisis can only be understood as a cry of concern over the way in which the site of everyday life for the consumer has become a contested battleground over la perruque, that is to say, the disciplinary locus upon which the full scrutiny of capital, in the form of brands and symbols and their discursive distribution, is brought to bear on the individual, guilty or not, forcing a fatal self-awareness of corporate intellectual property, up to and including not merely the trademarked language with which fashion our identities but those very identities themselves. By freely adapting the look and language of branded products to self-promote, we have been pirating in the semiological sea. We commit the crime of trying to tout our own personal brand at the expense of those from which we construct it.

Carles doubts this specious form of existential reasoning by which we can misrecognize our own motives and thereby realize a surplus -- not of capital but of meaning, which may, in Carles postmodern view, assume a greater significance in terms of who controls the drift of the socio-politico-economic sphere. Considering the perruque-like practice of buying discount goods and passing them off as authentically branded gods, he remarks: "I started to wonder if these knock-offs would enable me to achieve the same brand goals." This is not because the knockoffs are inauthentic, but the because the authentic goods are always already knockoffs. The perceived inferiority is internal to the system of signs and bears no material trace on the physical goods themselves, which is to say the "work" of improvement has been performed not by the manufacturers who seek to reap the profit from it but by the cabal of meaning-makers who enhance value through the certain circulation of ideas about what is socially relevant, popular, necessary.

Thus Carles recognizes that given the current interpenetration of signs and meanings, producers and consumers, we "just don’t know what belongs to who, and what type of ‘intellectual design property’ can really be owned." When we attempt to appropriate the meaning of a brand, are we annexing our own labor or someone else's, and is that attempt to steal itself another iteration of semiotic work, adding to the value of that which we seek to harness for ourselves? Is the gesture of piracy simply a moment in circulation, another instantiation of valorization for that lump of cultural capital? When the ledger of cultural meanings is drawn up, who's bottom line is assessed? Who signs the profit-and-loss statement, and is it signed with the blood of the consuming classes? The seeming struggle between corporate entities over specific design motifs merely masks the real battle between corporations and consumers. The perruque is inverted and turned against itself.

Those, who as Carles notes, "need'branded logos’ + scribbly shit [via Ed Hardy] on their t-shirts to make them look like they are rich/fit-in," may yet escape the crucible of sign production and valorization. The hope lies in manufacturing a deliberate plethora, of a surfeit of signs, of, in Carles's metaphor, "creat[ing] files that make it on to as many computers as possible." The near-costfree replication and dissemination of signs in "viral" online culture could produce precisely the disease necessary to stagger the corporate blood-sucking beast. Kill it with a cancer, an overproliferation of signs being produced from within its own factories. The perruque of the perruque -- disguising corporate work as personal to subdue to corporate and subsume it within the personal

12 October 2009: "Not sure if I ‘get’ the goal of ‘magazines.’"

This post is about ritual orgy. Carles notes that "Magazines seem like they ‘try too hard’ to generate discussion" -- that discourse has a generalized forced felling as if it is being produced to mask the expression of a deeper truth. He may have in mind the transmogrifying libidinal economy, considering the covers he choose to illustrate his point.

In L'erotisme Bataille explores the crisis of coitus: "Sexual activity is a critical moment in the isolation of the individual. We know it from without, but we know that it weakens and calls into question the feeling of self.... The material basis of the crisis is the plethora." By this, he means the "superabundance of energy" that initiates sexual behavior and seeks its own expiration, in the process annihilating the boundaries of the self in the surge toward reproduction, destroying the illusion of continuity and providing the foretaste of death.

Carles may have Bataille in mind in his concern with the flood-tide of pornography, now spilling into other graphic arts in a high-profile semi-pornographic magazine. IS this the accursed share de-eroticized through a radical conflict directly with sexuality's commercial equivalent? Sexualized sexuality, a cartoon of sexuality, already its own fetish in a vetiginous recursivity, a plethora of plethora that seeks to destroy the excess by channelling the super-abundance into a more sterile form of viral socio-sexual image production?

searched the internet for nude pictures of the Simpsons, and happened to find a ’shit load’ of cartoon porn. Like graphic pictures of tons of characters doing ‘the kraziest shit possible’ to one another. It seems to indicate that there is already a niche of fans who are interested in seeing the Simpsons nude/performing sex acts.

Nonreproductive sexuality is taken to its logical endpoint -- voyeurism vis-a-vis representations of sex among cartoon characters -- as a defense against the reproductive, self-annihilating nature of the sexual impulse. Carles asks rhetorially, "Are cartoons for people who ‘live in a fucking dreamworld’ (no matter how trendy & progressive they are)?" A dream world of fucking, not progressive but transgressive, anarchic, an overabundance that surges beyond the containing mechanism of cyclical fashion distractions. The fucking cartoon, an oxymoron or a koan?

Carles is dismayed to see this ultimate psychological defense mechanism co-opted by media companies whose preveious efforts to siphon off the surplus have lost their effectiveness: "Playboy appears to be utilizing this Simpsons gimmick just 2 try to sell magazines to ‘people who usually aren’t interested in Playboy’ since showing C-list celebrity breasts no longer makes the Playboy Brand a valuable asset/resource to our society." Appropriating images of human sexuality, Carles suggests here, no longer suits the post-human society of late capitalism.

Bataille predicted this: "In the human sphere sexual activity has broken away from animal simplicity. It is in essence a transgression, not, after the taboo, a return to primitive freedom. Transgression belongs to humanity given shape by the business of work." Hence Carles asks the natural question: "What’s the ‘kraziest shit’ u’ve ever tugged off to?" The answer is not pertinent, what matters is that we think of sexuality in terms of extremity rather than generation, and with a diligent perspicacity. "Wild cries, wild violence of gesture, wild dances, wild emotions as well, all in the grip of immeasurably convulsive turbulence." What could these worlds of Bataille possibly signify, Carles implicitly asks, other than a media-cartoon orgy?