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.