This post is about the sacrificial crisis. Carles signals his interest in the very title of this effort, linking commercial discourse with the elaboration of a liminal space in which the possibility for pleasure and for death comingle even more intimately then they must do generally. For Carles "deadly rave" has taken on the character of a Homeric epithet, so habitually does he stress the linkage between the cardinal concepts: raves, where subjectivity dissolves in a saturnine fizzle of psychoactive drugs and hypnotic rhythms, and death, not only the psychic death of the integrated identity but literal, somatic death, in which the body (with or without organs) ceases to function. Carles wants readers to consider whether a rave can be anything other than fatal -- "Feel like every music festival in California can be called a ‘deadly rave’," he notes -- and whether the words are metonyms for each other, death implying the apocalyptic jouissance of the rave, and the rave implying the finality of the rupture with continuous self-identity and the phoenix-like birth (the kind of resurrection so redolent of California) of the "lifestyle personal brand human," as Carles describes one of the promoters of this particular concatenation of necrotism and hedonism.
Carles forces the interrogation of the conditions that permit subjects to "make some commercial" -- that is to quantify the state of commerciality and render it conceptually conducive to being measured in terms of "more" and "less". Foregrounded in Carles's trenchant formulation is the fact of the commercial itself as product, as an achieved state rather than a natural condition or neutral description of pre-existing practices. To define the commercial is to conjure it into being, to "make" it. And making the commercial is engage the conjuncture of desire and death, the fatal appeal that can imbue products with desirability, to make people believe they can kill for the pleasure the products can provide, even if the only murder they ever commit in actuality is a kind of sad suicide of the psyche. "Even mainstream dbags who just want to pound their fists," Carles reminds us -- violence is everpresent beneath the thin veneer of institutionally orchestrated normality. The animal is caged restlessly beneath the human skin.
Carles wonders whether that that all public rituals are becoming analogues of the primordial ritual sacrifices that have always marked the evolution of human societies: "Worried that every music festival is ‘the same’ now," he notes, and links it to the repetition of the same faces and performers, the "sick artists" who emblematize in Carles's view the deracination inherent in a decadent and individualistic consumer culture. But the popular celebrities are not merely archetypes of triviality; they are lodestones of mimetic desire (""Do they seem like chill bros?" Carles asks, i.e. don't you want to be them, become them, take what they have?) that trigger and bring to crisis the resentments of individuals only barely driven by a tenuous social order to conform.
As Rene Girard argues, a sacrificial ritual is necessary to direct the seething rage onto a harmless scapegoat. The "deadly rave" then as Girard puts it "tricks violence into spending itself on victims whose death will provoke no reprisals." Girard dubs this "good violence", but as Carles darkly implies, the victims at this purgative rituals in the sun-soaked valleys of California may be our own holistic selves: "Whenever u hear about a music festival in California, do u get scared that some1 is gonna die?" Carles asks ominously. The implication: You should, and don't be surprised if you find yourself on the altar, with the high-priests of the culture industry looming over you, wielding the blood-drenched knife.
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