The anatomy of trauma-core aesthetics
a rambling about traumacore tumblr girls, hauntology, expressionist art, and the phenomenology of community and emotion
Hauntology by its very nature is a grab for the past, for the kindness of childhood. A time which can never exist, because it never did exist. The lost future is as mourned for as the inaccessible past. This is the state of modern society. This is the order of the day. Reach into the past and let your soul linger in the amniotic fluid of nostalgia. Cease to exist, because a better world lives inside the crackle of the VHS tape.
The girlblogger does as society tells her, because the young-girl is society. The girlblogger reaches into the past she is told to long desperately for and finds monsters under the childhood bed.
Traumacore, like hauntology, is all about a resolution to the past through the Freudian reliving of trauma. But what is being resolved is different. Where hauntology is the hope to resolve societal traumas through the individual, traumacore hopes to resolve individual traumas through a microcosm of society, ie. the “waifspo/weirdcore/tumblr girl” community of bloggers. The hauntological nostalgia obsessed millennial will look into the darkness of the present and retreat into the hazy past-which-never-was. The girlblogger has no such luxury, and as such she must confront certain hard truths about modern existence that others of her generation and the generations before her will refuse to acknowledge.
The girlblogger is assailed by two separate psychic forces: the longing to be a child once again, and the desire to make what was wrong right. There is nowhere to run, not even the past provides the safe haven that was once promised from the present of societal collapse. In the past there is only the spectre of abuse. The abuse is always vague, the acts themselves left at the wayside, the focus remaining solely on the feeling which the trauma provoked in the blogger as a child, the phenomenology of trauma as it is experienced both primordially in the present, and non-primordially through memory. In this way the girlblogger avoids the pitfalls of the modern trauma industrial complex, wherein women are mined for their rape and abuse stories, made to recount the horror of their traumas in excruciating detail so that they might pay rent. Debasement for survival. The girlblogger rejects this premise, and instead maintains her dignity. The phenomenological nature of her art is almost spiritual in its nature. The girlblogger can be seen here as the artistic descendant of the expressionist art movement. The community’s focus on the universality of pain as a mechanism though which human experience can be defined is most reminiscent of the works of both Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko. Both Bacon and the traumacore girlblooger are expressing the eyeless terror of a fear which cannot be understood or resolved.
The black rectangles found in Rothko, so long argued over, are beyond human meaning. They move beyond artistic form and into the realm of the spiritual. The girlblogger too hopes to move beyond meaning. Her trauma has distorted her conception of reality, and so meaning has little use to her. She is instead concerned, like Rothko, with the phenomenological experience. Her trauma exists outside of time, and connects her outside of time to every other girlblogger who shares the same images as her. She is in this way a part of a community defined by its spiritual links.
I formerly associated the traumacore aesthetic with Heidegger’s analysis of technology. Ie. traumacore as the realization of the loss of man’s possibilities in the technological era. The realization that she has been barred from present, future, and past. The girlblogger as an existence which is an echo of time lost, born of betrayal, which does not exist. I now think differently.
All I can think of now when I consider the link between Rothko and trauma core is of Edith Stein’s description of community and shared grief. When the leader of a group of soldiers dies, the grief each soldier feels exists as individual felt emotion, the locus being the individual ego. But the emotion is colored by the fact that it is being experienced by the group, by the we. The community which feels this grief is not solely made up of those who were friends with the commander, but of every soldier in the unit. And every soldier who has ever been in the unit, and of every soldier who ever will be in the unit. Similarly, when a traumacore girlblogger shares an image of a torn teddy bear and bloodied sheets, she is sharing her grief and anger and fear, the overwhelming tumult of emotion that defines the experience of trauma, and she is feeling it with the we community of all other girlbloggers, both past, future, and present. She may be closed off from the common conception of past as a nostalgia drenched utopia which one can retreat into, but she is blessed in that she is able to form a community who is not bound to physical limitations of time or place, but is defined through a spiritual connection of shared emotional experience. The individual rejects individualism here and embraces the essence of rootedness, of community.
I am also reminded of one of my favourite films, They Shoot Horses Don’t They? Most people consider this to be one of the bleakest films ever produced, but to me it is a life-affirming story which I like to watch when I feel lonely. The ending shot, of a room full of exhausted sleep deprived couples, caught eternally in a hell on Earth, slow dancing, evokes in me a deep feeling of belonging through which Gerda Walther defined community. I felt, the first time I watched this scene, that feeling of belonging. That it was better, to twist Milton around a bit, to share a hell, then to be alone in heaven. I felt an acceptance come over me, for the horror of life. If this horror could be shared, I thought, then it was liveable, and it didn’t matter so much. Hell to me then became the complete freedom of individuality.
This is I think how the girlblogger must feel, underneath it all, perhaps unknown to herself. She does not live in the pale blood covered sheets where she wishes for you to believe her essence resides. She does not live in the rape, or the beatings, or the horror, or the pain. She lives outside of the body, and of time, and at the same time she exists more within the body and within time than any other person, because she is linked. She lives within the community she has built, the feeling of empathy which is shared emotion between a vast society of hurt young girls who are desperately searching to resolve their pain. And she perhaps will not be alright, but she is not a figure to be pitied. She is a figure of great moral and spiritual strength, whose artistic sensibilities are groundbreaking and haunting. She is a true virtuous woman.
These are all preliminary findings of course. More could be said about the intersection between horror and art, the phenomenology of horror, as well as the recurrence of Sanrio characters within the realm of traumacore art, but that’s for another blog post.