Flicking through one of the infinite number of Sunday Times supplements, you see an advert for kitchen knives. ‘My, Marks and Spencer are really pushing the boat out with this one. Well I suppose everyone needs to keep up. No company these days wants to come across all out-moded.’ Then you realise it’s an article about those who ‘self-harm’, or, in the parlance of brutalised-but-concise American-English, ‘cutters’.

But who is this rain-drenched beauty dolled-up as if she’s off to a prom? Lips pouting, her tanned arms suspiciously smooth, you realise it’s her first time, poor dear. No longer solely the prerogative of goths and prisoners, we are given to understand that she is just one of many ‘modern’ women apparently turning to this most psychically abstruse of contemporary hobbies….

It’s not clear, though, that you would necessarily want the ‘cutter’ in the photo to cease her activity. Her forefinger expertly tipped on the handle, the blade tantalising close to perfect, lightly roasted flesh, she resembles more the delicious-looking basted quail a few pages further on than someone in desperate need of help and/or slapping about the face (‘pull yourself together, girl! Think of all the people in actual pain in the world! That they didn’t choose!’). The Times is a far stranger publication than I imagine…This captured act of potential autophagia poses odd questions – You could almost understand her desire to hack off a limb and make a nice Sunday dinner out of it…

…Now, are you a leg or breast man? How many slices do you fancy?

What are we to make of this macabre assemblage (complete with the word ‘health’ hovering uncertainly above the poor harmee’s left shoulder)? Of course, we are compelled to understand that it is she who is ‘on a knife edge’ – stressed, over-worked, over-tired, probably unable to cope with the spastic demands of child-rearing, careerism and marital shagging (not to mention all those films, books, plays she’s supposed to have seen/read/endured). The message is clear: pah! no mere teenie-existentialist she (damp dark tresses notwithstanding). This is a normal w-o-m-a-n, perhaps she is like you (though more attractive of course, this is a mainstream newspaper, don't delude yourself).

The Samaritans are interviewed. They call self-harm “screaming without opening your mouth”. This seems wrong, somehow. Surely “screaming without opening your mouth” is just a description of what it means to think under depressive conditions, what miserable thought (or perhaps all thought) is like. Compared to which scraping your forearms with a razor-blade might seem like light relief. Besides, picture-pouty prom-Queen seems all too happy to part her lips to indicate her obvious angst, though perhaps she is also wondering ‘but what if I stain my dress? Who will dance with me then?’

Non-suicidal self-harm intrigues Žižek of course. Barely anything that happens in the world doesn’t intrigue Žižek, paragon of cultural meltdown that he is. He writes:

Take the phenomenon of ‘cutters’ (people, mostly women, who experience an irresistible urge to cut themselves with razors or otherwise hurt themselves); this is strictly parallel to the virtualization of our environment: it represents a desperate strategy to return to the Real of the body. As such, cutting must be contrasted with normal tattooed inscriptions on the body, which guarantee the subject’s inclusion in the (virtual) symbolic order – the problem with cutters, is the opposite one, namely the assertion of reality itself. Far from being suicidal, far from indicating a desire for self-annihilation, cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a hold on reality, or (another aspect of the same phenomenon) to ground the ego firmly in bodily reality, against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as nonexistent. – Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real

What we are dealing with is an attempt to self-induce reality, to induce a literal feeling of homeliness. Domesticated bloodletting! If the red stuff flows, it is an indication that all is not yet lost in what remains of the ‘private sphere’, that some 'little things' resist capture by the giant screen of televisual big (br)other, this “virtualization of our environment”. Tattoos, on the other hand, for all their counter-cultural me-me-pokiness, ultimately indicate some sort of micro-acceptance of the realm of conditioned meaning. All that can be said for the private tribes of (mostly) women cutters is that they do not understand each other symbolically, that there is no communication across scars. Self-harm as the anti-tattoo. Each individualised real-time concentrated creation of reality is the true point of the pain, not the residual scratches (however deep) that remain.

Christina Ricci speaks in the Times interview about her own experience of cutting her arms with nails and the tops of fizzy-drinks cans: ‘it’s a sort of experiment, to see if I can handle pain…it’s like having a drink but quicker.’ It’s like having a drink but quicker…an instantaneous chemical smack to the back of the head to calm you down. (25,000 women a year are carted off to hospital on the back of their self-inflicted injuries; number of alcohol-related casualty admissions: 129,747). The thought of Hollywood stars getting inwardly violent with nails is not without its charms (the autocrucifixion of Brad Pitt; Nicole Kidman impaling her left hand upon a kebab-skewer), and there’s no reason to think that their experience of self-harm is in any way more decadent than that of, ahem, ‘real’ women (this ‘real’ is precisely what is at stake, after all). Admonishing celebrities for glamourising pain is like attacking locusts for destroying crops; it’s what they’re there for.

The Times article draws eminently moral conclusions of course: ‘At the other end of the human food chain [and what bizarre metaphors], however, are grown women – apparently normal mothers and wives [not actual women of course, anyway, who are they outside of their relations?] – who find the burden of their day-to-day responsibility too much to bear, women who can’t make a mark on their lives [though presumably they have jobs and friends and all that], but who, out of sheer anger and frustration, turn to marking themselves instead.’ Apart from the unbearable rhetorical smugness of the all-too-tidy conclusion – oo, just feel the polysemy of the word ‘mark’ there – the author has actually ignored everything his interviewees have been telling him: ‘It’s calming actually’, ‘it forces your nervous system and brain to go into alert’, ‘I feel in control’. Self-harm is the attempt to induce reality ex nihilo in the wake of the inescapable virtualisation of all meaning. As such it appears, quite perversely, as a stubborn and resilient gesture that skirts the rational much more than the rabid.