an email conversation

Music: The Black Keys: Rubber Factory (2007)

Cho's creep-out prose:

http://newsbloggers.aol.com/2007/04/17/cho-seung-huis-plays/

Gee: what should one do when we encounter disturbing work? I remember I felt this way about [a student's] stuff a little . . . .

Somebody should do research on all these discursive ways to make chaos and the void seem rational and controllable after the fact. The truth of the matter is that there are all kinds of people wearing black Matrix dusters.... writing anguished and angry prose, verse, drama.... without friends.... you name it. Very few of them will snap. Snapping is part of Life's Great Uncontrollable. But there is a huge theme in our (whose? the West? dunno, that's why research is needed) culture and discourse of control. Hence this mania to pass one law after another to control xyz, regardless of what that may be. So the Texas Youth Commission guys go bugger the teenage inmates.... who knew? Let's pass a law... as if there weren't laws already on the books against that sort of thing. So somebody goes and kills a bunch of people....tragic, but this happens. Let's pass a law....as if the next maniac will pay attention to THAT law rather than the laws already on the books against running amok.

Lets, someday . . . perhaps we'll have it done before the next massacre! [edit for tone: this is irony, folks]

What gets me is all the "this is unthinkable" and "unbelievable" rhetoric--which is all just horseshit. These fantasies are thick in our culture; if you build a sandcastle, some shit wants to jump on it. The motives and fantasies that fuel these kind of things are not difficult to discern, and I think you're also right to suggest there are patterns of re-framing for chaos (remember my and David's Columbine essay? NYT and other media outlets are doing the VERY SAME aerial shots and timelines and massacre maps to prolong the chaos). What is +tough+ to think-through is what you call the Life's Great Uncontrollable, which in people is known simply as "psychosis."

As a culture (media) we do well with obsession, neurosis, and to some degree phobias. We cannot handle psychosis.

Well, to call it psychosis privileges order. Makes it seems as if order is the default, and craziness sneaks in unexpectedly. What if we assumed that order was aberrant, or if not aberrant, then just a thin veneer laid on top of a constantly churning mass of craziness. Don't we see that in all these pathetic calls for doing this or that (lay another thin wash of order down) as if that could control the default of chaos that we all know is out there?

On this side of psychosis it's read as "order," however, order is achieved, not a default. I think this would be few of my agreements with Deleuze and Guattari: the default IS schizophrenia. The much-ado about the chaos is the tacit recognition of precisely the "churning mass of craziness" that lay just beneath civilization.

In a sense, psychosis = "the real," that gap or tear in the symbolic that trauma always reintroduces. Thereafter you get ideological interpellation--signaled by, no doubt, the re-arrival of "law and order" and the new sovereignty.

I sense a new blog entry in the making!