Positions
are taken, habits loved and hated, dreams launched and wounded. And just about
everyone is part of a secret conspiracy of everyday life to get what you can
out of it. She thinks it’s sort of like being a water bug, living on the surface
tension of some kind of liquid. Seduced by the sense of an incipient vitality lodged in things,
but keeping afloat too. And nimble. If one is lucky.
Stress in the lingua franca of the day. It can be the badge you wear that shows that you’re afloat and part of what’s happening – busy, multitasking, in the know. Or it can be a visceral complaint against being overworked, underpaid, abandoned by the medical profession, or subject to constant racial undertows.
Stress can motivate you, or it can puncture you, leaving you alone in times of exhaustion, claustrophobia, resentment, and ambient fear.
It can tell the story of inclusion or exclusion, mainstreaming, or marginality, But its widespread power to articulate something stems not from a meaning it harbors inside but from its actual circulations through forces and trajectories of all kinds: self-help culture, the power of the drug industry and direct advertising, social indifference, political depression, road rage, or the proliferation of countless intricately detailed little worlds built around major social injuries or inventive forms of recreation or reaction.
Stress in the lingua franca of the day. It can be the badge you wear that shows that you’re afloat and part of what’s happening – busy, multitasking, in the know. Or it can be a visceral complaint against being overworked, underpaid, abandoned by the medical profession, or subject to constant racial undertows.
Stress can motivate you, or it can puncture you, leaving you alone in times of exhaustion, claustrophobia, resentment, and ambient fear.
It can tell the story of inclusion or exclusion, mainstreaming, or marginality, But its widespread power to articulate something stems not from a meaning it harbors inside but from its actual circulations through forces and trajectories of all kinds: self-help culture, the power of the drug industry and direct advertising, social indifference, political depression, road rage, or the proliferation of countless intricately detailed little worlds built around major social injuries or inventive forms of recreation or reaction.
Stress is a
transpersonal bodily state that registers intensities. A thing like stress can
linger and do real damage. Or it can also flow out of a household like water
down a drain, as when some one gets a job. Any job.
The objects of mass desire enact a dream of sheer circulation itself – travel, instant communication, movies, catalogues, the lure of new lifestyles patched together from commodities into scenes of possible life.
The objects of mass desire enact a dream of sheer circulation itself – travel, instant communication, movies, catalogues, the lure of new lifestyles patched together from commodities into scenes of possible life.
The
experience of being ‘in the mainstream” is a concrete sensory experience of
literally being in tune with “something’ that’s happening. But nothing too
heavy or sustained. It’s being in tune without getting involved. A light
contact zone that rests on a thin layer of shared public experiences. A fantasy
life that can be somehow seamless and that we are in the know, in the loop, not
duped. That nothing will happen to us, and nothing we do will have real consequences
– nothing that can’t be fixed, anyway.
The experience of being “in the mainstream” is like a flotation device. But its very surge to enter life lite leaves in its wake a vague sense of all the circuits that gives things a charge.
Danny worked night shift on the suicide prevention hotline for a while. He said the borderline personalities were the worse. They kept calling back, looking for attention. He got to know them all, indulging them in their tiresome games and trying to help them out if he could figure out when they were being straight. But then they would slip of reach and then call back later, starting the cat-and-mouse game again.
But at exactly 4 AM all the calls would stop dead and he would lie down on the floor to sleep for the last two hours of his shift. He said he guessed even borderlines had to sleep sometime. It was weird though, how it was like clockwork.
Redemption: the recovery of something pawned or mortgaged. A second chance born of suffering and still resonant with loss.
The dream of redemptive violence has become the ready matter of commonplace dreams, dramas of a clarifying surge of action saturate ordinary life, macho movies, laws, publics, institutions, and diffuse, existential dilemmas of personhood and power. Mythic heroes sacrifice themselves to rebirth the world. Tight little circles of religion wrap themselves in apocalyptic dreams. The nation-state gets tough on crime on behalf of family values,. The death penalty comes to stand for the execution of evil itself, one individual at a time. And everyday life is hot with the constant clash of people butting up against each other by the consuming dream of righteous revenge.
To say a thing like redemptive violence is a myth is not to say it’s like a bad dream you can wake up from or an idea you can talk people out of. It’s more like a strand in the netting that holds things together. A conduit for bits and pieces of political beliefs, networks, technologies, affinities, dream-of possibilities and events.
It can take many forms. It can mean a pettiness, a dissolute rage, a habit of self-destruction, an overcharged and swollen will, a body in a state of alarm. It can be a derailed sensibility thrashing around at full throttle. Or something really small. It’s road rage, or parents whipped into violent deeds to protect their children, or drug addicts slashing at the American dream as they spiral out of it. There’s always something a little “off” in the way it plays itself out. A little sad. It’s teenagers who kill, the pipe dreams popping up all over the place, the smoldering resentments in workplaces and intimate spaces. It’s Andrea Yates drowning her children to save them from eternal damnation. Or Thomas Junta – the “hockey dad” – killing his son’s coach in a fight on the ice. Or Junta’s brother, arrested shortly there after for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon when he threw a cell phone at a Best Buy employee who wouldn’t let him return it without a receipt.
The experience of being “in the mainstream” is like a flotation device. But its very surge to enter life lite leaves in its wake a vague sense of all the circuits that gives things a charge.
Danny worked night shift on the suicide prevention hotline for a while. He said the borderline personalities were the worse. They kept calling back, looking for attention. He got to know them all, indulging them in their tiresome games and trying to help them out if he could figure out when they were being straight. But then they would slip of reach and then call back later, starting the cat-and-mouse game again.
But at exactly 4 AM all the calls would stop dead and he would lie down on the floor to sleep for the last two hours of his shift. He said he guessed even borderlines had to sleep sometime. It was weird though, how it was like clockwork.
Redemption: the recovery of something pawned or mortgaged. A second chance born of suffering and still resonant with loss.
The dream of redemptive violence has become the ready matter of commonplace dreams, dramas of a clarifying surge of action saturate ordinary life, macho movies, laws, publics, institutions, and diffuse, existential dilemmas of personhood and power. Mythic heroes sacrifice themselves to rebirth the world. Tight little circles of religion wrap themselves in apocalyptic dreams. The nation-state gets tough on crime on behalf of family values,. The death penalty comes to stand for the execution of evil itself, one individual at a time. And everyday life is hot with the constant clash of people butting up against each other by the consuming dream of righteous revenge.
To say a thing like redemptive violence is a myth is not to say it’s like a bad dream you can wake up from or an idea you can talk people out of. It’s more like a strand in the netting that holds things together. A conduit for bits and pieces of political beliefs, networks, technologies, affinities, dream-of possibilities and events.
It can take many forms. It can mean a pettiness, a dissolute rage, a habit of self-destruction, an overcharged and swollen will, a body in a state of alarm. It can be a derailed sensibility thrashing around at full throttle. Or something really small. It’s road rage, or parents whipped into violent deeds to protect their children, or drug addicts slashing at the American dream as they spiral out of it. There’s always something a little “off” in the way it plays itself out. A little sad. It’s teenagers who kill, the pipe dreams popping up all over the place, the smoldering resentments in workplaces and intimate spaces. It’s Andrea Yates drowning her children to save them from eternal damnation. Or Thomas Junta – the “hockey dad” – killing his son’s coach in a fight on the ice. Or Junta’s brother, arrested shortly there after for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon when he threw a cell phone at a Best Buy employee who wouldn’t let him return it without a receipt.
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