The Camera/Gun & the Culture of Death
Ghetta Life
ghetta_outta at hotmail.com
Tue Dec 9 10:49:27 CST 2003
I'd like to see if I can make sense of these two statements on either side
of the famous "mysterious people's oneness" VL quote. I'll not try to
relate them to that quote, just deal with them directly. BTW, it's not
clear who authored these statement, but I'm assuming Terrance did not.
The first quote implies that war is the inevitable result of a level of
independence, maturity, beyond the infant-parent state. That infantile
state exemplified by the regressive control of totalitarian states. The
second quote says that war results from an infantile reaction to the
complexities of group existence. If these are both to be accepted as true,
there seems to ba a very large gap needing to be filled in between them.
Wouls anyone care to try and fill that gap?
>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>
>Conflict, of which War is a specialized institutional drama, is a
>recurrent fact in human societies; it is inevitable when society has
>reached any degree of differentiation, because the absence of conflict
>would presume a unanimity that exists only in placentals between embryos
>and their female parents. The desire to achieve that kind of unity is
>one of the most patently regressive characteristics of totalitarian
>states and other similar attempts at tyranny in smaller groups.
>
>"Frenesi dreamed of a mysterious people's oneness, drawing together
>toward the best chances of light, achieved once of twice that she'd seen
>in the street, in short, timeless bursts, all paths, human and
>projectile, true, the people in a single presence, the police likewise
>simple as a moving blade-and in individuals who in meetings might only
>bore or be pains in the ass here suddenly being seen to transcend,
>almost beyond the will to move smoothly between baton and victim to take
>the blow instead, to lie down on the tracks as the iron rolled in or
>look into the gun muzzle and maintain the power of speech-there was no
>telling, in those days, who might unexpectedly change this way, or when.
>Some were in it, in fact, secretly for the possibilities of finding just
>such moments. VL.118
>
>In almost all of its manifestations, war indicates a throwback to an
>infantile psychal pattern on the part of the people who can no longer
>stand the exacting strain of life in groups, with all the necessities
>for compromise, give-and-take, live-and-let-live, understanding and
>sympathy that such life demands, and with all the complexities of
>adjustment involved. The seek by the gun to unravel the social knot.
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