Talbert knelt in the a tergo posture, his palms touching the wing-like shoulder blades of the young woman. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.” Violence is the conceptualization of pain. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations.
What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. Consider our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. “Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life - not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horrors of our own bodies.
In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylised glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.” How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. “The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory.
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