Notes on “Constituent Parts of a Theory of Spectacular Acts of Public Violence”

Spectacular acts of public violence, therefore, maybe be better understood less as a direct product of the lack of meaning but more precisely as products of the system’s violent oscillation between two extremes. As the rigid structure of the 1950s (for example) is consumed and broken down by this new, unanchored population in the 1960s (for example), the predator of purposelessness thrives. This consumption, in turn, eventually leads to a collapse of the rigid meaning structures, which starves the violence of its prey and forces a temporary quiet. But this is not a final state. The system, once devoured, then begins the slow, painful process of rebuilding a new, singular form of meaning, restarting the inevitable cycle. The mass shooter, the mad bomber, the bored assassin is a product of this oscillation, a biological mechanism of a chaotic system, an embodiment of the violent transition from one ideological state to another. The violence is the inevitable result of a system that cannot tolerate either a lack of purpose or its oppressive abundance and so perpetually oscillates between them.