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2011 | Buch

Berserk Style in American Culture

verfasst von: Kirby Farrell

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US

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Focusing on post-Vietnam America, using perspectives from psychology, anthropology, and physiology, this book demonstrates the need for criticism to unpack the confusions in language and cultural fantasy that drive the nation's fascination with the berserk style.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter
Introduction
Abstract
You went berserk … you’ll probably be liable to fits of it all your life.
Rudyard Kipling
To be berserk is to be on the edge of control. The term came into American headlines with the massacre of civilians in the Vietnam War and the rash of workplace and school rampages in the 1980s, but the idea is venerable. Dictionaries define the berserk state as frenzied, violent, or deranged. The original berserker was “A wild Norse warrior of great strength and ferocious courage, who fought on the battlefield with a frenzied fury known as ‘the berserker rage’; often a lawless bravo or freebooter.” The term may refer to a Norse hero who “never fought in armor but in his ber sark, which means ‘bearskin’ in the Nordic languages. Thus the term berserk became synonymous with reckless courage. During the Saga time in Iceland and in the Scandinavian countries (AD 870–1030) … the Berserks, apparently bearing the same name as the legendary warrior, arose as a predatory group of brawlers and killers who disrupted the peace of the Viking community repeatedly.”1 Some sources suggest that the Viking fury was a temporary psychosis induced by eating the mushroom Amanita muscaria (Fabing, 239).
Kirby Farrell
Chapter 1. Berserk Style
Abstract
Nothing succeeds like excess.
Oscar Wilde
Ideally readers will look up from the last page of this book and see many unexpected examples of berserk style at work around them. Yet the phenomenon is not a particular butterfly that can be pinned to a specimen board once and for all. The difficulty lies in the comprehensive and interactive nature of the problem. As style, abandon is thoroughly psychosomatic and psychocultural. Its feedback mechanisms mean that it is richly volatile, readily self-intoxicating, and contagious. Conditioned by style, berserk behavior becomes self-conscious. But since it is also usually richly conflicted, it also invites doublethink or another mode of denial. And since it affects the creaturely ground of personality—fear of death and appetite for life—it can be as inexhaustible as it is intractable.
Kirby Farrell
Chapter 2. At War with Style
Abstract
Just about no mission is impossible for the United States military.
Michael Barone 1
My rifle is human … We will become part of each other … Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and myself are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. WE ARE THE SAVIORS OF MY LIFE. So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace.
The Marine Rifle Creed
You’ve killed. You’ve taken life. What I found, though, is that you feel the shock and weight of it only when you kill an enemy for the first time, when you move from zero to one. Once you’ve crossed that line, there is little difference in killing 10 or 20 or 30 more after that.
Capt. Shannon R. Meehan
The proverbial berserker is the warrior. As a creaturely motive, war acts out radical appetite for more life. Although usually formulated as self-defense and a last resort, war is also a thrilling hunt for justice and trophies. Victory means more life—freedom, land, sex, slaves, and tribute—but also the joyous conviction of survival and self-worth. War is a technic for harvesting life that can be “planted”—buried in a grave but also sown like a seed—in order to produce more life, as in the Nazi philosophy of blood and soil.2 Holding the fate of the defeated in their hands, the victors enjoy living proof that they have mastered death. War demolishes limits and burns off humdrum frustration in the fire of heroic purpose: survival registers as rebirth. But there is an unspoken, tragic volatility in this psychic economy.
Kirby Farrell
Chapter 3. Making a Killing
Abstract
The massive global pool of speculative finance has run amuck.
Doug Noland, “Riddle of the Burst Bubble
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, a Google search for “economy amok” turned up 595,000 hits, one sign of the role berserk style played in the mayhem. In Joseph Stigitz’s summary, “No democratic government … has ever wasted resources outside of war on the scale which our private sector misallocated capital … a massive, massive failure [sic]. But after the crisis the consequences are even larger, the gap between full employment, potential output and actual output, is trillions of dollars and mounting.”1
Kirby Farrell
Chapter 4. Booty and the Beast
Abstract
[The] American capital markets are a crime in progress.
Matt Taibi, Rolling Stone, October 14, 2009
Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told The Observer.
The Observer, December 13, 2009
The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.
Thomas Friedman
The Enron collapse in 2001 betrayed what critics would come to call a “criminogenic environment” in business culture. Before long the FBI was warning of an “epidemic of mortgage fraud” (December 14, 2005). The metaphor picked up on concurrent fears of a flu pandemic and suited the global scope of rogue economic behavior that was about to break the banking system. “Major Wall Street Firms Face Criminal Probe,” headlined Reuters (May 13, 2010). This chapter examines that criminal contagion as an expression of cultural fantasies shaping behavior in and beyond the boardroom. Specifically, it reconsiders the antisocial character of some powerful post-Vietnam economic motives.
Kirby Farrell
Chapter 5. Rage for Order
Abstract
Government … derives its moral authority from God. It is the minister of God with powers to ‘avenge’ to ‘execute wrath’ including even wrath by the sword. … Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
Conventional wisdom thinks of “what is right” as an abstract principle or a cosmic code such as “the word of God.” But the need to feel right is built into us. It is part of the operating system that enables an ephemeral creature to feel at home in an overwhelming world. It supports the conviction that our lives have lasting meaning: that we matter. When that conviction falters, self-esteem suffers, and we face the fear “not so much of extinction, but extinction with insignificance.”1 No wonder people will kill to feel right.
Kirby Farrell
Chapter 6. The Living End
Abstract
Apocalypse has become banal.
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity
Rampage killing is figuratively an apocalypse. Eric Harris wanted in caps to “Kill ‘em AALL!!!” Narcissism tells us that “the world is me. After my death nothing matters.” The doomed self can see no future and can scarcely help resenting the lucky ones who will live on. Annihilation resolves all conflict. Given the right story, total death can be totally significant.
Kirby Farrell
Conclusion
Abstract
To return to the beginning: “the concept of berserk abandon is far more pervasive than conventional wisdom recognizes.” This proposition spurred a friend of mine to ask, “If the concept is so pervasive, how come it isn’t immediately recognized?” An answer came to her in a flash: the berserk is hidden in plain view, like Poe’s purloined letter. Since it shades into everyday behavior and ritual, and takes protean guises in berserk style, it is latent everywhere.
Kirby Farrell
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Berserk Style in American Culture
verfasst von
Kirby Farrell
Copyright-Jahr
2011
Verlag
Palgrave Macmillan US
Electronic ISBN
978-0-230-33914-9
Print ISBN
978-1-349-29731-3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339149