day 61

Two events demonstrate a theatricality that defies logic -

1. lightning struck the head of Merlion
2. Indonesian/Chinese Student stabbed Professor and leaped to his death

While it is easy to blame Nature and Construct as the driving forces behind the violence,
it is far more interesting and subversive to suggest that alterity (that is always apart from these categories) is the root of our miseries.

Either as symbolic order or as national imaginary -

you may defile the national construct by doing absolutely nothing and extreme effects will still be produced by virtue of what the national construct introduces as a staged entity that does not have to do much but vomit. That entity's passivity (as a statue of empty signification) invites a danger to itself (without being conscious of itself) and we know immediately without a lightning to highlight to us the lack of a brain even as it continues to vomit. This passivity is, really, also its alterity. It can do nothing but vomit. And it cannot swim and must perform without knowing it is performing, assuming eternity, the poor symbol for the tourist gaze and the mechanical reproduction of flash lights. In other words, without the set-up and staging of a passivity (being in a concrete park looking out into a mirror of its own construction by cranes and cement), it cannot be at the right place and the right time to get a haircut without asking for one. It must surely be bald and without its white mane. That is what signifies itself as wholly other. And this wholly other is its own danger.

OR, you defile the national imaginary by doing exactly what is assumed as a "problem with the student," who is internationally displaced but in any case the Master remains sovereign even if wounded. For such an isolated event is surely not common, where we can be safe in the knowledge that our mediation of the event (some students on campus rushed to snap [pictures] ) allows us to take a safe distance back and take [pictures] of blood and its aftermath; precisely because it is an aftermath, quickly disposed, quickly reported, and quickly forgotten by the members of the public who were equally quick to make a media out of it. What this suggests: If the merlion should die from nature's deathblow, we will be rushing to the scene to take [pictures] but as such it will be an indifference since the national is always capable of constructing new empty (hybridized signifieds).

What is truly violent about the above events is the aleatory nature of these events. As much as the National Construct/Imaginary can presuppose the safe infrastructure and harmony that its citizens, emigrants and others enjoy, occasionally isolating similar events as naturally news-worthy, any one such event can immediately cause a chain of unreported events that are in themselves a violent resistant to totalization and the general. The resistance takes on the form of passivity and indifference. I mean, why bother?

What we cannot determine is the Why-answer. We can merely present them as a performance (if we bother) of their inability to fit in - so much so that the Merlion may soon have to get a new hair cut (how nostalgic!) and perhaps even a new brain made up of lightning-resistant material. The logic of prevention and siege, or the mentality of constantly in trauma and crisis is seriously a fear of its own alterity - the irreconcilable difference within itself that must surely defy all classification of its supposed national identity. Nevertheless, we continue to fossilize some form of fused identities, devoid of a historicity that is rigourous and precise. (What is precise is the margins of its construction; of which I mean the wooden sticks framing the facade of so many buildings here) We also continue to assume that people of the same race, religion, ethnicity and language must surely be a community. Hence, it will end up doing violence to those who fail 'to be' the national imagined (or any of the above imaginaries), but at the same time, invite the aleatory forces to act almost instinctively and with scary precision the violence to the construct.


So we must surely learn the lesson inherent in the violent double act - the student stabbing Professor and himself - that there is always something we will never know, in each passing of the person that embodies the tension between alterity and theatricality OR the inward self-identification and the outward response to this inward projection. You may perform all your life but once violence is ultimately produced, it ceases to be a performance. It is a resistance. It is the resistance against totalization. We are intrinsically violent to ourselves as much as we love ourselves through performances.

A student - A master? It's time we leave dialectics where it belongs. It is really more productive to think how each passing of a thought process (e.g. a decision) manifested in an action is really the potential to be different from what is thought. It is violent and modifies immediately when it comes out of its shell and opens itself to the forces that surround it. I can die by nature. Or I can die by construct, by which we should really be weary of the violence that happens behind our backs (E Tu Construct!). The Nation is a honourable idea. It feeds and cares for its people. But the following events happened:

1. National Symbol stabbed by Nature.
2. Pedagogical Master stabbed by Diasporic Disciple who stabbed himself.

Already, we see how it is that we cannot thematize the tensions always at work.
Already, you see how I fail to be honourable to the above events.