Cry-Baby: Knotland

Cry-Baby

Good manners training with The Bureau of Melodramatic Research

Cry Baby

Good manners training with The Bureau of Melodramatic Research

The crisis of global capitalism can be textually read as a crisis of the official rhetoric of optimism. The transnational ode to joy is being at last shadowed by gloomy, negative feelings; the sudden shift from euphoria to panic is paving the way for emotional collapse. Doctrinaire choirs set the tone for these public lamentations, the economic and political depression is more and more often tantamount to nervous depression.

The generalized lachrymatory outbursts cannot be judicially/legally controlled anymore, they are not even threatened by EU’s recent law which bans the traditionally East-European profession of mourning at funerals. At the same time, there is a new emerging category of professional mourners, a new code of emo-political manners. This code is constantly promoted by public figures, ranging from presidents to all sorts of other feeble-hearted political or legal personalities, including corporations. It keeps fueling a ubiquitous compassion which, most of the times, ethically justifies economic interests.

On the other hand, depression as “de-activation of desire” could be a fatal crack in the social nervous system, an irreversible imbalance in the self-sufficient xanax economy, the first false tones in the much touted hymn of the capitalist miracle.

Being interested in the circuit of emotions, the Bureau of Melodramatic Research recognizes the anti-hierarchical potential of cry-babies - weeping as a form of resistance, but also its manipulative purpose with the aim of producing consent. BMR proposes a new etiquette, the Cry-Baby Guide. This new guide turns to onion, as a natural catalyst for these socially forbidden eruptions in the public space. The new skool of lachrymatory practice aims at breaking the alleged monopoly of emotional secretions and promotes reflex tears as a form of counter-crying, a protest which doesn’t end but start with tear gas.

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