[-empyre-] Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement

[naxsmash]

On Jul 16, 2009, at 1:47 PM, virginia solomon wrote:

> so in all of this talk of violence and the violence attendant to any  
> sort of queer operation or tactic, I very much understand Robert,  
> Davin, and Christina's arguments but I am nevertheless troubled,  
> with Judith, about the stakes of referring to that as violence.   
> What are the stakes of calling an ontologic/epistemologic shift  
> violence when those enacting that 'violence' face the very real  
> threat of actual physical violence?

yes I guess that is what Judith is saying when she notes that the  
videos coming out of the Iranian election protests are 'queer'....
....
>  Reconfiguration is certainly violent, enacts a violence, because it  
> changes the meaning of bodies for those whose very bodies have been  
> the site of their power.  But what is at stake for emphasizing that  
> violence?


I had a very strong desire to make a repetitive collage stacking video  
stills of Neda's face as she died.   Yes this was the site of her  
power.  And still to honor that power, that sacred face-- (meaning  
sacred as all faces are but also beyond this , her face, this terrible  
violence )
means not to show her face.

So i didn't make the collage.  At least not yet.  So far I have  
thought it would be violent, and I wasn't sure I totally could  
understand or take responsibility for that (if I were to go ahead).    
But, if violent, also in the sense of swerve: turning the video image  
into a flag-like repeat-- the wallpaper idea (of how traumatic images  
are part of a 'resonating surface' (Suely Rolnick) we do not want to   
really look at , like wallpaper.   something like that


>
>
> I think this is less a meta question than a practical one. Davin  
> discusses definitions of violence from the dictionary (its own  
> framework, to be sure) with a different set of terms - alteration,  
> fervor, discordance. To that I would want to add ambiguity and  
> contradiction. Do these different terms acknowledge the violence  
> inherent in the changes that need to take place for social justice?  
> I think so. And yet they don't place that violence at any kind of  
> premium. I think of practices that practice inaction, but that  
> nevertheless enact what we seem to be collectively arriving upon as  
> a queer operation - the labor slow down, masochism, Jamaica  
> Kincaid's 'Autobiography of My Mother" (in which a narrator refuses,  
> though various steps, to be interpellated by any number of the  
> systems with which she comes into contact).
>

did someone (Robert?) already mention "Bartleby the Scrivener" in this  
connection?

Once a few years back I got to see a dance theatre production of  
Bartelby at the Theatre de la Ville de Paris.  Stark sets , the clerks  
high desk and chair like a guillotine.  The dancer all angles ,  
falling from and into steep crashes, over and over.  It actually  
hypnotized
me; I was in a trance.  I wonder now whether the means, 'alteration  
and fever' around 'inaction' is an aesthetic mode that alllows us to  
let the comprehension of violence seep into us, even against wishes to  
stay normal, follow the action, look at a picture
the usual way, ie go to the theatre, watch the dance, leave the  
theatre, unscathed.  This is a situation sort of like Bacon's tripych  
painting of his lover George Dyer.

christina

  http://christinamcphee.net/photo/american_iraqi_flag.html