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

[Judith Rodenbeck]

Thanks, Virginia. I, too, understand the arguments and the sense; indeed,
I¹m in principle in agreement with much of the latter. But non-violence
seems to have queered the conversation, no? And I love the evocation of the
slow. Davin writes: ²I wonder what the implications of an abstract pure
violence would have for my opposition to the forms of violence that we are
familiar with (from physical force to threats of force)²--and that is a
large part of my concern. But I¹m reminded of the introduction of trauma
theory to art discourse, which at first provided some deeply useful
formulations (the punctum...) and then mushroomed into a general theory of
representation-qua-representation as it lost the specificity of its
grounding in an actual therapeutic practice directed at specific individuals
and their unspeakable experiences‹that is, it was generated by the immediate
experience of Vietnam and growing recognition of the complexity of the
Holocaust¹s scar tissue; it developed in the context of Pol Pot times (see
the extraordinary description in today¹s NYT of Duch¹s animal cry at Tuol
Sleng, 40 years after he wiped out its inmates one by one) and the German
historikerstreit. But in the late 1990s trauma became, in certain
art-critical circles, not just a useful can-opener for Warhol but a way of
thinking about making and responding to art in general. To my mind it¹s
worth being a bit wary of the romance of language.

This, from Virginia, is the point:

> I think it might be useful to distinguish ontologic and epistemologic violence
> from physical violence, where we include in phisycal violence social violence,
> or the violence enacted upon minoritarian subjects by structures and policies
> that aren't necessarily a billy club to the head.   
> 
But it¹s also worth bearing in mind that part of what makes that language so
romantic is the prurience of calling upon the billy club to the head to
describe the edit.

Judith
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20090716/d27ec142/attachment.html