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

[davin heckman]

Virginia,

I wouldn't necessarily say that my comments were meant to condemn
ontological "violence," particularly as it has been deployed as a
defense against actual physical violence...  only that it strikes me
as an area of caution (and the ethical aspects of it most certainly
depend on who holds the power).  I think it is important to note that
ontological violence often paves the way for physical violence.  I
would say that in "post" civil rights United States, people with power
and privilege seem to do much of their work at the ontological level
(defending abstractions, arguing principle, speaking hypothetically),
as a way of concealing the real consequences that their policies have
for various populations.  In many cases, these policies translate into
various sorts of hate crimes or policies, but rarely do the leaders of
these anti-social "culture warrior" movements speak in any way where
direct lines can be drawn between, say, a particular speech and the
"random" acts of violence that happen daily.

Peace!

Davin

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 3:47 PM, virginia
solomon<virginia.solomon at gmail.com> 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?  Is this different
> for different subjects, ie might calling upon dead male french theorists (ok
> agamben and guattari aren't men but you get my point) say something about
> the positioning of the producers of a particular kind of theory?
> 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 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).
>
> 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.
> And that we think about the stakes of Derrida talking about violence in ways
> that, say, Angela Davis or Gloria Anzaldua don't.
>
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:25 AM, davin heckman <davinheckman at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I was reading Agamben's State of Exception, and then stumbled across
>> Robert's post.  It strikes me that Agamben's discussion of Benjamin's
>> "pure violence" might be useful here.  Also useful here might be
>> Agamben's discussion of anomie (lawlessness) and nomos (the law), and
>> the sort of lawlessness that results where the law is too weak (there
>> is no norm) or too strong (where the norms are impossible to follow).
>> In my mind, queer tactics reside in between the two poles of anomie.
>> On the one hand, as Foucault demonstrates, norms play a critical role
>> in shaping and cultivating desire.  On the other hand, where norms are
>> too severe, they have the effect of criminalizing everyone.
>>
>> I think there is a metaphysical "violence" in queer tactics here, but
>> I think they are the kind of violence that the Merriam-Webster online
>> dictionary defines as "undue alteration (as of wording or sense in
>> editing a text)."  Occasionally, this violence might also describe a
>> category of emotional state ("fervor) or aesthetic state
>> ("discordance").  And, as a fundamental goal, an anomic relation to
>> the law (which verges closer to the kind of physical confrontation
>> associated with "violence.")  At some point, as we progress from
>> "undue alteration" towards a critique of the law as a system, we move
>> from a discussion of improvised means towards a discussion of
>> strategically defined ends...  which might mean that it is impossible
>> to theorize a "queer tactics," as they would more properly regarded as
>> "strategies."
>>
>> I don't know what to make of these connections.  In my mind, such a
>> conception of a "pure violence," if it is to be applied, veers too
>> close to an outright nihilism.  If it is to continue as an
>> abstraction, it does not offer practical utility.  And, finally, as a
>> pacifist (I am, I think, as I write this, a pacifist), I 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).  On the other hand, it is hard
>> for me to imagine a "queerness" which is not, in some way,
>> threatening....  not by its own design, but by the very laws written
>> to prevent its transient character from emerging.  I have a hard time
>> seeing "violence," say, in the kinds of cultural queering that takes
>> place in borderlands.  Rather, the laws that seek to prevent this
>> process...  through linguistic purity, the construction of barriers,
>> and nativist movements...  exert a violence on what would otherwise be
>> an organic process.  Yet, all the same, the very sorts of queering
>> that take place in the various borderlands of our structured society
>> are not insignificant...  they have ontological power...  they "harm"
>> (end, dissolve, destroy) one way of being by becoming another.
>>
>> Very, very interesting reading this month.
>>
>> Peace!
>>
>> Davin Heckman
>> <www.retrotechnics.com>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 3:19 AM, Robert Summers<robtsum at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I would respectfully yet disagree with many aspects of what Judith
>> > wrote,
>> >
>> > One passage: *Robert's original call asked about the _possible_
>> > heteronormativity of
>> > *relational aesthetics.* I'm not interested in *torturing* anything,
>> > whether
>> > bodies or the proper names of continental theorists, but I am interested
>> > in
>> > *the democratic space of the *violence of participation,* though I'd add
>> > quite emphatically not as the repetition of violence or even the
>> > metaphorical torturing of anything but as the exploration of, for
>> > example,
>> > behaviors, obedience to authority among them. *Queering* relational
>> > aesthetics, then, is productive inasmuch as it forces that
>> > metadiscursive
>> > activity.*
>> >
>> > Indeed, there is, I argue, a certain *violence* to/of queer(ing).  In
>> > the words of Sedgwick, "'[q]ueer’ is a continuing moment, movement,
>> > motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means
>> > across -- it comes from the Indo-European root -twerkw, which also
>> > yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torque (to twist), English
>> > athwart” (_Tendencies_, 1993: xii).  This *speaks* of a certain
>> > violence (*torque* can also be traced to torture, which is an act of
>> > violence), and to queer (or queering -- which I want to also use as a
>> > transitive verb, which would violate/torture rules of grammar) *is*
>> > violence against the normative (and queer _does_ do/enact more than
>> > just this), and we can *see* a certain *queering* as a certain
>> > *violence* when Derrida states, in a way that shows the slippage
>> > between binary oppositions, *... a caress may be a blow and vice
>> > versa. … And let us not exclude either that certain experience of
>> > touching (of 'who touches whom') do
>> > not simply pertain to blows and caresses.  What about a kiss?  Is it
>> > one caress among many?  What about a kiss on the mouth?  What about a
>> > biting kiss, as well as everything that can then be exchanged between
>> > lips, tongues, and teeth?  Are blows wanting there?  Are they absent
>> > in coitus, in all the penetrations or acts of homosexual or
>> > heterosexual sodomy?  Is a 'caress,' more so than a 'blow'? (_On
>> > Touching_, 2005: 69)*
>> >
>> > I do not think we need to participate in the reifying of binary
>> > oppositions (either/or), and I do not believe in *meta* anything.  I
>> > would never argue that *queering* is a *meta* anything.  Why this turn
>> > to the *meta* -- which implied both a transcendence and an outside?
>> > And it is interesting that Judith states *Queering* relational
>> > aesthetics, then, is productive inasmuch as it _forces_ that
>> > metadiscursive
>> > activity* (emp. mine).  Here we are at a certain violence, a force,
>> > even as it is disavowed.
>> >
>> > I mean this to be polemical, btw.
>> >
>> > Robert Summers, PhD/ABD
>> > Lecturer
>> > Art History and Visual Culture
>> > Otis College of Art and Design
>> > e: rsummers at otis.edu
>> > w: http://ospace.otis.edu/robtsum/Welcome
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> >
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>
>
> --
> Virginia Solomon
>
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