[-empyre-] violence materializing, positionality, differential consciousness, prisons, iran

[dj lotu5]

all this talk of violence and derrida reminds me of a moment i had in a
seminar with avital ronell. being the person i was at the time, very
immersed in community organizing and just stepping into theory, i asked
her something like "but how can we justify discussing the meaning of
this punctuation mark for so long, if we're concerned with social
justice and anti-racist, feminist practice, when there are actual bombs
being dropped on people every minute that we're spending here?"

[paraphrase from memory! don't make me dig up the mp3 archives!]

to which she responded with the answer, roughly, that she feels that by
introducing doubt into the definitions of terms such as addiction (in
crack wars), technology (in the telephone book) and certainty (in
stupidity), that she can actually defer, slow down or change the
decision making apparatus that actually drops those bombs, or puts
people in prison.

in this context, this seems like a highly queer move to me, to point out
the intersection, not to deny the violence of words, but also not to
deny the physical violence faced by queer people and people of color all
over the world every day and minute. her response points precisely to
the intersection, the transversal line, the place where the two kinds of
violence overlap, intertwine, become one another, transform.

yet, in this discussion, i'm inclined at points to say that yes,
queering is an epistemic violence, and why not! i'm reminded of fanon
and anti-colonial violence. as virginia asks about minoritarian
violence, is the violence of the colonized against the colonizer
violent, or more importantly is it justified violence?

i was also happy to see the earlier reference to chela sandoval's
methodology of the oppressed, a text i've been working through myself a
great deal lately. yet the question that i fear someone will ask me
about my claims about that book are, "but who is the oppressed?" while
it seems clear that rich, white, hetero, male people are oppressing
everyone else in the world, as a good derridean/ronellian i have to
admit that anything which seems so clear is very suspicious. and as
someone who's been involved in numerous painful, personal political
debates of queer vs (2nd wave) feminist and compromise vs. NO
compromise, i have to admit that i'm in favor of strategic and tactical
manouvers, positions and transformations. sandoval's differential
consciousness is so appealing to me precisely in that it resonates so
much with my own feeling that i'm a shapeshifter, constantly in
transition, but also constantly tactically dealing with various
difficulties the world presents me as a queer person. still, my question
is, how can we claim that violence from a minoritarian subject position
is somehow justified and in the same breath claim that subject positions
 have fuzzy boundaries and are false, temporary, shifting constructions?

lastly, i was also very happy to see any mention of angela davis,
especially in this context, as i've recently become a penpal for a
transgender prisoner, through the Queer/Trans Prisoner Correspondence
Project in Montreal. At the Critical Resistance conference in Oakland
last year, I was hugely inspired by the work they are doing there to end
the practice of putting people in cages, and the massive, horrible
violence that occurs in the prison industrial complex everyday. it puts
logical/linguistic/rhetorical violence in context quickly. I also
recently saw the amazing piece Public Secrets by Sharon Daniels about
women in california prisons that looks very closely at Agamben's notion
of bare life.

also, on queer videos from iran, this video struck me very deeply:

Poem for the Rooftops of Iran: "Where is this Place" - June 19th, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKUZuv6_bus

i found it because mez breeze twittered it...

all for now,

  m


virginia solomon wrote:
> totally, which was the thrust of the not just the billy club point!
> 
> I wanted to make the point of ontologic/epistemologic violence and change
> enacted by the minoritarian subject as being distinct from the violence,
> either physical or let's say ideological, of the dominant. does that make
> sense?
> 
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 7:44 PM, davin heckman <davinheckman at gmail.com>wrote:
> 
>> 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



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