[-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly

[Monika Weiss]

Dear all,

I have been on an airplane and now I see so much has happened in our writing in the meantime. I will read/address those newer posts later tonight but in this post I would like to share what I wrote on the subject of voice of (for) others in response to Johannes Birringer’s question:
_

The voice must be given but only to those who express the desire or need, those who agree to have it projected into space, to have it exist as their voice but also as our voice, shared as an inscription into the public sphere.

Those who are here now, our contemporaries, and who live in the shadows of their private or public trauma or who are socially removed from power, including power of voicing. How can we not offer [as we are positioned in the realm of visibility, we work with visibility as our language] to be the conduit, to be the transmitter, the ‘amplifier'?

Those who are no longer here, the forty students in Mexico, those disappeared whose relatives I met while working on the project in Chile, whose fragile remains, particles, bone fragments, are still being searched for in the sands, in the dirt surrounding Santiago. How can we refuse to offer to be their microphone? Their amplifier? their resonance box? Their archivist? Their instrument? Their lover/loving listener?

Those who are no longer here, the 1,000 young women seamstresses who perished in one of the death marches, on their way out of Gruenberg camp ( “Shrouds”), the abandoned, now forgotten (and sold to a private developer) by the city. The square as actively not remembered, not seen, by the citizens. The women who perished there are in oblivion; the site today looks like a damp, full of debris, which serves as a field for the enacted practice of forgetting, our active forgetting. How could I refuse to give them our/their voice, the voice of now living young women that worked with me on that site, lamenting, and who wanted to speak through their presence (the young women living in this town today), in order to give the voice to that absence and erasure. 

A ribbon came out of the young women raped by a group of citizens on a bus. One of them recalled during the trial a certain feeling of surprise at the site of that red ribbon, which was her intestines taken out by a rod inserted violently into her already devastated and destroyed bleeding body, inserted by the youngest of the rapists. Her heroic attempts to stay alive without internal organs left inside, just for a little while, some days following the destruction, where her body was literally turned inside out, her RIBBON (something I am working with right now), and her dramatic whispered call. She addressed us to us to not to forget .  Her voice and her ribbon waving at us, still today. How can I not give her the voice, the amplification. How can we not give the voice to the raped and murdered daily victims of the horrific uses of war and sexual violence  understood as means to destroy, as means to kill, to penetrate with rods, with bottles, with weapons, harsh objects, those taking ribbons out, in horrific acts of violence against human beings. We all ought to see the ribbon. It needs to glow before us, in our memory, in our wake and in our sleep. I dream of a monument to her internal ribbon that should occupy a public sphere. Perhaps within the canopy in front of the India Gate. A monument abolishing rape and abolishing gender based prosecution.  We ought to stand by, identify with, those who’re tortured, silenced, disappeared, raped, killed, wounded, beaten, forgotten, invisible, impoverished, deprived, removed.

We as artists have at least a chance, a potential, a chance at visibility, through the artifacts that we sometimes make, the conditions of enunciation. Art making as the realm of the visible, always within public domain

Art as pollution and as an accusation and as a trial.

Cultural production as political production, including poetry.  Activating and transformational, even if only nearing this potential of transformation. The artifact, the poetic entity, the place, the site of the encounter, bordelinkings (Bracha Ettinger) . Artifact as the amplifier, as the conduit, as the transmitter, as a fluid membrane, as a form of resonance, as the act of waving our silents and often forcibly silenced arms towards the volume of violence. Potentiality of the realm of the symbolic, what Kristeva calls the “thing”.  The shortcut, the residue, voice, voice over, voicing, speaking up, voice as presence.

——

Monika Weiss

On Nov 20, 2014, at 3:57 PM, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 
> 
> dear all
> 
> So much to ponder, in your postings, that one doesn't know where to go, following Simon's dark pronouncement of our dilemma, and the fear projected onto us all?
> 
>> Is it possible to talk about a political intention in accelerating violent imagery, collapsing historical precedence, dividing societies by reversing meanings, that debt will be credit, that risk and danger will be security, that wars are humanitarian, that is eradicating rights because they threaten democracy, privatising and marketising weapons manufacture, including nuclear arms, while directing their deployment in a controlled market of the senseless consumption of living flesh, enslaving governments to corporations, while violently overthrowing states who fail to surrender sovereignty or economic self-determination?> [Simon]
> 
> The reversing of meanings, or the crossing over (inside/outside, before/after) the Law, also haunts me after reading Andreas' letter.  And yet, last night, I felt encouraged to think of poetry, yes, and the power of "accents" in the very ambiguity, unassimilated to power, towards law and power, also the power of joke     - thank you Murat for the text you linked us to [http://ziyalan.com/marmara/murat_nemet_nejat3.html]  - I laughed loud, and cried as well as you recount your wild dissimulations and "self-immolations" , migrating to an Am-erika without poetic continuities (and thus no anxiety of influence..of rights or rites);
> and I had to think of Rustom Bharucha's last chapter as well, where he struggles to explain Ghandi's training to die, training the body to become the proper source of sacrifice (Terror and Performance, p. 156), training non-violence in Ghandi's Hindu understanding of 'ahimsa' (non-violence) and 'satya' (truth)....  but thus also training to be sacrificed, to be beaten
> 
> and to my horror Rustom then engages a longer discussion of the performatives of suicide bombers who record their video testimonials, auto-erotically preparing the destruction of self, before the act of killing, or 'martyrdom.'   The Jihadists  of ISIS, in interviews, are not sick in the sense in which the US secretary of state thinks they are. They knew their camera work too, in the videos, and two of them, believed to have been recruited from France and Britain, spoke yesterday of their 'spectacular' mission, perfectly ready, as Maxime Hauchard is quoted, for "martyrdom, obviously." 
> 
> After reading Monika's powerful plea for healing, lamenting as pollution and indictment of public space-against-forgetting-and-in-need-of-communal enunciation-rituals, and Ana's resigned response that there is too much un-health -- it occurred to me that quite a few here amongst our participants, including Christina and Mine, who insist on the arts as educational techniques, and Murat, Rustom and Monika, and also Fereshteh with her new play, and of course Alan when he makes music and writes apocalyptic poetry -- are probing performance and theatre along a potential line -- maybe also considered spatial/physical practice -  that can rupture emotionally (as briefly evoked last night in my reading of Hamed Taheri's lost home) and aurally the terrible "legal spectacle" , the "thick liquid undecidablity," as Andreas ponders. 
> 
> 
> Fereshteh,  what were you (not) able to take from there to there, what accent do you speak in now?  what garden do you tend now?
> 
> 
> And as a small but not irrespectful question to Monika, which was on my tongue last night when I ran into Olga Danylyuk, the question of speaking for others or of voice. 
> 
> [Monika schreibt] > Leila  Sadat, a scholar of international crime and law ... would travel around the globe, she would see and meet the communities, the individuals, the whole generations and nations affected, mourning, in suspension of trauma, but not fully mourning. What voice do they have, she asked me. Where does it live, the voice>  < This is why subjectivity appears as witness; this is why it can speak for those who cannot speak’ >
> 
> When I mentioned this to Olga, her reply was  - what if someone does not want to speak?  What do you do (for) when someone does not need to speak?
> 
> 
> 
> Johannes Birringer
> 
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