Violence and the Limits of Representation

G. Matthews, S. Goodman, G. Matthews, S. Goodman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137296894
• eBook ISBN: 9781137296900
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Violence and the Limits of Representation explores the representation of violence in literature, film, drama, music and art in order to demonstrate the ways in which the work done by researchers in the Arts and Humanities can offer fresh perspectives on current social and political issues.

1

The Violence of Representation and the Representation of Violence

Benjamin Noys

We could summarise the approach of theory to the problem of violence as the movement through a chiasmus: from ‘the representation of violence to the violence of representation’. The interventions of theory suggest that instead of remaining at the level of the representation of violence, we have to consider that a form of violence is intrinsic to the very act of representation itself. Theory, which refers to those positions that were inspired by paying attention to the sign and the signifier, directs its attention to this ‘primary’ violence at work in the sign. In this way it undermines, or deconstructs, the usual distinction made between violence and representation, which places violence as exterior to, or beyond, representation. Hannah Arendt ascribes such a view to Greek thought when she remarks: ‘Only sheer violence is mute’.¹ In contrast, theoretical analysis suggests that, in fact, violence is essential to representation, to language, and to the image. It is ‘empirical’ violence, or representations thereof, that is derivative and secondary, or serves to conceal or distract from this ‘fundamental’ violence. The result is that violence isn’t simply at the limits of representation, but rather it is an internal divide within representation.

To give an initial example, we can turn to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological fieldwork in Of Grammatology (1967). Derrida disputes Lévi-Strauss’s suggestion of a primary innocence upon which the violence of language falls and which it contaminates, in the figure of the anthropologist. Instead, Derrida suggests that there is an originary ‘arche-violence’ of inscription that precedes the violence of the law and empirical instances of violence.² Without an understanding of this ‘originary’ violence, which Derrida calls ‘the violence of the letter’, we cannot grasp the operations of violence. In this way Derrida overturns the claim of Lévi-Strauss that violence is merely accidental, or introduced from outside, to probe a more nuanced encounter in which violence is ever-present and actualised in different forms. This does not suppose an endorsement of violence, but rather what Derrida will elsewhere call the difficult task of ‘choos[ing] the lesser violence within an economy of violence’.³ It is only by thinking about a general violence that we can truly capture the forms and specificities of violence; otherwise we cast out violence as only ever secondary and accidental to some primary innocence.

Of course, it is the shift to this level of the violence of representation that has often been used to indict theory itself as an intrinsically violent practice. The argument is that theoretical abstraction does violence to lived experience, or that it encourages an indifference to violence.⁴ I do not wish to renew this kind of attack here. Rather, what concerns me is something of the difficulty or even impasse in passing between the representation of violence and the violence of representation. My point is not that in moving to this ‘higher’ level we do violence to everyday existence in the name of the abstract, but rather that we can miss an actuality of violence that lies in the abstract. Therefore, I am not suggesting that theory occludes violence per se or fails to do justice to the gross and evident forms of violence, but rather that it can at once open and occlude certain abstract forms of violence that form our reality.

One sign of this risk is what we might call the oscillation or overlap in theory between extreme forms of empirical violence and the violence of representation. This is clear in Lyotard’s deployment, in The Differend (1983), of the Holocaust as the signature event that ruptures the ‘phrase regime’ of experience.⁵ Here, the excess of that historical event over the limits of representation is used to indicate the violent limits of representation and the violence of representation. It is the extremity of this antinomy, at both ‘ends’, which I think poses a problem for certain forms of violence that lie occulted in the median space of representation.

To argue this case I am going to turn to the work of Roland Barthes. While Barthes may be less than fashionable at present, to use the language of the market, his work poses the problem of violence in more explicitly political terms. The Brechtian roots of Barthes’s thinking speak to this political concern, which remains a constant in his work. At the same time, under the formulation and development of the thinking about the sign, usually under the nickname of ‘post-structuralism’, Barthes shifts this project more insistently towards an interrogation of the violence of representation. In this passage, and in the fraught continuities present in his thinking about violence and representation, Barthes forms something of a test case for the necessity and difficulty of thinking about the representation of violence and the violence of representation together as a theoretical and political activity. I will then turn to the need to complicate and separate the running together of the representation of violence with the violence of representation. This is not to restore the pre-theoretical view, but rather to nuance our understanding. To pursue this, I want to explore an unlikely site of theoretical reflection: the factory. Tracing through a number of theoretical reflections on the factory, I argue that this is a site in which the question of abstract violence can be better posed. To pre-empt my conclusion, I want to consider the violence of abstraction as a way of mediating and rethinking the question or problem of violence and representation.

Mythologies of violence

We can read Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) as an exercise in teasing out forms of representation and their relation to violence.⁶ At the broadest, and perhaps clumsiest, level we could say that Barthes tries to distinguish between ‘bad’ representations – those that dissimulate their own violence by passing off their historicity as natural – and ‘good’ representations – which admit and even revel in their status as ‘pure’ representations. Of course this practice already passes beyond what we might call the common level of cultural politics, in which we find a sorting of ‘good’ representations from ‘bad’ in terms of their social or cultural acceptability.⁷ This kind of practice, familiar from the work of censorship or from political claims about the adequacy of representations, tends to leave the form of representation itself largely untouched. The aim is merely to find an adequacy of representation to buttress political, social, or ethical claims or norms. In the case of Barthes, his ‘sorting’ is already operating at the level of a consideration of the question of the violence implicit in the act of representation itself. In fact, Barthes works with a sense of the necessity of violence, arguing that it is the relation to this violence of representation that allows a political and ethical testing of forms of representation.

To take the example of his analysis of wrestling, Barthes treats it as an art form that exaggerates the signs of violence (15−26). In this way violence is no longer coded within the forms of a contest nor is it minimised as a technical necessity, both features which characterise his counter-examples of boxing and judo. Wrestling is treated as a creative paradox: it at once tries to abolish the space of representation, by making the sign coincide with the referent and by ensuring all meaning is given and perfectly clear, yet in doing so it becomes the ‘pure’ act of representation itself, detached from claims to the ‘natural’. So, wrestling disrupts the passing off of violence as an intermittent but natural phenomenon by revealing a ‘pure’ or theatricalised violence that demonstrates the violence hidden in all representation. Although we may regard this as a trivial example, a charge Barthes deliberately courts, we could argue that it forms the matrix for his critical probing of a theatricalised violence that displaces our acceptance of the given ‘naturalness’ of certain forms of violence, and in doing so reveals the ‘pure’ violence of the sign.

So the question of the passage from the representation of violence to the violence of representation is already posed in these analyses. The analysis outlined in the methodological supplement ‘Myth Today’, however, does draw a distinction between the primary level of language – structured by the sign as the unity of signifier and signified – and the discourse of myth that operates at a second level of distorting or deforming these signs by dehistoricising and naturalising them into myths (117−74). In this way mythic discourse does violence to language by dissimulating its arbitrary form into the ‘unity’ of myth. This false unity also dissimulates the violence of this mythological operation, which passes itself off as necessary and natural. That said, Barthes does not simply suggest an operation of demystification that would reveal this violence as such and so restore language to its ‘true’ signifying function purged of myth. Rather, his strategy suggests a redoubling, as we saw in ‘The World of Wrestling’. The critique of myth should take the form of an ‘artificial myth’ (147), which would render mythic discourse less natural, rather than imply the return to a true nature. As Barthes notes, ‘If there is a “health” of language, it is the arbitrariness of the sign that is its foundation. What is sickening in myth is the resort to a false Nature’ (126). The admission of the arbitrary ‘violence’ of the sign is what inoculates us against the false violence that sutures the sign of ‘Nature’ to history.

There is a certain equivocation in the analysis of Mythologies between courting the possibility of a true meaning and displacing it by the recognition of an intrinsic arbitrariness. Rather than a dream of ‘non-violence’, of a pure coincidence of sign and referent, we are called to recognise violence. In this case the violence of representation is turned against the violence of myth. So we could say there is a kind of therapeutic necessity to the recognition of fundamental violence. In the Derridean terms I previously mentioned, to choose the lesser violence in an economy of violence involves the paradox of choosing what initially appears to be a more extreme act of violence. This choice is necessary to disable the naturalisation of violence that leaves it outside representation and consideration. It is only the admission of violence into representation that then allows a true consideration of violence.

In the ‘Preface to the 1970 Edition’ of Mythologies Barthes displaces or radicalises this analysis further, shifting decisively to a consideration of the violence of representation as crucial (9−10). In doing so he makes exactly the kind of theoretical movement I suggested, from analysing representations of violence to analysing the violence of representation or, to be more precise, from the violence of certain forms of representation to general condemnation of the violence of the sign. What Barthes contends is that his earlier practice of ideological critique has to become more sophisticated. Instead of taking the form of a series of mythologies, such a ‘critique’ would better take the form of the liberation of the signifier. After the impact of May ’68, with its liberation of speech, Barthes now sees the essential task as striking at the form of language itself rather than at its mystificatory misuses. This contention is reinforced by the typically hyperbolic claim, made in his 1977 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, that: ‘language – the performance of a language system – is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist’.⁸ The ‘fascism’ of language lies not in the overlying of the arbitrariness of the sign with the unity of myth, but in the originary ‘grid’ of the system of language (langue).

The analysis of myth considered it as a ‘second-order’ violence, which (ironically) pacifies and naturalises violence by the presumption of a ‘natural’ link of sign and referent; this is signalled in Barthes’s example of the occlusion of French colonial violence in the image of a Black French soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of Paris-Match (125−138). In Mythologies there is a wresting away of myth from this natural status to reveal its violence. But there is also the movement towards the arbitrariness of the sign, the intrinsic ‘violence’ of representation, as the means to dislodge ideological violence. The later preface, however, suggests another turn of the screw in attending to the violence of representation itself, which can only be resisted by a ‘semiosis’ – the violent avant-garde disruption of signification and language. This radicalisation leaves us in the situation of a primary violence from which all other instances of violence derive. The result is a move away from a possible specification of violence to a more general analysis that tends to pose the abstract function of representation itself qua violence against a resistant explosion of language. This increase in scale seems to involve a potential dilution, as violence is in all representation and so the particularity or weight of forms of violence seems to be potentially rendered equivalent. If language itself is fascist, then how would we judge particular forms of violence as fascist? While drawing attention to the problem of the violence of representation, such hyperbole risks occluding certain more mediated forms of abstract violence.

‘Political Orientalism’ and the writing of violence

Federico Luisetti has provocatively analysed ‘political Orientalism’ as the deliberate use of ‘Orientalist’ tropes to displace the political and philosophical coordinates of the West.⁹ Among his examples of this ‘political Orientalism’ – which also include Nietzsche’s ‘Buddhism’, Foucault’s invocation of the ars erotica, and Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadism – is the ‘Tao minimalism’ of the late Barthes’s lecture course at the Collège de France The Neutral (lectures given between 1977−1978).¹⁰ In fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Introduction: Violence and the Limits of Representation
• 1 The Violence of Representation and the Representation of Violence
• 2 Violence and Love (in Which Yoko Ono Encourages Slavoj Žižek to ‘Give Peace a Chance’)
• 3 (Im)material Violence: Discipline and the Gaze in James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late
• 4 Sadeian Women: Erotic Violence in the Surrealist Spectacle
• 5 Demarcating Violence in the Dramaturgy of Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls
• 6 ‘Skeletons of Solid Objects’: Imperial Violence in J. G. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy
• 7 Contingent Violence: Bergson and the Comedy of Horrors in Schindler’s List
• 8 Violence and Mediation: The Ethics of Spectatorship in the Twenty-First Century Horror Film
• 9 Objects of Surprise: Violence, Security, and Metaphysics
• Bibliography
• Index