getting violent

Music: Robin Guthrie: Continental (2007)

I've recently returned from a small conference organized by Jim Aune (and gang) and hosted by the department of communication at Texas A&M University on the topic of "symbolic violence." About fifty-to-seventy (it was hard to gauge, but I don't think more than 70) attended for four days or so of panels and plenaries about a topic that, admittedly, could get one down after a while. The four of us who spoke on the last day---on a Sunday morning, no less---were delightfully surprised at the energy and resilience of the audience, still quite robust in size and not as exhausted as one would expect after three days of discussing Nazis, rape, torture, and other sorts of atrocity.

I mention the usual and expected topoi of "violence" because, while we all referenced these, a good amount of labor went into thinking about and getting a better handle on what, exactly, violence might be, and how the qualifier "symbolic" relates to it. Although there was a consensus that we all agreed certain kinds of violence were, prima facie, bad, only a handful of folks seemed prepared to summarily dismiss violence out-of-hand. Indeed, much work went into advancing various taxonomies of violence to better enable us to formulate questions about "it," or better, about "violences." In this respect, DJ Dee-Zee-Ski (a.k.a. Prof. David Zarefsky) kicked us off with a keynote set that methodically detailed a typology of violences (and refreshingly unanswered questions), that really did capture the tone of the conference to come. Prof. Pat Gehrke advanced an alternative typology that was equally provocative and helpful.

Most of the other discussions I heard were more case-study focused, but again, most seemed to take-up quite seriously the realization we may not actually know how to grapple with violence as a thing---or an event or structure. (By the way, Bordieu and Zizek were perhaps the most cited theorists I heard.) I found this attitude or disposition really, really refreshing and productive, and I suspect we were all reacting, to some extent, to the way in which prefabricated responses to violence (or perceived violences) are so central to mediated ideology today. Everywhere you turn, one is supposed to respond to violence as an unquestioned evil and to respond . . . well, to respond in kind.

Zarefsky did not rule out violence as a possible necessity, but he did pose civility as the preferred default. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell responded by stating symbolic violence is a default mechanism of identity---although her focus was on the centrality of what I would term "projection" (and her example was Cuba). The next day, however, taking the position of the inevitability of multiple interlocking forms of violence (structural, objective, political, and so on), Gehrke posed the provocative question: "how do we do violence better?" That question stuck with me and many others for the rest of the conference. At lunch today my colleague and friend Jennifer Mease said she was quite taken with Erin Rand and Dan Brouwer's papers today, which concerned a kind of "queer intimacy" or interaction. One of many of Rand's biting insights was that the gay male suicides of recent years has produced a public figure of the lonely and isolated bullied gay boy that runs cover for the excruciating din or "cacophony of the social" (that is, suicide was seen as an escape from the social, not an isolation from it). Mease asked: "is queer intimacy a better violence?" meaning not so much displays of public affection but a different comportment toward what Brouwer described as the "stream of life" (he described a scene in which a drag queen helped emergency personal get through a crowd). Well, I cannot possibly replicate the nuanced context of Jen's intriguing question here---at the moment I'm almost brain dead and weary from the conference, but still: what a question!

For my part (and to some extent that of others, especially Chris Lundberg in his discussion of evangelical popular cultures), the goal was similarly to pose what we term "violence" on this side of language as a recognition of the drive central to the subject. Like Erin and Dan, Claire Cisco King and I deliberately crafted our papers as a conversation about how violence travels across different modalities of symbolicity. We examined violence in film, primarily (although Claire was careful to underscore all sorts of clear parallels in Western art and disturbing, iconic photography). So, for example: imagine a horizontal line labeled "language." Prior to this line is something we might label "compulsion" or "drive," which is references a human tendency toward enjoyment. A full realization of that enjoyment would be "death"---not necessarily destruction, but something like stasis or equilibrium. After the line, we have various symbolic ways to channel the compulsion, which we might recognize in good or bad terms, like pain or pleasure. Now, my argument was that genre was one of the ways we organized these impulses or compulsions into regimes of meaning, and that historically when it's pushed into the service of destruction, that has been done over the body of woman (cue Laura Mulvey on the gaze, etc.).

None of these discussions were satisfying, especially mine. But that's not a criticism---quite the opposite. The point is that for four days a group of people zoned in on a very difficult social problem that concerns what we study (rhetoric) and were working toward a map or ground clearing for future thinking. I just really, really appreciated the general disposition of thinking aloud---of no one claiming to have a definitive map or answer, just thoughts about how we might coordinate future inquiry.

Aune did a good job today summarizing four (or five?) thematics that seemed to emerge from the conference. The one that seemed foremost, to me, was the "dialectic of civility and incivility," two buzzwords at the forefront of the popular imaginary today, especially in political discourse. What became very clear to me by the second day of the conference is that, just like "violence," there were many civilities. It seemed to me folks were working with three different but interrelated conceptions of civility: (1) procedural or functional; (2) aesthetic or tonal; and (3) publicity. Most everyone seemed to agree with the value of procedural or functional civility, which concerns a reasoned exchange of ideas. Things seemed to break down, a bit, with tonal civility and civility as publicity. A number of folks seemed confused by what I was calling civility as publicity, by which I meant the appearance of procedural and tonal civility (that is, PR). For example: the repeated and often passionate calls for more "civil" public discourse is often just an appeal for the appearance of procedural civility in a manifestly uncivil, disrespectful, or otherwise oppressive state of affairs. I need to get off to bed, but I'll sign off with the observation that I think we need to disarticulate these forms of civility if those particular discussions are going to do any sort of conceptual work. Too often we slide between them interchangeably, on the surface of things, in a way masking what my colleague Dana Cloud termed the "violence of civility."

Well, this is an admittedly disorganized gloss on the conference and the ideas that circulated in my head as I made the two-hour drive home. And that is to say, this conference did what I wish every conference did: gave me a puzzle I actually find myself invested in working-through, even though it may never come together. Despite the troubling and at times depressing topic, what a rewarding and productive conference this was!