Regarding Violence

"It surely was a dream" the officers insisted. "In Macondo nothing has happened, or is happening, or will ever happen. This is a happy town". Thus the extermination of the union leaders was consummated.

—García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude

The crux of the matter is that violence, vibrant in its unconditional submission to the will to power, becomes a prophetic illumination, a manner of questioning and answering, a dialogue, a tension, and oscillation . . . No solidarity is possible.

—Yambo Ouologuem Bound to Violence

The complex and ambiguous relationship between violence and representation has been the object of so much critical analysis that it could be assumed that at the beginning of a new millenium we are better equipped to understand the artistic and ethical implications of attempting to conceptualize what was often lived as incomprehensible and unnarratable. Undoubtedly, the experience and trauma of violence, as well as the role of violence in modern culture and our globalized world can be better understood in all its complexity thanks to the intellectual brilliance of critics such as Cathy Caruth, Zygmunt Bauman, Dominick LaCapra, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Ariel Dorfman, to name but a very selected few. At the same time it could also be said that we are in a moment of receptive overload regarding both violence as an object of cultural analysis and its material consequences, in particular as explored in trauma studies. Ironically, such overload is parallel to, and indeed perhaps due to, the extraordinary popularity of what Hal Foster calls "trauma talk" in popular culture: talk shows, twelve-step therapies, confessional fictions, psycho-dramatic interventions. According to Foster if there is a consistency to this particular trauma discourse, "it has to do with a redefinition of experience, both individual and historical, in paradoxical terms—experience that is not experienced, at least not punctually, at the moment, that comes either too early or too late, that one is condemned either to act out compulsively or to reconstruct after the fact." ("Return"). These reenactments of trauma and crisis, as is well known, are explicitly or implicitly constructed to elicit empathic identification with the personal wound while avoiding critical analysis of the collective circumstances that allow or indeed create the traumatic situation to begin with. Ironically, the intense voyeuristic experience such narratives offer is justified (sublimated) in terms of a supposed pedagogical and/or therapeutic effect, both for the survivor but also for the community as a whole.

It seems unquestionable that the representation and reenactment of violence, particularly certain types of violence is seductive, and therefore commercially profitable. The consequence of the barrage of violent images and narratives with which we are confronted everyday, combined with the constant recourse to banal "trauma talk" in the media, leads to the often mentioned "compassion fatigue": a numbing that effectively blocks affective responses and critical questioning both of the events presented to us and the narrative and rhetorical strategies mobilized for their description. Many artists have responded to that situation by creating works that emphasize the impossibility, or even futility, of certain representations. To name just a recent example, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar produced in 1994–95 Real Pictures (1994–95), an installation about the Rwandan massacres in which the photographs of genocide remained sealed in black boxes, never to be seen by the spectator. His decision not to show the thousands of pictures he had taken in Rwanda was meant to emphasize the disjunction between the experience and its record. According to Jaar, his strategy "offers a commentary on our incapacity to see, on the futility of a gaze that arrives too late. If the media and their images fill us with an illusion of presence, which later leaves us with a sense of absence, why not try the opposite? That is, offer an absence that could perhaps provoke a presence." ("Limits"). According to this position, then, it is only by hiding the representation that the true magnitude of an unspeakable tragedy can be conveyed, and the victims put to rest. Yet many artists still affirm the power of images, and words, to expose the forces that...