Violence

Introduction

For some violence is a human universal that has shaped every aspect of history, delimiting social and political structures and even determining planetary fate. Contrastingly for others, violence is constitutive of the universalizing discourse of the subject within colonial-modernity. For some violence exposes historical injustices and asymmetries of socio-political structures manifesting the utterance and resistance of the oppressed. Others construe violence as the essential logic of all relations and the foundation of the social. While violence may be said to pervade the immediate lived experiences of all, it surely does so in ways that are differentiated in valency, intensity and outcome.   Representation of violence is ubiquitous. Representation itself is often understood as a primary matrix of violence. Digital networks relay violent events and encounters instantaneously; artistic practices often seek to disclose the psycho-social experience of violence. These forms may be seen to extend or redistribute the force and logic of violence.  Some speak of the ethical demand to bear witness, others of the imperative to disclose violence without thereby reproducing it. Yet others point to the language of violence, its semiotic field and modes of enunciation. Some propose a limit to representation in genocidal violence while others believe that we properly touch violence through materiality and the non-discursive. Divergent figurations of violence – as utterance from elided histories and subaltern lived experiences; as limit or logic of representation; as materiality and technique – shape different enquiries.