a subtle vehemence
Music: Hammock: Chasing After Shadows . . . Living with the Ghosts (2010)
Perhaps violence concerns a frustration over telepathy?
Vanus: empty, without substance—the trouble with (the) vanity is that it’s so isolationist, in (or at) the end. One can put two sinks in there but, you know, we all shave alone. (“This is life in the fall.”)
But that’s not the point of (a) vanity: there is the yearning for and provision of a mirror.
My friend and colleague and mentor and often teacher of life-important things Rosa Eberly ] departed many days ago, after visiting for a stint, but memory of her presence lingers. I spy water rings on the patio table. We ate and talked and processed the conference we had just attended on “symbolic violence.” It was a strange topic to process together because our visit was so peaceful, downright joyful; one night we sat on the patio into the wee hours of the morning blowing smoke (rings). It’s been a long time since I’ve had such a communion. We discussed her paper (and the marvelously fecund notion of a “vernacular cloud”) and her response to Kevin DeLuca’s plenary presentation concerning our world of “infinite violence.” I’ve been thinking a lot about her response to DeLuca, which was a challenge, and not just because the bathroom didn’t have two sinks.
DeLuca and only a handful of others at the conference had the notion we needed to confront the affect of violence; we knew the tendency of our ilk, we/us academics, would be to abstract—too abstract—to stay on this side of the “symbolic” in “symbolic violence.” DeLuca wanted to “go there” and confront us with our own (complicity in) barbarism. My co-presenter Claire Cisco King and I had the same idea. We all showed disturbing images and reacted, or asked a reaction, to them. This was our go-to habit of confrontation: to display monadic, invite the dyadic.
But in retrospect, and in the wake of Rosa’s visit and (graciously softer) influence, I’m wondering about this impulse, that violence confronted demands a violence vehement—a violence experienced close to the source, a recon trauma. As I have been processing Rosa’s response to DeLuca, which was subtle and careful and delicate, I second guess. A/I a third.
Thirdness. Charles Sanders Pierce is in da house (in the membrane), laying down the “law of love.” My dim memory of Pierce from graduate school is crusty with frustration on the edges. I remember firstness as the is-ness (the indeterminate thisness). Secondness is the condition of alienation, the evagination of subject/object; and thirdness the mediation, the font of meaning and “sign,” creativity. Pierce is often perceived (and rightly so, I feel) as a fierce logician but also as a self-styled “agapist.” We may very well be the vocabularies that we inhabit, and given the promise of poetry, we very well may overwhelm Auschwitz with our words.
Still, “inhibition” or station or “the sink” is the problem. Rosa repeatedly characterized rhetoric as “processural,” which is distinct from the “event” or period or flash or bang we would fashion for violence as such; we make it a thing because our retrospective sense-making periodizes “it” in the mourning that is meaning. Rosa ended her response with a reference to the unspoken (or at least muffled) conversation of voices circulating at Penn State (the movie!) and its interiors removed: a private home in which the words exchanged between Paterno and McQueary gleaned a violence processural, a violation of being yet-to-be. What violence is that, elongated and senseless but for the quiet (re)covery? What violence is that? indeed. I take note and bow my head. Yes, friend: there is that violence too.
I speak oblique but not without purpose or care. What slow violence do we but ignore, that unseen violation next door, the subtle vehemence that does as much if not more damage because it lacks recognition? To make this thinking concrete, but to abjure having to make a definitive point (which is the luxury of bloggishness), I reference an unsettling violence heard in recent weeks: A female violence calling from a neighboring apartment complex to “call the police! call the police!”
I called the police.
But that was not enough, I felt, deep down in “this.” And this feeling is guilt. Unlike “giving a paper” or collecting a paycheck, the call to conscience is not merely machinic or programmed, the script “to be good” that we (my friends reading this) all know. It’s something Other. The call, the visitation, is an invitation for rethinking violence as the condition of objecting-the-Other at all. That’s not a “deep thought,” of course, although I recognize (even delight in) the abstraction of words here at the same time as I worry about their reception (“oh, Josh is talkin’ shit again”). I’m trying to say other-than-the-words-in-the-way that the words-in-the-way-say: violence is what happens when I make you a character, a figure in “my” movie. That much is inevitable, and that much is why I should remind myself you are out there, and that you are not like me. Perhaps “rhetoric” is simply another word for “guilt.”
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Writing in/a relentless reckoning with the realization that love is not enough, that the ideal of commun-
glory. holy. you are a free man in paris (texas). unfettered and alive. thank you for calling the po lice. because it’s just an arroyo and a fence. and sound travels. (“my name’s deluca….”)
i like remembering pat gehrke’s question to kevin, inspired by the dworkin: “why didn’t you show us the worst stuff?”
processual. leff told me i was “rotten with process” at the Cs in nineteen ninety-something. and i will find the “water rings” song for you: seems wiping up condensation /condescension is a constant in my life.
at farmers market today i told bill callahan about bill callahan, and bill callahan told me about another bill callahan.
guilt needs to lose U. call it gilt: like the guest room. maybe rhetoric is the guest room. thanks for helping me to learn how to write again. derek walcott and paul simon wrote in the libretto to “the capeman”: “if you want to keep your sanity, you’ll teach yourself to write.” over and over and ova.
nobody does it better than you, birthday boy.
You are both such blessings in my personal and intellectual life. I am still “processing” the SVC, and hope to have some reflections up soon, once I dig out from the administrivia that currently engulfs me. As I said at noon on Sunday, for me at least, this whole topic is best construed as a set of dialectical tensions. Yes, violence is actually rather rare (and decreasing over time) and hard for humans to accomplish (cf. Randall Collins). Yes, there is a symbolic violence (in Bourdieu’s original sense) which grinds down bodies every day in the home and, perhaps especially, the workplace. Yes, we enjoy violent representations and that fact can make us both less virtuous and also help us trans-form our cloacal mafia ids (a term from Thomas Merton) into spirit.
The only way out is through. Thank you both for being part of this journey of Spirit.