Session 4: Pictures of Violence
8th Global Conference
Monday 4th May – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary
Photography as an Art of Trauma and Action-Image: Shadows Play in the Photographs of “Desaparecidos” in Latin American Dictatorships
Márcio Seligmann-Silva
Departamento de Teoria Literária (Center of Literary Studies), Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), State University of Campinas, Brazil
The paper presents the role that photography played during the dictatorships in Latin America between the 1960s and 1980s. It discuses the different modalities of capturing violence, the structural relation between photography and depiction of catastrophes, as well as makes an analysis of the struggle between photographers and censorship. It deals with the paradoxical situation of terrorist States that at the same time wanted to show it’s violent potential and disguised it’s violent means. The work takes also in account the ways the photographers founded to criticize the governments through ironic images of the power theatricality. It is showed how in countries like Chile, Brazil and Argentina the photographers organized themselves in affiliations to protect their professional group.
In a second movement the article analyses how photography has been used by several artists since the end of the dictatorships to built a working through of the traumatic past. Presenting works from different artists as Alfredo Jaar, Marcelo Brodsky, and Rosangela Renno, the article discuses how the photographic device has been used to build a (moving) image of the violent history that those populations survived. As a thesis the article presents the paradoxical situation of Latin American cultures, oscillating between a present characterized by a very fluid memory and the desire to construct a nation on the basis of justice and truth. It is as if Latin America still affirmed the analogical principle of photography as an art of fixing the disappearance, that wants to keep contact with the missing subject. This analogical principle is being challenged in the present by the digitalising of culture and it’s transformation in the river of the Web. The “desaparecidos” (missing person, people that were kidnapped and normally murdered by the State in Latin America) is a phenomenon that determines a singular place for the photography in Latin America.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
The Beauty of Violence
D. Anthony Larivière
Department of Philosophy, Lakehead University, Canada
We often refer to violence as if it were a prima facie wrong, and therefore we deplore it where we find it just because it is a wrong. We search for its roots in human nature or evolution in order, perhaps, to eradicate it or at least to understand and control it. I think this is mistaken. Violence is not a prima facie wrong, and I argue instead that it is value-neutral. As such, it is only violence of a certain character which is wrong, and violence of another character can be good, desirable, and right. I argue further that it can even be beautiful. Hence, while it is important to understand the propensity to violence in the human animal, the attempt to eradicate it is itself a wrong, and even the wish that it were otherwise is ill-considered.
The Aesthetics of Violence: (Crime as Urban Spectacle in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation)
David Levente Palatinus
Peter Pazmany Catholic University, Hungary
The purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenology of violence and the aesthetics of fictionalized crime through the examination of the immensely popular American television drama called CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
I will argue that after such philosophical approaches to the problem of violence as Rene Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, or Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, it has become a truism to say that, from a phenomenological point of view, violence predetermines the cultural space within which it is located. Its conception is framed by socio-cultural, ethical and judicial discourses, academic disciplines and artistic genres. And yet, the phenomenology of violence also comprises the consideration of violence as a cultural commodity: the prominent position crime stories occupy in popular culture, in popular film and television in particular, could hardly be debated. Their critical reception and their approval as an established form of literature were for a long time confined to the narrow context of the popular and were defined against the alleged aesthetic supremacy and “elitism,” of “high art.” There could be an endless list of works in literature as well as in the visual arts which are in some ways connected to the themes of crime and violence. In fact, it so appears that the theme of violence as such, in its eminent form, has always been there and we have always been, in some peculiar ways, fascinated with it.
I would like to try and trace the manifestations of this fascination in CSI. Two factors, the trade-mark visual style of the series and the underlying emphasis on corporeality are paramount to the popularity of the show. On the one hand, I want to argue that the practices and technicalities surrounding the production of the cinematic image in CSI apparently work toward an aestheticization of violence. This aesthetics of death relies primarily on the visual experience of the body and discloses the visual plasticity of violence as urban spectacle. On the other hand, by drawing on Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic and Kristeva’s concept of abjection, I will also argue that the aesthetics of fictionalized crime is not meant to decriminalize killing. Fiction, in this respect, has an auto-therapeutic function: it deconstructs violence by providing for the audience the simultaneity of active participation and controlled distance.
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