Session 8: Communication and Violence

8th Global Conference

Monday 4th May – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary

Narrating Silence(s): Relations between the Limits of Language and Power
Melissa Shani Brown
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom

This paper is concerned with the idea that an examination of the relation between ‘biopolitical’ power and language is also an examination of silence, or more specifically, the movement between language and different silences. A number of theorists, such as Agamben and Scarry, have argued that political power is ultimately manifest in the power to ‘let live and make die’, but such a concern with the physicality of power is inseparable from an exploration of the boundaries of language. A brief examination of the dynamics of torture illustrates the extent to which power, while both killing and silencing, is also concerned with suspending subjects in the liminal realm between life and death, voice and silence. An examination of silence (of the unspoken and unspeakable and the forgotten) however, reveals the complexity of these power-struggles, and the extent to which the relation between voice and silence cannot be mapped onto that of life and death. The silence of the living holds the potential to be an agential silence, a means of controlling narrative and constructing a specific remembrance, in choosing what remains unspoken. This paper will examine the relations between biopolitics and silence with brief reference to the above theorists’ work, and the film Red Dust, concerning issues of torture and memory in post-Apartheid South Africa.

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Production and Reproduction of Different Forms of Violence in Two Contexts: Human Trafficking and Discourses of Counter-Trafficking
Reyhan Atasü Topcuoglu
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

Human trafficking is the exploitation of one’s labour and body via coercion and/or deception after a process of transportation. It is one of the most extreme practices of violence and has become a widely recognized subject in the relevant world literature during the last decade. A human trafficking experience usually includes not only physical violence but also psychological and social violence. Therefore, it is a combination of various forms violence which are practiced and suffered and abided. This study will examine the production of violence and its effects in two different contexts: Firstly in the context of human trafficking and than in the context of counter-trafficking. Examining the aspect of violence in human trafficking is important for designing social services for survivors of human trafficking, and also for reshaping social policies with the aim of abolishing human trafficking.

This study will also scrutinize discourses of counter-trafficking produced by international organizations (such as United Nations and International Organization for Migration) and NGOs in Germany (a destination country for human trafficking) and Ukraine (a transit and source country for human trafficking) and investigate how a specific form of violence, namely symbolic violence, is reproduced unintentionally when people and institutions attempt to fight against violence. What are the methods and dynamics in counter-trafficking discourses that produce and reproduce symbolic violence against survivors of human trafficking? The study will also focus on the relation between symbolic violence in counter trafficking campaigns and discursive emphases which perpetuate identities based on binaries as “us and them”; ‘decent’ persons as opposed to ‘poor and evil’ persons; rescuers and victims. Deciphering symbolic violence in counter-trafficking discourses is important for disillusioning counter- trafficking agents, as well as for revising existing counter-trafficking policies and shifting their focus from migration restriction to a new survivor-oriented approach to prevention, compensation and gender equality.

Time as Legitimacy
Leonhard Praeg
South Africa

The Western tradition of thought is one of “subjection to transcendence” (Foucault). In this onto-theological tradition (Heidegger) ideas such as God, Being or Truth are posited as transcendent but ultimately knowable. On the basis of this undecidable exteriority these Ideas have acted as foundational to the interiority of thinking and being. In such a timeless metaphysics of presence (Derrida) the association of cognition and action is a given. Because I can know God, Being and Truth, it is possible to know the meaning of an action before or at the time of its execution. For instance, an act of violence is a perfect manifestation of cognition – of knowing the Will of God, of recognising the unfolding dialectic of Truth et cetera.
Characteristic of our post-modern world of cosmopolitan convergence – in which appeals to transcendent ideas are met with incredulity amidst a total lack of consensus on what such ideas might be – is a disassociation of cognition and action. In the absence of transcendent ideas the legitimacy of violence becomes a function of temporality. Legitimacy must either be built up in advance through “spinning,” consensus building or warnings in order to pre-determine its meaning (as in the Bush War on Iraq) or violence must proceed as successful revolutions historically have, that is performatively, by producing after the fact “the interpretative model that will give legitimacy to the violence that has produced, among others, the interpretative model [itself]” (Derrida). “[This] separation of cognition and action by time means that no acts of violence can truly be justified at the time they take place” (Cornell). Where legitimacy has become wholly immanent the politics of legitimacy becomes the politics of temporality: who has the means to manipulate the machines (Deleuze) that re-produce the temporal dimension of the social network – TV, print, cinema, discourse et cetera. While a modernist differentiating between various acts of political violence turns on questions such as Who gets to put their view across on TV? Who has access to what? et cetera, these questions become moot in a world where legitimacy can no longer be founded and where we recognise the impossibility of any appeals to arbitration that will not replicate the logic of transcendence. This pushes the temporal dimension of politics to the fore. For instance: while violence has always had symbolic value, in a context of radical immanence symbolism becomes self-referrential legitimacy. Because legitimacy is now a function of performativity (which requires time to unfold) it becomes a function, not of transcendental reference but of temporality itself. This paper explores the notion of time as legitimacy with reference to, among others, the work of Deleuze.

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