The claim “performative violence is an specific mode of communication” suggests that there is a violence that does not require to be performed (a violence that precedes the act or gesture, that exists without a subject exerting it). This observation suggests something similar to what Walter Benjamin previously looked for, the possibility of analysing violence without resorting to the means and/or ends it pursues. Nevertheless, we have to take in account that violence is always expressed relationally, that is, between two or more bodies. Therefore, we have to consider that each touch between bodies is violent: it is impossible to measure violence, to establish it as necessary or excessive, it cannot be reconstructed through the traces and residues it leaves behind hence, we cannot predict the consequences that may derive from any contact. Violence is the body becoming.

The above observation shows two aspects that the excerpt (and the essay it comes from) misses: first, that violence is always performed as it is inherent to performativity, and second that it is not “a specific mode of communication”. We are used to analysing, or at least thinking about, violence from a distance: the images taken on demonstrations, the consequences of collective action, in projects, plans and manifestos, in the means and ends of events, but we never stop to reflect and recognise the fact that each body has an intrinsic capacity to “perform” violence, a violence that is expressed in each existential act. In this perspective, this essay opposes the interest to deactivate the intrinsic violence of the bodies that has prevailed in neoliberal and “progressive” agendas, or in redirecting it to “seek to effect social transformation” as Juris text argues. The proposal to observe “performative violence as a mode of communication” reflects an interest in trying to set a constructive/just end that justifies the performance (use) of violence, something that takes us back to analysing violence through means and ends, attaching violence in the discourse that promotes “change”, as well as the pursuit of “peace and tranquillity”, adding up to the current interest on non-violent protests, civility, tolerance and dialogue: the agreement between particulars, the corporate settlement. Currently there is an interest to theorise the possibility of peaceful, non-violent relationships between bodies, nevertheless this comes from the false notion of assuming bodies as equals, assuming communications and relations as neutral linguistic concatenations, neglecting the intrinsic violence and contingency of the body and its becoming.

Thus, after understanding that violence is inherent to the body that exists, I will analyse, on one hand, the modern interest to deactivate said violence and, on the other, the contemporary interest to reactivate the violence of the body with a specific telos through its causes and effects, and the issues that then arise from this two interests; to subsequently open the possibility to conceptualise and theorise violence without falling into the circle of means and ends, linking art, politics and violence through the concepts of destitution, becoming and inhabit.

Deactivation of violence

One of the reasons that motivates to promote a neglection of the violence of the body is the distance that media, let it be “social media”, the newspapers, the radio, tv, etc., has set between bodies; it is a gap that does not allows to understand the relationship between body and violence, thus promoting an ignorance on the body and its “use.” Let it be clear that the term “use” this text refers to comes from the exercise of confrontation and friction: it is not about a specific end, it is about recognising the intrinsic contingency of the existence of the body. Furthermore, the “issue” that arises when trying to “analyse violence without resorting to its ends” is because the participation of the body in a specific time-space where the event occurs is essential; thus, in a contactless society, where “the revolution” might as well be televised, there is an irreconcilable disconnection between the spectator that waits, and the heat of the bodies in motion.

Regarding the image, it demands a degree of representation and legibility, that can be recognised by the spectator –through an accumulation of sensible experiences and intellectual knowledge. Contemporary continental thought has focused on the relation between subject and image to the extent that they propose a change of sensory and aesthetic nature in order to promote a path to radical politics (and democracy) against the current context of “exceptional violence” and generalised precarity. In the case of the image of art / the “art image”, when the aesthetic experience is set to free art from any function and end, to find a link between aesthetics, art and politics, it overlooks “the exhibition” as its end, as the telos of art.

When I mention that “the exhibition” is seen as the ultimate end of art, it is because art, institutionalised or not, has found refuge in the display of bodies (works of art / artworks) which effects are anesthetised since their creation. It is not by chance the term “curator” is used to name those agents in “the world of art” that work as mediators between the artist, the object, the space (most of the time part of, run or funded by an institution) and the spectator.

But this aesthetic distance is something that Rancière wants us to be completely conscious about: the distance between “art” and “the real” through “aesthetics” attests that the “artwork” does not guarantees a specific effect, but nevertheless, the effect that Rancière is looking for is to “open possible paths to new forms of political subjugation,” as for him

“the real does not exists as such […] the real is always the result of a fiction, that is, from a construction of space in which the visible, the sayable and the feasible are tied together.” “The image of art do not supply weapons for battle. They help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and consequently, a new landscape of the possible. But they do so on condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated.”

Thereby, it could be said that for Rancière “images of art” emulate what Walter Benjamin referred to as mythical violence: they are critical images, they reconfigure the distribution of the sensible in its context, and assume that they will produce meaning(s) and have effect(s) without knowing exactly which one(s).

The matter at hand here is that, while Rancière displaces himself from the traditional concept of representation in terms of the image, through his aesthetic and political thought he makes from the first one the basis of the latter, by arguing that new forms of political subjugation can arise through the effects of the aesthetic oeuvre he inadvertently establishes aesthetics as mere identity politics.

In this context, we must remember the exhaustive analysis Giorgio Agamben carries on in the relation between art and poiesis, in opposition to the modern conception of art and praxis (aesthetics), turning around the analysis of “art” from the point of view of the spectator (the aesthetic attitude), to the position of the artist. The issue to be derived from Agamben’s thought is that becoming an artist does not constitutes a difference of identity that must be “reinforced,” it is not a construction of an identity as there is no such thing as an “artist identity”; this being possible only after understanding art as poiesis, in opposition to the modern conception of production which mixes it with praxis and work, where labour power has marked the body and language aiming to (self)assign a specific function (identity) at the means of production. To talk about identity, as well as aesthetics, is to carry out an anaesthetisation and domestication of the body, its intrinsic violence and its singularities: “identity is what causes singularity to pass from different ways of existing to a single identifiable frame of reference.”

The interest to append art into the aesthetic dimension derives from the desire of establishing a distance that defuses the intrinsic violence of art and the body: the inclusion of art within the modern concept of production gives it a “use case” within the production chain, at the cost of domesticating its inherent subversion/destruction possibilities, making it “worthy” of being admired. Here it would be a good exercise to reflect that if when Plato expelled poetry and art from its ideal city he was actually trying to protect the poets and artists rather than his ideal city, trying to avoid domesticating the violence and contingency of art, poiesis and the body.

Reactivating the body and its violence

This “art of becoming all-powerful” through an active use of the organs consists in the appropriation of our body and of its creative organic activity: “The body is the instrument of the formation and modification of the world. Thus we must make of our body an organ capable of everything. Modifying our instrument means modifying the world” […] The principle of Poetry, in which the unity of theory and practice, of spirit and nature, is actualized, is will, and not the will of something but absolute will, the will of will […] At the end of this process, man and the becoming of the world become identical to each other in the circle of absolute and unconditional will, a circle in whose Golden Age it already seems possible to hear Zarathustra’s message, the message of the one who, in the great midday of humanity, teaches the eternal recurrence of the identical: “Everything that happens, I want. Willful phlegm. Active use of the senses”.

In the aesthetic dimension there is no other violence than the one in the cycle of means and ends, mythical violence. Rancière, as well as Boris Groys, realises there is an issue of self-annulment within “critical art”, however, the first one gives aesthetic art the function to “design a new landscape of the visible, the sayable and the feasible. They forge other forms of “common sense” against the general consensus, a new controversial common sense.” Here we can attest the cycle where Rancierè’s thought gets surrounded: like lawmaking and law-preserving violence, the aesthetical-political-art assumes a telos of creating and preserving our contemporary context, while at the same time making it tolerable and reproducing the exact same things it criticises. The “performative violence” Juris invokes and his analysis between the relation of it through manifestations and the images that such events might produce, appeals once again to the naivety of granting “performative violence” a just end that can legitimise its use. Thereby, the interest in the reactivation of violence here is just a mere return to the nonstop conflict of mythical violence, yet necessary for the continuity of said cycle.

The contemporary tendency of resolution of political conflicts through corporative mediation proves the inversion of Benjamin’s analysis in Critique of Violence: the realm of institutional politics, thanks to neoliberalism, has turned out to be the territory of corporate and peaceful resolution of conflicts and, the conflict between private persons, now appeals to a productive and constructive use of violence, critical of its context but never revolutionary. This inversion promotes a “repoliticisation of society” under the frame of liberal democracy and its institutions, something similar to what Chantal Mouffe proposes in her last book For a Left Populism, a trend picked up by diverse “left-wing” political associations and parties around the globe, arguing that it is not only possible to set right the current institutional politics model but that in fact it’s the only one possible, thus the telos of politics. Despite how critical “society, academy, the opposition, aesthetics, art ” can get, we are witnesses on their complicity with the contemporary ruling hegemony, and not only this, also on the need for them to be critical in order to perpetuate and revitalise the decaying status quo, because criticism has always been a fundamental part of modern institutions.

Presupposing a limit of “what can change”, is to assume an universal precondition of the real.

The real has something intrinsically chaotic about it that humans need to stabilize by imposing a legibility, and thereby a foreseeability, on it. And what every institution provides is precisely a stationary legibility of the real, an ultimate stabilization of phenomena. If the institution suits us so well, it’s because the sort of legibility it guarantees saves us above all, each one of us, from affirming anything whatsoever, from risking our singular reading of life and of things, from producing together an intelligibility of the world that is properly ours and shared in common. The problem is that choosing not to do that is the same as choosing not to exist. It’s to resign from life.

A critical repoliticisation of the body can only promote an aesthetic distance that denies the confrontation of bodies other than inside the realm of wait and hope.

In this context, if we are honestly interested in trying to avoid this cycle of constituted-constituent power, we must theorise a different reactivation of the body and its violence. However, before spotting an exit, it is necessary to establish a distinction that helps us clarify the way art is implicated in this theoretical adventure.

In the current neoliberal world, where every single human is reduced to their labour power and its ends (productivity, efficiency, cost effectiveness, viability, etc.) both art and politics have undergone a process of change to the extent of acquiring the current models we bear witness. To clarify, the interest of this analysis is not to conceptualise a pure art nor pure politics, on the contrary, what this current models show is the impossibility of granting them a specific object and/or space: art and politics are attributes, attitudes, not substances.

Likewise, this attributes, this attitudes to confront the singular against the universal has never guaranteed a consensus or agreement. These are attitudes that turn into ashes those substances that were thought immutable, without aiming to build a possible future, as they know themselves angels of destruction. Art does not communicates anything else than the image of destruction. It is the total will-of-violence of the body and its vitality, it is a process of singular becoming that unveils the real as it is, letting itself join the non-teleological “universal material flow that destroys all temporary political and aesthetic orders.”

Because of this, it is impossible to point at examples, models or oeuvres “of art”, art is the potential that never becomes an act, art is art because it cannot be seen, shown or demonstrated. In our epoch of frenetic accumulation art has been assigned the space of “that one cannot do”, a certain “non-productive” completely productive activity, something worth of being admired and left at a place to be cured and taken care of, one more veil that covers the real, an aseptic aesthetic experience. Rancière’s aesthetics is based on the distant confrontation of two spectators awaiting, art is the direct confrontation of two bodies that exist, that violently interact.

As we previously observed, there is a direct relation between the institutionalisation of the real and the separation between bodies and their touches. The legacy of modern institutions, and their (dis)functionality to this day, makes us understand that “quite often, the apparent failure of the institutions is their real function”; what was supposed to be the exception to the rule was actually the rule functioning at its optimum level. As a result, the act of concealment of violence and the real through mediation and corporate resolution is extended to subjects and their bodies; the institution became the existential act per excellence: we stopped existing.

This takes us to the last stop in this text: by understanding art as a gesture that unveils the real as it is, we can now analyse violence without falling into the cycle of means and ends in our current neoliberal context, a violence that is not a “mode of communication,” a proposal, a solution, a path to follow, because only then we will be able to break this frame in which we are trapped.

Breaking the circle that turns our contestation into a fuel for what dominates us, marking a rupture in the fatality that condemns revolutions to reproduce what they have driven out, shattering the iron cage of counter-revolution—this is the purpose of destitution.” “We don’t have any program, any solutions to sell. To destitute, in Latin, also means to disappoint. All expectations will be disappointed.

Destitution is a violence without ends or expectations. “Whereas constituent logic crashes against the power apparatus it means to take control of, a destituent potential is concerned instead with escaping from it, with removing any hold on it which the apparatus might have, as it increases its hold on the world in the separate space that it forms.” For this very reason, Irmgard Emmelhainz mentions that “to destitute is to stop colonialism from making sense”, it is to abandon all frames of existence outside the bodies involved. This is similar to what Felix Guattari refers as “becoming”, processes of singularisation against the models of institutional and political subjectivation, identification and framing. This reactivation of violence occurs at the level of the body, “it consists in apprehending things and beings from the inside, grasping them by the middle” rendering inoperative the current “social bond,” the institutions, identities and frames of identification and recognisability: it is a violence that cannot be grasped in the terms of means and ends, as it renders a form-of-life which its core is the singular becoming. It is in this conflict between bodies where a contingent universal is build, an assemblage of singulars which origins and results cannot be pointed at, and in which the ties that form this community of singulars can be replaced or broken without being able to establish a plan or project beforehand.

The reticence to point at specific models or cases, by me or some of the authors here quoted, can be understood as a desire to break decisively with the normative categories that surround the current neoliberal democracy frames and expectations, to the abandonment of the idea that there is a telos to politics and existence. In this context, the complexity to fully grasp the concepts of destitution, becoming, communism, form-of-life, inoperativity, inhabit, relies on our constant drive on trying to understand violence in either something that must be avoided at all costs, or something that must be used for a greater good, and once again all of this on the plane of means and end that has been previously analysed.

Here the reactivation of violence through destitution (and becoming) is, at the same time, “desertion and attack, creation and wrecking, and all at once, in the same gesture”; this being possible by the process of unveiling the real as it is, which opens the arena for the politics to come. This is what Newman’s analysis on Agamben’s concept of destituent power seems to overlook, even though he manages to imply a possible passivity in it through the notion of inoperativeness, to destitute is at the same time to displace, which is inherently a violent gesture hence, existential and alive. As Consejo Nocturno analyses, the issue of space is fundamental to the destituent potential, as it is not only a matter between bodies, it also comes with a displacement of bodies through space, which generates friction and conflict but at the same time a territory where this bodies can become, where fragments can assemble: a space to inhabit.

To inhabit

is to occupy the territory outside and against the power in order to destitute it, before the imminent collapse of capitalism crushes us with its apocalyptic sensation that surrounds the present […] before it completely destroys our capacity to live and reproduce in community. To destitute is to oppose the “constituted power” that clings to pragmatic reason in order to keep on adjusting the structures and power relations of a country to serve the global market necessities and ideals: “accomplishing governance with the minimum amount of repression and to propitiate economic growth”. [To destitute] implies rejecting “constituent power” as well, that which elaborates ideal images of future societies appealing to an utopic reason to oppose technocracy with the notions of “equality,” “autonomy,” “community,” and “the public” but without being able to untie itself from the modern idea of universal emancipation that underlies this notions. To destitute power in favor of the networks of reproduction means to inhabit in common […] is to take care of our existence.

It must be stressed that this is not a proposal to synthesize the processes of unveiling, becoming and destitution to the notion of inhabit, on the contrary, we must understand the urge to theorise around this processes knowing that their inherent contingency prevents us a pragmatic delimitation but a rhizomatic territory that shows the intrinsic violence that each one of this processes carry on. Only this way we might realise that the issue at hand is not to explore or “imagine” a “new possibility” within the “circle of killers”, it is not to see “violence as a mode of communication” nor as constituted-constituent power as this has always been the case, it is not about looking for half measure solutions or proposals that keep people just on the threshold of survival, it is not to keep relegating our violence and our existence to the State and private corporations. The matter in question is, as it has been in many occasions in the past, to make use of our bodies and our intrinsic violence as singulars, it is to deny the possibility of others to represent us and to speak for us, it is the process of unveiling the universe as it is, it is to build complicities occupying territories that allow us to become in communism the politics to come, now.

Notes

In the case of Rancière’s Le Spectateur Èmancipé both English and Spanish translations were used, as the English one does not matches entirely with the original, while the Spanish one does.

With Groys’ book Going Public both the original English version and the Spanish translation were used, as the Spanish version contains three more chapters than the English one.

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