The Legibility of Violence

The Fall of the Rebel Angels, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

“... a person can speak a language badly or not at all and still be able to read it. In any case, there were a lot of dead women.”

Any discussion of how to depict violence ignores the fundamental question of what violence is. The fourth part of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 proceeds by detailing a great number of crimes, most of them murders. This is a choice that is confrontational and demands interpretation. In the image conjured by the above quotation a man is reading a newspaper in a language he doesn’t understand yet the point is very clear: violence is legible even from a distance.

By contrast we should look at Scorscese’s recent Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorcese is one of the great metaphysicians of violence of our time and Killers… is no exception. By gun, by bomb, and by needle we are witness to the multitude of forms that violence can take, both slow and fast. In some ways it serves Virillio’s notion that “violence can be reduced to nothing, but movement.” By comparison one of Bolano’s favorite writers, Javier Marias presents an image of violence that is more existential, choosing to focus on the vague and internal dimension that drives one towards an act. Yet, by focusing on the forms of violence we are still left without a real understanding of the ontology of violence. 

An analysis of violence that seeks to categorize certain types of actions as violent and others as non-violence can never scratch the surface of the core nature of violence as it exists in the world. Is violence a concept, force, or entity? If we first consider it as a concept that is applied to certain events or actions we raise a productive vector for analysis. Why are certain things labeled as violent and others supposedly not? Structural violence as a concept can unveil otherwise hidden forms of violence: educational gaps, medical violence, and supposedly passive formations that add up to very real violent ontologies. Of course we should add that structures are never passive things, but activated machines.

Structural violence, however, cannot begin to account for the “implied violence” that is entailed by the maintaining of borders and the policing of cities. And even this so-called “implied violence” is very much actual in the case of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the racialized violence by state and non-state actors in the United States. An interrogation of violence as a concept is only productive insofar as it can deconstruct the media apparatus which labels certain actions as violent and which is also complicit in the perpetuation of violence as such. The risk here is that violence can only be confronted in terms of the simulacra that represents it.

An analysis of violence as force has more appeal if we wish to commit to materialist class struggle. Violence as an entity, some “thing” which we interact with either positively (by enacting) or passively (by ignoring or allowing) would seem to go further in an ontological analysis of violence. I think that a look at the implications of the fourth chapter of 2666 will show the productive landscape of both of these notions.

With only a few exceptions crimes themselves do not occur in the chapter. Women go to work, home, a night club, someone finds a dead body. The murders themselves are like a black hole the book cannot directly enter. This is partly a literary strategy to conceal the killer or killers, but it also raises an important theoretical approach to violence that is at the heart of Bolaño’s work. Violence is not a category of action, but the making non-existent of a thing, in this case a life. Bolaño takes pains to make life legible since we cannot look violence directly in the eye. This is the concept of a black hole, which cannot be seen, but only assumed to exist based upon the orbit of celestial bodies which are drawn to it. 

Bolaño himself was no stranger to mass violence. As a Chilean dissident he knew the very real dangers of political oppression. Consider that in Pinochet’s regime that mass killings were referred to as disappearings, an emphasis not on the modality of violence, but its absolute end consequent: a disappearance. This is taken up similarly in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's City of Sadness. Political violence is dealt with in a completely spectral manner. We do not see the “226 incident” or the disappearings that follow. We see a depiction of life as it goes on in these circumstances. Violence is therefore something spectral, which only has a shell of an image and goes by many names and continues under different flags.

Miyazaki references this film extensively in Spirited Away. The most demonic spirit in the movie, named “no face,” exists as an enigmatic and violent creature that can only enter if invited in. Once he leaves the bath house he returns to a calm and almost mutable state. It is as if violence in this case is treated as a sort of body without organs that once it grabs onto something can produce all sorts of chaos. He becomes larger, grows arms and develops a voice as he feeds on the desiring-machine-spirits that are the working people of the bathhouse.

“We should not be surprised that difference should appear accursed” writes Deleuze “that it should be in error, sin or the figure of evil for which there must be expiation.” Violence is political and in the above examples predicated on difference. In 2666 the crimes were mostly committed against women. In City of Sadness the violence is nationalistic leveraged against the Taiwanese people from mainland china. 

“There is no sin other than raising the ground and dissolving the form. Recall Artaud’s idea: cruelty is nothing determination as such, that precise point at which the determined maintain its essential relation with the undetermined.”

So in a Deleuzian formation, violence is the relation that is set forth through the determinism of a desire to eliminate forms. The violence of capital is simply its determination to continue the relations that define ruling and working class. The gendered violence in 2666 is the determination of patriarchy mainly through an economic form. The fact that many of the victims in the book are factory workers is especially relevant. That women are defined through their relation to the production of goods ties gender and class relation to an ontology of violence. 

“Deleuze relates artistic experimentation to esoteric knowledge and experience. Both in his own work and in collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze is explicit about the fact that immanent thought is involved with an exploration of extremes, and with abyssal adventures of great risk and tremendous ordeal.”

The notion of extremity and ordeal in Bolaño. Not just a large book, but a painfully long and hard chapter. Direct relation to the unfinished narrative: at the end a possible conclusion is reached, but it is unclear if it is even true and even then can in no way account for all the crimes in the book. Even if you find the killer you don’t really solve anything. The work raises a question as to what it is exactly that violence is enacted upon.

“Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it may fall into bottomlessness.”

Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” inverts the relationship of media to open up life itself to a mode of media analysis.  Violence is external, operating upon a surface that is divided or destroyed, but it also impacts itself on an internal surface in the form of trauma or experience. 

“Forces” writes D.N. Rodowick “operate at a site and in a dimension other than those of forms - not the space of extensiveness, the actual, and perception but the dimension of the Outside, the virtual, which is not so much “space” as “becoming” or emergence.” So if we are to assume that violence exists it is not so much as form, but as force. Violence is the place we cannot go, the black hole we cannot see, the absolute sub zero.