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Author’s Note

Brad Evans

Monday, 23 July 2018

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN struck by the political importance of the literary imagination. Not only does literature allow for a more intimate and compelling insight into the wonder and fragility of the human condition, it also provides critical commentary about those elements of human existence the so-called “social sciences” fail to capture. What is more, it is in the literary field that the spatial and temporal markers of human existence collide in full appreciation of their complex and often blurred lines of articulation. Just as we cannot understand the problem of violence without discussing life’s poetic elements — creativity, passion, and love — so it is impossible to think about the political without journeying back, like some privileged witness already armed with the plot to the final scene, into the dramas of the past, or willfully projecting ourselves into the future anterior in all its hopeful and catastrophic permutations. The person, the political subject that comes to believe in this world, has never been simply determined by reasoning and rationality. Each subject both literally and figuratively navigates the world, endlessly reconceptualizing its modes of being while thinking and feeling its way through the bittersweet vortexes of cohabitation.

This book borrows its title from J. G. Ballard’s classic The Atrocity Exhibition, which offers such an apt description of contemporary life saturated by the onslaught of various media spectacles. Ballard understood better than many “political scientists” the importance of embodied critical thought, and his commentaries on the interplay between the social, the technological, and the all-too-human desire to break open what is inside the body provide us with some of the most sophisticated critiques of violence to date. But what might the title mean today, nearly 50 years after it appeared on the cover of this most wounding and unsettling of texts? Well, simply switch on your “smart” phone (which actively inserts what it means to be “intelligent” into the design of the user’s grasp and simultaneously evacuates the need away for the user’s won intelligence) and open any major news application. As you scroll through the constantly changing and replenishing news updates on the digital feed — a fragmentary world that has seemingly lost any sense of plot — from the comfort of wherever you are, so the contingent and indiscriminate “atrocities” appear, one by one, disaster upon disaster, vertically hierarchized on your screen by selected news-worthiness, yet horizontally flattened in respect to any meaningful contextualization. What is actually the exhibit on such an app? Events of human suffering are being broadcast, exhibited for our full viewing (dis)pleasure. But the gallery has also been logically inverted. We have become the exhibits, walking around in a motionless and seemingly impotent gaze, while the image has become the visitor, journeying to us with various degrees of interest and already preloaded with subjective prejudices about our worthiness.

This series of writings and discussions was written across what seems to be the longest “short decade” (2011–2019) with all its disorientating speeds and intensities. Beginning with the ongoing and calamitous wars that were predictably declared following the collapse of the Twin Towers up to the political catastrophe that is Trump (with his own presidentially gilded towers, brutally marking with their unapologetic modernist presence the same scarred New York skyline), it represents an exercise in writing from the reality of our dystopian shadows, covering a period in which terror has become normalized and war such a part of the everyday fabric of a global existence it no longer even needs to be declared. I owe it to the brilliant series editor for this Los Angeles Review of Books “Provocations” imprint, Tom Lutz, for capturing this moment and the various forms of violence this anthology has responded to when proposing the subtitle “Life in the Age of Total Violence.” The word total invariably has a fraught and impassioned political history that arouses sensitivities, from the brutally oppressive ideas of totalitarianism’s Total State to the devastating reality of Total War, whose physical and philosophical cuts deep into the body of earth are still all too apparent. Let’s not forget here what Hannah Arendt discovered in her still-important The Origins of Totalitarianism: “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” The “everything” Arendt wrote against was the total liberation of every prejudice and the total denial of every right to be classed merely human.

Our age and its violence are undoubtedly different than the violence of the 20th century and its willful slaughter of millions in the name of some European ideological supremacy. We can only try to imagine what World War II might have looked like, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, if our immediate social media platforms had been available. It would certainly have tested Judith Butler’s theorizing on the powers of mourning and the aesthetics of its performance. And yet if we understand the totalizing condition to be one that suggests no alternative, then we can purposefully deploy the term “total violence” as a conceptual provocation to describe the contemporary moment — despite the sleepwalking delusions of the “enlightened” Steven Pinker. Because violence continues to shape all social relations in the world today, its ubiquitousness — as possibility and as fact — defines the age.

Violence comes in many different forms, every form of violence should be taken and critiqued on its own terms, and indeed, given its unique victims, every instance of violence demands ethical rigor and contextualization. But we also need to consider violence and its history as a whole, and it is here that representing violence as “inescapable” is unacceptable; it would mean we have already surrendered to the most totalizing of human claims: that we have accepted our species’ annihilation.

The brilliance of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition lies in its fragmentary and non-teleological narrative. The very idea of sequential time now belongs to an outdated past, and chronology no longer appears to be sufficient for explaining the unfolding of the historical present, where space and time have been undone by the powers of the digital and information communications revolutions. Ours is the time of the event — the fleeting exhibition — which we can barely grasp due it to recombinant forms and unlocatable centers. And yet the fragmentary still presents to us the promise of a certain critical entry. Life in an age of total violence is life in fragments. How we pick up the pieces remains part of the task — or, as Anton Chekov once wrote, “don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

Nobody understood or developed the fragmentary method more completely than Walter Benjamin. He understood that through the cracks of history, what remains are fragments of truth. This requires the assembling, juxtaposition, and conversation among things that on the surface may not appear connected. This anthology follows in a similar vein, providing commentaries and analysis on fragments of violence, not to bring out something of the universal or to naturalize a position, but to insist upon the need to critique violence in all its forms — all while looking at the ways common logics appear — whether we are talking about victims of state-sanctioned violence or the murder of a young female Mexican student who died alone.

To that end — or perhaps (as explained in the piece that appears towards the end of the essay section titled “Violence, Conflict at the Art of the Political”) in a search for an alternative beginning — the hope for this set of writings is to foreground the problem of violence through a fragmentary series of responses such that the need for us to rethink the political itself in more poetic and conversational ways can become the mobilizing force against the new tide of fascism in the 21st century.