Naming and Violence
Violence, whether physical or psychological, is sustained by the act of ‘naming’—placing people into categories of ‘the other’ based on a singular difference in socio-economic, ethnic, cultural, or religious identity. Art by its very nature works best when it succeeds in breaking the categories of certainty inherent in naming, disabling the mastery of language and optical assumptions the viewer brings with them to the work.
In his book Identity and Violence the Nobel-prize winning Indian economist Amartya Sen argues that conflict and violence are sustained by the “illusion of a unique identity.”(1) The act of ‘naming,’ placing people into categories of ‘the other’ based on difference creates a distance that predilects violence, whether physical, psychological, or systemic in nature. Yet in reality human beings exist within a plurality of identity and with the common denominator of human dignity.
Despite the links between ‘naming’ and violence, the act of ‘naming’ is an extension of the human drive for meaning, making sense of the universe among other things through language, culture, and art. Yet art, when it ‘works,’ works best because of its very ability to break ‘naming,’ disabling the mastery of language and the certainty of optical assumptions brought to a work by the viewer. Art creates the opportunity for the generation of new meaning, to both see the world differently and envision a different world.
The Multi-Valency of Being Human
I have often struggled with a certain ‘violence of naming,’ being placed too quickly into singular and simplistic categories. Growing up in India with European heritage I look like a ‘foreigner,’ and am treated as such, yet identify as a ‘local’ and because of Indian birth and citizenship expect the right to belong. Based on my ethnicity I am viewed as the ‘other’ when I don’t necessarily fit that category, inhabiting an identity that is neither this nor that but both.
Naming and categorization are enlisted to exclude and exert control across gender, racial, ethnic, religious, and political lines. Conflicts across the globe, whether fueled by tribal differences in Africa, ethnic histories in the Balkans, religious identities in South Asia, or imperialism past and present, are fanned into flame by reducing human beings and complex socio-cultural realities into caricatures of the ‘other.’ Amartya Sen calls this the “miniaturization” of human beings: “Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of uniquely powerful categorization.”(2) Attempts at either celebrating or down-playing differences, whether multiculturalism or sincere attempts at interfaith ecumenicalism, make a similar mistake of reducing identities to singular categories.
The truth is that human beings exist in a plurality of identity. The Taliban soldier in Afghanistan is more than an ‘enemy’ or a ‘radical Muslim.’ Among many things he is also a farmer, poet, father, orphan, student, friend, citizen, speaker of Pashto, and a man struggling to make ends meet. For me, the juxtaposition of being both ‘local’ and ‘foreign’ has created new meaning, a multi-valent identity that synthesizes both categories and points me to the common denominator of shared human dignity.
Naming and the Breaking of Naming
Naming runs deep in our bones. It springs from the instinct and capacity to make sense of reality and produce meaning, the process of understanding a thing by placing it within a category. It is a profoundly human act. Naming generates language, the building blocks of culture, and lies at the cornerstone of science, producing knowledge and bestowing mastery. Yet mastery is a two-edged sword, both empowering and destroying. Given our finite place within the cosmos, naming holds out the promise of control, autonomy, divinity, and yet pivots as a tool of oppression, and ultimately of our own undoing. French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault warned of knowledge as power, both that it generates power, but also the inverse—that knowledge is created by power—mastery at its hubric worst.(3) There is great irony in the dual nature of knowledge, in that it both illuminates and blinds. Names become our markers of certainty, and given the limitations of human knowledge and experience, certainty is a dangerous thing.
The act of art-making, as wide as that category is, could in some ways be understand as a type of naming, e.g. a manipulation of form that produces meaning. What gives a painting of a sunset its significance is the fact that it is not the sunset itself, but a human being’s interpretation, in a sense their ‘naming’ of the real thing. Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images features a painting of a pipe with an inscription that translates: “This is not a pipe.” In one simple statement Magritte can be understood to sum up both the limits and the possibilities of art. While a comment on the limits of representation, the gap between ‘language’ and ‘thing’ implies that art matters precisely because it is not the thing itself. This gap, despite its consequent ‘treachery’ and contestation of meaning, points to the unique ability of language and art to create things that exist purely in the realm of the symbolic, generating the ‘symbolic culture’ unique in the natural world to human beings.(4)
And yet art is also about breaking naming. Art that “works,” works because it succeeds in breaking the categories of certainty inherent in naming, disabling the masteries of knowledge, language, cerebration and the optical assumptions the viewer brings with them to a work. It is in the realm of experience that art is able to by-pass and subvert the realm of knowledge. Phenomenology, a philosophical method of inquiry sometimes referred to as the ‘science of experience,’ points to the extent to which our perception of reality is shaped by our lived experiences in an interconnected world—rather than merely on pre-conceived didactic Cartesian ‘facts.’(5) The more those pre-conceived ‘facts’ can be suspended, the more our understanding of reality can acquire newer and deeper meaning through an experience that involves not just sensory perception but emotion, volition, and action.(6) The phenomenological epistemology of art creates just such a possibility. Art is effective when it becomes affective. Good art, art that has the ability to affect another human being, breaks the markers of certainty and opens us up to a larger, deeper experience of truth.
1 Sen, Amartya, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 16.
2 ibid., 15
3 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and other writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 93.
4 “Symbolic Culture,” Wikipedia, accessed March 24, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_culture
5 “Phenomenology,” Wikipedia, accessed April 7, 2017.
6 “Phenomenology,” The Basics of Philosophy, accessed April 7, 2017, http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_phenomenology.html