Violence and the Other in Contemporary Art: A Question of Ethics for Art Education

Abstract

Images of killing and cannibalism occupy a significant site within popular imagination and visual culture, through prohibited, interrelated, and reinforced acts of social violence. While death itself is overdetemined in a broad range of representations, killing the other and eating the other, together or in their respective manifestations, are frequently described as unthinkable transgressions of social codes which help construct us as rational and disciplined human subjects. In psychoanalytic terms, we are subjects of the Law i . Killing, and cannibalism, both affirm and transgress the limits of the social and it's Law.To speak of killing or eating flesh is, in many cases, to speak of monstrous, evil violence. This discourse is imbricated realms of social and cultural deviation, madness, and primitivism, among others. According to Žižek (2008), this discourse is mostly a subjective form of violence that disturbs the "normal" peaceful state of things.... in opposition; Objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to the "normal" state of things.Objective violence is invisible since it maintains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. (p. 2) Subjective violence is considered overt violence, such as images seen in film or television and in news broadcasts, and understood through forms of mass shootings, terrorism, civil unrest, or international conflict. Objective violence, on the other hand, is considered unseen violence-either symbolic in terms of language, for example, or systemic, such as capitalist or communist political economies.Objective violence as systemic is inherent in societies that, despite recent economic downturns, avow that the political economic system is running smoothly.