What violence encompasses
Dwelling.
How can we begin to understand the way of dwelling within our current social, economic, and cultural systems? While we might consider dwelling as a synonym for residing, in this case we should make a clarification: dwelling is not an individual verb. Dwelling cannot (or should not) be understood as a mere way of inhabiting a space, commonly understood as housing. Dwelling is also about constructing, about generating life in one or several specific places. Just as we dwell in our homes, we dwell in the spaces we frequent insofar as we generate life around them. We dwell in our homes as well as in our streets, our bars, our workplaces, among many other things.
“This [dwelling] goes beyond those constructions; on the other hand, however, it is not limited to housing. For the truck driver, the highway is his home, but he does not have his lodging there; for a worker in a spinning factory, the factory is her home, but she does not have her dwelling there; the engineer who runs a power plant is at home there, yet he does not inhabit it. These constructions shelter human beings. They reside in them, and yet they do not dwell in them, if dwelling means only having lodging” (Heidegger 2014).
Where then does the violence lie in this act of dwelling? As Arturo Romero Contretas (2020) explains, a space is not possessed in a literal sense; rather, it is made one’s own by frequenting it, and it cannot be known before being traversed. Furthermore, spaces do not belong to a single element; instead, they “relate, expose” (Romero 2020). Spaces are inhabited by those who are in them, even if we do not understand them as our residential area.
“Those who inhabit a space are those who traverse it, and this traversing together, whether through convergences or divergences, distances or approaches, constitutes a kind of common habitat. Space, and this is very important, can be a geographical territory, language, or thought. In fact, we must say that one never inhabits a single space, nor does a final instance exist. We move from physical space to mental space to linguistic space (or sometimes, some function as signs of others)” (Romero 2020).
Violence in dwelling manifests itself in forms that embrace both the despicable and the explicit, ranging from domestic violence within homes to the most subtle and implicit forms, such as the elimination of public spaces. However, it is difficult to draw a clear line of specific violences or to make a single distinction between violences and non-violences within the concept of dwelling. What we can do, instead, is begin to draw imaginary lines to know where to position ourselves. This is why we should first start by understanding that current spaces are marked by the way in which capitalism (or rather, the agents of capitalism) has implanted a space of infinite expansion. While we may also know that spaces hold infinite possibility, we must understand that their infinite expansion is not possible, for it is merely a utopia marked by greed. Even so, current space begins, as Romero (2020) explains, with the contradiction between lived experiences and structure, where appearance and essence lose their connection. That is to say, it is now necessary to carry out a structural analysis because an absolute connection no longer exists (nor necessarily should exist) between our immediate experiences and our concept of specific spaces. To understand, then, the violence of dwelling in a space, we need to understand the structure or structures that constitute that space. Romero (2020) discusses four ideas for understanding contemporary violence that configures common space. First, he presents a “radical fragmentation of the world” (Romero 2020), within which an enormous number of systematic violences are produced and reproduced. Second, he points out how technology has made it possible to introduce a “radical disproportion between an individual life and the general or global harm it can cause” (Romero 2020), giving as an example the capacity that a single individual or a small group of people has to make the decision to use an atomic bomb, potentially ending entire civilisations. Third, he urges that “we can speak of a violence that has installed itself [...] in normality itself” (Romero 2020), which we have naturalised and stopped observing as violence, turning it into a common, everyday element that generates an overwhelming disproportion between those who have access to these means and those who merely suffer the consequences. Finally, he emphasises that one cannot speak of violence as a generic concept without first placing it in a context; rather, we must refer to it in the plural, attending to its frameworks of representation, its scales, and the implications it possesses. Regarding this last point, he states:
“[But] if we renounce an essential concept of violence, we do not, in turn, yield to the multiplication of its appearances. This is why, faced with the unity of the concept and its interpretative multiplicity, we are faced with the need to think about the correlativity, the complicities and differences, that is, the borders that exist between some forms of violence and others, as well as the peculiar logics that each one entails” (Romero 2020).
It is also essential to understand that, although for some of us it may seem obvious, a queer perspective on the violence of spaces must not only encompass the violence applied to queer people but must thoroughly investigate the foundations that build the basis of the systemic violence(s) that overwhelm us, beginning with the entire prevailing cultural framework. Violence in dwelling, applied not only to queer people but also to each and every one of the social groups that make up the periphery of the normative, stems from the same roots, and it is the responsibility of queer critique to understand the intersectionality of these violences. Thus, a kind of surrounding space is generated, one that is connected to the central space yet distanced from it, where everything that escapes the norm forms a common, though differentiated, housing network. Violence in dwelling, from the centre to the outside, is the relegation to the margins, the confinement to the periphery. The most vulnerable groups, especially within the working class, are continuously pushed outward, towards the limits of space, because it is easier to generate the image of the Other when this Other is not also in the centre. Violence in dwelling is expressed primarily by turning us into an Other, rejecting us from the We. Identity dissidence, whether conscious or unconscious, entails a systemic violence upon our spaces and our bodies, and it is necessary to understand that the spaces we inhabit are violent, not in order to create new spaces, but to know how to rebel against them.
Moving through spaces
Transit, insofar as it is the common element that necessarily unites each and every person who inhabits a place, becomes an exceptionally useful tool for measuring the violence we suffer, not only as citizens but also as social groups. To transit, however, is a word that many people express with longing, with desire. The desire to transit, to go out, to change, to evolve, to become. For other people, to transit is routine and monotony. At times, it is even the wear and tear of their daily lives. The perspective of transit is important for understanding the level of violence it applies, and it is also important to understand it as a transition between states, between places, between spaces, between encounters.
Everyday transit, for its part, is a quasi-natural obligation in our generic cities. As Koolhaas (1995, p. 2) rightly said, “being ‘in transit’ is becoming a universal condition,” so the continuous movement between different points on a map surprises absolutely no one. However, the lines we draw between points are indeed subject to judgement by the system and, often, by those who comprise it. The stroll, the getaway, or getting lost and finding oneself again are actions that fall outside the framework of transit. Transit must be productive. It must be. A transit between two points that involves, in the meantime, the enjoyment of the path itself without resorting to buying and selling in commercial areas ceases to be transit. Time, as Benjamin Franklin expressed, is money, so wasting it on strolls, getaways, and getting lost and found again is to break the cycle of exponential productivity of the capitalist system. But as we also know from the myth of Midas, when everything turns to gold, enjoyment, health, and life itself are lost. Therefore, the result we end up with is a continuous battle between a citizenry that, in the eyes of the system, is cheap labour, and that possesses desires, expectations, and longings regarding its bodily experience; and a heartless system that, with the help of urban planning, designs all the spaces where the citizenry will live in order to obtain the greatest possible productivity through it and, therefore, the greatest possible profit. This battle, fought primarily through transit, is that violence we mentioned.
The violence of transit is a violence that can also be extrapolated. Transits, paths, processes, transitions. The most efficient, most profitable, most productive, and (the cruelest adjective) most correct route is always expected of us. Straying from that route, as we have already expressed, ceases to be transit and thus falls into the category of waste, of squandering, of dissipation. What is wasteful, in a system that prioritises profits, efficacy, and efficiency, is synonymous with disposable. Anything that strays from the route, from the path, from transit, from the correct transition, must be discarded in order to recover the system’s proper rhythm. The tool used to prevent citizens from straying from the pre-established route is primarily fear, always accompanied by propaganda. The tool used once they have strayed from the route is much crueller: dehumanisation. But let us return to fear and propaganda. As Jordi B. Sebastià (2007) rightly stated:
“The growing importance acquired by cultural factors in guiding current urban processes is significant. On the one hand, awareness of social inequalities, the desire for distinction, fear of others, and the refuge in private life are very functional to the model of globalised urbanism” (p. 44).
Fear of the other, of the one who takes a different route, starts from a different point, or pursues a point that differs from that of the rest, is one of the fears that the system uses to its advantage. Fear of the other, largely excused by ghostly cultural factors, is the main driver of automatic behaviour in citizens. And the steps the system follows are especially easy: first, we push others into precariousness and social exclusion, and then we convince the citizenry through propaganda that this situation is the route the others chose to take, subtly expressing that this is the situation awaiting all those who decide to follow the others on their path. Fear of the other is the maintenance mechanism of capitalist urbanism, and it is also one of the main mechanisms of social individualisation. The urban revolution that resulted in the generic cities we live in now has ended up becoming a showcase of empty slogans that resonate deeply, such as freedom of choice and meritocracy, and “yet, never had social segregation in space been so great” (Sebastià 2007, p. 41). The promises of transformation and revolution in the ways we communicate and relate to each other in society have ended up becoming threats, cease-and-desist notices for our longings, and have finally forced us to become pawns moving back and forth across a chessboard, without ever becoming queens.
This violent drift (or rather, increasingly violent drift) of cities is reflected in everything we find around us. One of the greatest analogies to transit and its authoritarianism that we can bring to the fore is the vision of trans people. The transition (or the transit from one circumstance to another) that many trans people undertake is seen as the only correct way to be a trans person, regardless of the acceptance this may entail. Transition becomes an obligation for trans people when they want to be recognised, perceived, or treated as who they are. This transition, this transit, moreover, must be carried out in the most efficient, productive, and effective way possible. The slightest hint of failure along the way would be subject to violence in our public perception. The sexologist Carmen Jurado (in: Martín 2022) stated that “transition is what we call those behaviours, expressions, changes, often external, that are carried out to appear more in line with what they feel.” However, is this not forcing oneself onto the pre-established route? Does it not result in a violent act to place oneself within hyper-planned urbanism, in which we are already forced to be? Even so, we would not be in a position to judge these actions, because pretending to be, for example, a trans woman who does not undergo social transition and medical transition is buying a direct train ticket to the saddest and most miserable space of social exclusion we can imagine.
Forced transition, the transit from one circumstance to another when it is not our desire, is an extremely hurtful violence and, for some reason, it is a violence that is overlooked because in the general eye it is perceived as a desire. It is a mistake to categorise those violences we inflict upon ourselves as our own decision.
Returning to cities, violence is the daily life of the inhabitants of our metropolises (and also of what are not metropolises). The widespread expulsion of citizens from common spaces, which have become mere recreational-commercial spaces where leisure and culture become a mere spectacle of buying and selling products and services; the enclosure of streets, which become corridors with automatic belts that force citizens to circulate through the only spaces available to them; the mutilation of originality, which generates images that are copies of copies and ends up creating identical cities because, as Martí Perán (2015) rightly said:
“An enclave between highways does not have the same significance as a shopping centre or an airport, but it denotes the same ambiguity that characterises the spaces that are reproduced within the fabric of the generic city: they are so identical to each other that they could appear anywhere else.”
All this way of constructing cities, never taking into account the desires and longings of the citizenry, adds to the cruel and ruthless fabric that the capitalist system continuously generates: precarious jobs, hyper-exploitation, private property, degradation of fundamental rights, and a long etcetera. The way of living in cities is, rather, one of survival.
However, survival cannot be based on living in the background. If the city is violence and, therefore, we live in violence, we will inhabit it. If the city copies itself continuously, we will mould it to make it our own. If the city mechanises its routes, we will always take a detour. If the city expels us from common spaces, we will create new ones. If the city acts independently of us, without taking us into account, our motility will be resilience. Perán (2015, p. 2) defined the right to the city as “the active right to make a different city, to adapt it a little more to one’s longings and to remake ourselves according to a different image,” but perhaps we should be more ambitious. The right to the city should not only be the right to transform our cities, but also the right to truly inhabit it. And to inhabit a city means to be able to get lost in it, to be able to get lost among others and see that the only thing left is an us. The right to the city must be, fundamentally, the right to find ourselves among others. As Marina Garcés (2022) said it, in a way much better than we could ever express:
“The human being is something more than a social being; their condition is relational in a sense that goes far beyond the circumstantial: the human being cannot say ‘I’ without a ‘we’ resonating at the same time” (p. 29).
This is why stating that the right to the city is the right to actively transform it falls short and can lead to falling into hyper-individualistic traps of transformation from a supposed individual “I”. The right to the city is, fundamentally, the right to “us”, the right to find ourselves among others, and the right to suppress otherness. The right to the city is to understand that “we are not us and them, placed face to face, but rather the dimension of the world itself that we share” (Garcés 2022, p. 30).
The right to the city is the right to us, the right to free transit in every possible direction, the right to get lost, the right to make mistakes, the right to transformation, the right to originality, the right to cease being one and to become all. The right to the city is the right to stop being continuously violated by the space we inhabit.
Living, surviving, dying.
The current state of our economic, political, social, cultural, and even psychological systems is one of survival. And our systems keep filling up with empty messages of self-improvement and the transcendence of negative thoughts, messages that are based on individualisation, almost as if we did not live in community. It is necessary to stop thinking of self-improvement as an individualistic act, as an act that is one’s own and unique and enclosed within our body, because our bodies are also the bodies of others. The individualism of self-improvement (understanding this improvement as the messages about leaving behind what is bad) translates into creating a bubble around oneself.
Our situation is not only ours. Let me not be misunderstood: we can have, and we do have, personal problems that have and deserve great personal importance and equally personal treatment. However, many of our problems, which we consider personal, are the result of the current state of survival of our systems. We cannot self-improve our way out of precariousness. We cannot self-improve our way out of oppression. We cannot self-improve our way out of poverty, nor racism, nor ableism, nor misogyny, nor LGBTIfobia, nor any mechanism of social control. Surviving can be an individualistic act, but living must be a communal act.
Let us make the distinction by drawing, again, imaginary lines. Surviving tends to be used when one wants to express that we carry on (understanding carrying on as having the capacity to meet certain basic needs) despite the adversities or conditions we possess. In simple terms, surviving implies ceasing to live without having died, or even never having lived despite having been born. We can make it clear, then, that the system dictates that the working class must live in a constant state of survival, and we will develop this a little further, because this does not necessarily mean that we live in continuous adversity, but rather that adversities must be properly interpreted. Taking a relatively Marxist reading of survival, it is relevant to understand that the working class does not own the means of production, but rather sells its labour power in order to survive, creating a loop in which the waged working class sells its labour power to be remunerated with a wage that it will use to pay for the goods and services it will use to continue selling that labour power. However, I consider it relevant that we adhere to the words of Braidotti (2022): “contemporary capitalism is not Marx’s capitalism, but a different capitalism” [trans.]. The author herself also insists that we should have already learned that, since the 1960s, capitalism does not break, but rather bends; that is, it adapts and adopts any possible modality because it is simply a short-term profit code. A code that, moreover, works, according to Braidotti, because all of us are trapped in it.
Capitalism works by adapting and mutating, patching itself up and reconverting itself. But when capitalism or capitalist agents see their status quo endangered, they turn to a great ally: fascism. As Horkheimer (1988) rightly said, “whoever does not wish to speak of capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.” Referring now to Wallat (2021), fascism is understood as “an imperialist-terrorist attempt to resolve a fundamental capitalist crisis” (p. 189), which, instead of solving social and economic contradictions, as well as underlying political conflicts, “represses them with internal and external violence” (Wallat 2021, p. 189).
“Those who practice violence become more and more like entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs become practitioners of violence. [...] But terrorists do not want to base their power solely on violence; they want to anchor it in industrial production” (Neumann, in Wallat 2021, p. 191).
We live in a continuous state of survival because we live in a constant permacrisis, a continuous cyclical crisis of capitalism, and the system resorts to fascism and its own repressive tools to protect its status quo. For this very reason, we are unable to live, nor are we able to die. We survive, we push, we carry. And this is a great apparatus of violence upon the shoulders of the working class.
Regulations.
It is common within queer critique to speak about the cisheteropatriarchal norm, but let us speak about the norm that applies to the entire working class. The queer movement cannot focus uniquely and exclusively on identity and orientation, as this would lead to a dead end. An intersectionality within the queer is relevant, a direct critique of the very foundations of bourgeois capitalist social and cultural norms. And this is no small matter, because it is necessary to impact the foundations of racism, colonialism, imperialism, and all the mechanisms of control over oppressed peoples. The liberation that queer pursues cannot only speak about identities, for that would be a way of simplifying the struggle that is not deserved.
Throughout the pieces that will be shown and explained later, we will focus on the image, because what has been proposed for the queer struggle in this project would be incommensurable within a series of artistic pieces, destroying the image and making a nod to the deconstruction of what we commonly understand as our own representation.
From here on, the normative will focus on transit, on the habitable, on rebellion, and, finally, on the violence that we can begin to apply through the arts and upon our own bodies.
“In those who belong to the mass, therefore, all the stings that were previously isolated appear together, the product of very diverse circumstances and origins. The others are there, facing them, alone or in huddled groups, and they seem to know very well why they feel so afraid.” (Canetti 1981, p. 261)
