an essay i would love to get comments on, a work in progress THE EROTICS OF NONVIOLENCEBeyond the Myth of Ritual Sacrifice In the spring of 2000, a Dutch subsidiary of the Bechtel corporation re-routed a stream that flowed through a village near Cochabamba, Bolivia. The people had enough wells to keep their homes and farms supplied with water, but when the stream was diverted the trees which once grew along its banks began to wither and die. When the trees died, the birds stopped coming, and the people lost the beautiful music that once brightened their mornings. And so these campesinos and factory workers took to the streets, confronting soldiers armed with rifles and teargas grenades, putting their bodies on the line to fight for the right to hear birds sing at dawn. (See “Oscar Olivera: Spokesman for the People” by AmyCasada-Alaniz, Narco News, August 23, 2004.) There is something ecstatic and alive in this struggle of the poorest of the poor for the right to beauty and dignity. There is nothing symbolic or contrived here -- the people of the village weren’t playing out roles scripted for them by history or culture or ideology, their resistance was a spontaneous and organic reaction to seeing the land that they loved threatened by people who had no understanding of or connection to their lives. It was an act of love, an act of passion, something visceral that required no translation or explanation. All of this points to what is lacking in many of the resistance movements in the U.S. today. We have become too enamored of the abstract and the symbolic. We know what we are resisting, but we have lost any real connection to that which we want to liberate, preserve, or bring into being. Perhaps most disturbingly, we have become caught up in a morality play, in which our victories are defined by how much suffering we can endure, where the intensity and integrity of an action are defined by whether or not the police are provoked into firing teargas and rubber bullets, or by how much jail time the judge hands down, or how quickly the court shuts down our attempts to talk about nuclear weapons and international law. Consciously or unconsciously too many of us have bought into the idea of a mystical economy of suffering, in which our own physical sacrifice willsomehow reduce someone else’s pain, somehow transmute a violent system. But this very economy of suffering requires and embraces violence – even romanticizes it. One of the central tenets of Western nonviolence is that “unmerited suffering is redemptive.” But is there anything fundamentally redemptive in the rape ofa child or the poisoning of a river? Suffering is suffering, and by proclaiming that it is redemptive, we deny its reality. We can embrace suffering as a teacher, and recognize it as an essential characteristic of our constant process of birthing and rebirthing – but neither is possible without facing head on the real and essential nature of that suffering. Somewhere along the line the willingness to endure suffering in order to defend life, which is inherently connected to a deep and vibrant love, became distorted into a belief that the amount of suffering we were willing to endure was a measure of our love. This is inextricably linked with a puritanical denial ofpleasure, sexuality, and the self that marks both the Christian and the Gandhian traditions that have shaped most contemporary Western thinking about nonviolence. I once heard a Plowshares activist speak about how we must “crucify our desires.” The crucifixion of desire is not a renunciation of violence, but a choice to turn that violence inward. Empathy and compassion are rooted in understanding the shared desire of other beings for liberation and for life. When we deny our own desires, our own passions, our own flesh, we lose that empathy and compassion and replace them with moralistic abstractions. The feminist psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, writes about the chora, the pulsing core of pure desire that drives all our actions from the moment we emerge from the womb. Early in childhood, the chora is subjected to a “symbolic order” which restricts and limits its expression. But sometimes there is a rupture in that order, something emerges that is so sublimely beautiful that the symbolic order has to be reshaped in order to accommodate its reality, and if the order fails to bend and change it will be shattered. This is the site of poetry, of art, of orgasm, of magick. Truly nonviolent resistance comes not from suppressing these moments, not from attempting to sublimate what is already sublime, but from riding their wild and undeniably erotic energy. The only love that has the power to transform is the visceral, primal love at the core of our being, that recognizes the pulsing chora at the center of all life, and wants to shatter the symbolic order and set that chaotic force free into the universe. This kind of nonviolence also demands that we do away with abstractions and connect with the direct experience of other people’s lives. When we do this we begin to recognize the pervasiveness of violence in every day life. In her profile of Oscar Olivera, one of the leaders in the struggle against the privatization of water and natural gas in Bolivia, Amy Casada-Alaniz wrote that: “The ‘Wars’ for water and gas, Oscar says, are sotermed by the people in general who in reality live instruggle and ‘war’ daily. He asks: is it not violenceto wake up every morning in a state of anxiety, unsureof how the day will play out… vulnerable to employerswhom he testifies force birth control on femaleworkers, threatening them with the loss of their jobsin no uncertain terms if they should ever becomepregnant? He says that some factory working women hereare told that they must accept a copper apparatus thatwill prevent pregnancy, an IUD, if they wish to keeptheir jobs, and that they must keep this secret fromtheir husbands. ‘Is this not violence?’ asks Oscar. [. . . ] This is war every day; it is essentiallyviolent. It is in this context that the resistance ofthe people empowered with a voice and given an ear,name their collective struggle: WAR.” It was in this same spirit that Diane DiPrima wrote that “The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.” The daily repression that denies people the ability to be fully alive is as real and as violent as the war in Iraq. If our resistance ignores, or worse yet replicates, this repression, we are complicit. Conversely, resistance that is rooted in real compassion, real empathy, born of living passion, is liberating in and of itself – a revolution both in its end and in its means. In Linda Hogan’s beautiful novel, Solar Storms, the narrator, an Indigenous woman resisting the construction of hydro-electric dams that would destroy her ancestral homeland, says that: “For my people, the problem has always been this: thatthe only possibility of our survival has beenresistance [ . . . ] To fight has meant that we canrespect ourselves, the Beautiful People. Now webelieved in ourselves once again. The old songs werethere, came back to us. Sometimes I think the ghostdancers were right, that we would return, that we werealways returning.” Its time for us to return to the erotic passion for life that inspires our resistance, to claim our own power fully and use it to awaken other people to the knowledge of their own power to be free.
Nonviolence can be more, for example when workers in Buenos Aires (Argentina) barricaded them selves in the factories. They were not pissing around they were tring to hold the means of production. This is a example where nonviolence is more for tactical reasons, riots are not as effiective as holding the means of production hostage. Burn a city to the ground and you get the attention of the media, stop production over a large scale and you get the undivided attention of the ruling class.
hey, great article. I read as much as I could before my eyes started to hurt. can you space out the sentences and make a few paragraphs? thanks. -revo
hey, I agree, great article. You did a good job connecting violence with non violence with compassion and the inner workings of the mind and soul; I liked it. You need to do some editing, and work on the organization a bit, like more clear divisions in ideas and topics. You touch upon many fundamental differences between us and the corporate owners/oppressors. Most people around the world do not view the rape of a child and poisoning of a river in the same light. As with most global problems, it all comes down to money. Use-value and non-use-value. In the market, the singing of birds is a non-use value, so the company doesnt give a shit. This is just an inherant problem with a society that revolves around money. Here is a quote I liked a lot that I found in the book Management for a Small Planet: Strategic Decision Making and the Environment by W. Edward Stead and Jean Garner Stead: “You can tell which institution a society considers most important by the relative height of its buildings. In medieval times, the churches were the tallest buildings. After the Renaissance, the tallest buildings were the seats of government. Today, the tallest buildings are the centers of economic activity.” [font="] [/font][font="]James Campbell, 1988 Anyway, good article, thanks Sam [/font]
Basically the essay is just a bunch of meaningless words. The strong will always defeat the weak and few. If it were a country with thousands or millions of people, do you really think a large corporation would re-route water? Think about it. The only reason big corporations do crap that like to feel superior and godly. Big corporation do not have the little people in their minds. They have the mightly dollar, buck, yen, pound, gold, diamond, ruby or whatever in the forefront of their agenda. That is why human beings do what they do.
