Painting text: an extract from essay  "Distant Voices, Real Lives"    by Graham McCann.                                                                                            return to gallery page: Click Here

The replacement of the human by the linguistic turns out to be a self-defeating gesture in every sense. For the human subject always returns in the act of writing, and to attempt its suppression in writing is ultimately an act of self-violence. Although critics often seek to justify the importance of language as a means of eliminating the aggressive authority of the human subject and its history of misdemeanours they cannot escape this same history, and they end by erecting the edifice of language upon the tomb of the human self. The human face, as it were, must be washed away to make way for language. Lukacs’ concept of reification explains how the modes of production in capitalism gradually peel away all signs of the human from out lives; modern critics have fallen prey to a form of reification in their preference or language over the human. Every day the idea of the human grows fainter and more distant even as the theories of language become more fragmented. Modern theory consequently enacts a maddening gesture doomed to repeat the crimes it despises the most: killing the concept of the self because the self may kill does not extricate one from the cycle of violence. There are luxuries of detachment one should like to afford, but cannot. ‘Violence’ is a term that captures the area of concern currently share by criticism and ethics because it alone evokes the visceral reaction that provides a key to the stakes at issue. The word ‘violence’ evokes fear and pity, courage and compassion, exposing those emotions that define us most as human beings. This anthropological base is central to an understanding of the ethics of modern criticism because theorists today, despite all claims to the contrary, are engaged in a species of argument that has startling implications for the way in which we relate to and define the human world.

Violence exists whenever humans being harm other human beings. Such violence takes many forms, arising in physical attacks or words and actions that deprive human beings of their humanity. Violence is a human problem. It is never an infernal machine without a maker; it is never without a victim.

Book Title: The Missing Text (a compilation of essays edited by Marysia Lewandowska. Published by Chance Books of London , 1991.)