The Violence of Things

Things and their images can carry complex, pre-verbal meanings that derive their valency from not being spoken. For example, the rich public archive of Buddhist iconography in Sri Lanka may, simultaneously, convey the principles of non-violence and also the trauma of recent extrajudicial killing. Similarly, the extreme violence of crucifixion is celebrated as religious art or a mark of forgiveness, but may also evoke memories of conquest and genocide. In her On Violence, published in 1969, Hannah Arendt insisted that, rather than being an extreme manifestation of power, violence has an independent instrumentality. This insight, which has remained undeveloped in subsequent work on materiality, has provocative implications for the material world of things. Understanding how the material archive is central to the instrumentality of violence leads, in turn, to appreciating how the archive interacts with the performance of public life. “Professor Martin Hall on the violence of things”: https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2014- 03-14-professor-martin-hall-on-the-violence-of-things