Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

Schmidt, Leoni

English

Playing With the Image: In Conversation with Margaret Roberts

Venis, Jane

113
Jane Venis
Playing the Fool
I am a multi-media artist working across sculpture, sound and performance. My most recent 
work includes the making of a series of Fool’s Instruments played as part of a ‘fairground 
installation’ that poses the question: ‘Is reality television a repackaging of the carnival freak 
shows of a century ago?’ 
Included in the installation are several brass and copper instruments created from recycled 
plumbing components, car exhaust systems and cannibalised parts from retired brass 
instruments. The centrepiece is The Snurglaphone, a fairground organ that plays humorously 
dark carnival music. 
Traditional brass band music and instruments of the ‘big top’, and the development of street 
and fairground organs that fronted smaller travelling fairs and carnivals have provided an 
historical background for the construction of my Fool’s Instruments. These instruments have 
a dual purpose. They are played live within an ensemble of traditional brass instruments to 
create darkly humorous carnival music; and a fairground organ (constructed from recycled 
car parts1) digitally activates recordings. The flavour of this music ties in with the humour, 
pathos and absurdity of the degraded carnival that is reality television.
I have always loved pipes and tubes, connections and couplings. I spent a lot of my early 
childhood in various work-camp boiler houses with my father, half listening to the background 
murmur of tall stories punctuated by blasts of hissing steam and juddering pipes. Whenever 
I see a collection of disused pipes I want to raid them for any interesting flanges or couplings 
I might find handy for my work. I forage in filthy rubbish skips at the back of the local muffler 
fitters for that special pipe and I’m always drawing obsessively. 
My drawings are those of a compulsive doodler. Pipes appear in many of my drawings, twisted, 
distorted and bulbous; pipes growing rhizome-like in many directions. I have always enjoyed the 
books of Dr Seuss, particularly the absurd way his cobbled-together machines always seem on 
the point of collapse. G S Smith2 describes the Seussian world as one of “benign decline”; it is 
not revolutionary or apocalyptic. “Seuss knows things fall apart by themselves, they don’t need 
to be destroyed.” This aesthetic of the cobbled together forms the basis for the construction 
of my Fool’s Instruments. The use of plumbing materials references the connection between 
Venis – Playing the Fool – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
aRTisT’s PaGes
114
the spluttering, rumbling, bellowing, burbling, farting, and incontinent dribbles common to 
both brass instruments and antiquated plumbing on the verge of collapse. 
The early difficulties in learning to play these Fools Instruments3 accurately has resulted in 
some truly horrendous squawking and rumbling that I have since put to good use, by recording 
these in various slightly (and not so slightly!) discordant combinations. The later recordings 
have been far more purposefully discordant as I have learned to pitch the instruments more 
accurately. I have also experimented with timing, especially on slow tracks delaying the return 
to the oncoming beat to provide an aura of irritated expectation. This feeling is no doubt 
familiar to viewers of ‘final’ reality television episodes wherein the outcome is dragged on 
through far too many advertising breaks. 
I am also playing, recording and editing experimental music with several other musicians, 
using a combination of my Fool’s Instruments and conventional wind and string instruments. 
The music is mainly improvised using a single word, phrase or concept as the starting point, 
for example ‘think of an excruciatingly slow elephant bumbling around’; or we use nonsense 
phrases with a Seussian flavour, for example ‘ricketty gallumphy’ and see what sounds 
eventuate.
Venis – Playing the Fool – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
Jane Venis, 2006, Drawing for a Fool’s Instrument, 
pencil on paper, approx. 20 x 20 cm.
The concept of playing music that has 
a humourfully discordant or a-rhythmic 
feel has its problems. The music has to 
sound just bad enough to be funny but 
not too bad to be misinterpreted as merely 
incompetent. My first contact with this 
concept was listening to PDQ Bach in the 
late 1980s. PDQ Bach was the fictitious son 
of Johannes Sebastian and is the brainchild 
and pseudonym of ‘professor’ Peter 
Schickele. Through PDQ Bach, Schickele 
undertook a satirical exploration of the 
conventions of musicological scholarship 
and of Baroque music, using humorous 
slapstick timing, incorrect notation and an 
array of unusual instruments.4 
The concept of creating wrong notes or 
wilfully playing behind or ahead of the 
beat is something I share with Schickele, 
although the way the outcome is achieved 
is very different. I improvise to create 
chance clashes and work within a group 
that constantly experiments with ways to 
keep contact with an underlying theme or 
melody by only a merest thread, while being 
poised for diversion at any moment. 
115Venis – Playing the Fool – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
Jane Venis, The Snurglaphone, from Freaquent Viewing, interactive exhibition at the Seque Gallery, 
September 2006 (photograph: the author).
Jane Venis, 2006, copper and brass ‘steel’ drum made from recycled hot water cylinders,  
tuned by beating with a hammer (photograph: the author).
116
I have also been making drums, which have an historical connection to carnival. My set of 
copper ‘steel drums’ responds to the history of the West Indian steel drum and its connection 
to carnival. The notion that primitives’ “irrational, violent and dangerous natures”5 are stirred 
up by the pounding of traditional drums appeared to be behind the banning of skin drums 
in Trinidad. Freed African slaves traditionally played the skin drums in carnival and other 
festivities, but these were eventually banned by the government, and were replaced by hollow 
bamboo drums. David Mangurian, from Laventille, Trinidad, in his article “A Short History of 
the Shiny Drum,” 6 tracks these changes from the outlawing of the traditional skin drums 
through to the development of the steel drums. Steel drums were made from oil drums that 
washed up on beaches during the Second World War. 
Steel drums took their name from steel bands7 dating from the early 1930s, whereby all 
manner of discarded steel objects – ranging from car parts to biscuit tins – were played in 
carnival. These objects were used because they could produce a much louder sound than 
the bamboo drums. All my instruments are also made from recycled metal objects, including 
car parts. I discovered the history of steel bands after I made my first drums and can now 
see even more links to my work. 
Mangurian recounts a possible origin of the first tuned steel drum:
Around 1942 or 1943, according to one legend, a 12-year-old Laventille youth 
named Winston ‘Spree’ Simon, loaned his large iron ‘kettledrum’ to a friend. 
When it was returned, his drum had been beaten concave and had lost the 
‘special’ tone Simon liked. He started pounding the under surface of the drum 
back to its original shape and discovered that the pounding created different 
pitches or notes. He produced a four-note drum and, by this accident, started 
the transformation of the steel ‘drum’ from a rhythm instrument into a melodic 
one. 8
I have used this same idea in tuning my copper drums but have used an animal skin pattern 
within different-sized concave pads that produce different notes. I am particularly enjoying 
the irony of re-instating the animal skin into the Afro- Caribbean drum.
To play is the prime motivation in my work. I play with ideas and concepts. I play with materials 
as part of my making process, I playfully doodle and draw and I play my instruments, (playfully 
of course).
       
 1 The concept of a car being reconstructed as an instrument is also linked to reality television shows 
such as Jessie James’ Monster Garage wherein he works with a team of people within a tight timeframe 
to transform cars into a series of multi-functional super vehicles, for example, flying machines, turbo-
charged lawn mowers and other eccentric fusions.  
 2 GS Smith, Sewanee as a Seussian System (2002) at http://smith2.sewanee.edu/texts/Sewanee 
last visited on 4 April 2004.
 3 They are called Fool’s Instruments not only because of their nonsensical appearance but because 
of the experimental nature of the music. In the way that the fool leaps into the unknown, I often play 
these instruments spontaneously.
Venis – Playing the Fool – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
117
 4 4www.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDQ_Bach - 24k last visited on 20 April 2006.
 5 Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects Modern Lives (London: Blackwell, 1991), 8.
 6 David Mangurian, A Short History of the Shiny Drum (2004) at http://musicforlondon.com/Steel_Band.
htm last visited on 2 March 2006.
 7 Ibid.
 8 Ibid.
Jane Venis is an artist who works across sculpture, sound and performance. She has 
completed the Master of Fine Arts degree at the School of Art, Otago Polytechnic in 
2006; and is the academic leader for the Creative Studies Programme in the Design 
Department. Her studio work explores the notion of the ‘carnivalesque’ and the ways 
in which it manifests in contemporary popular culture. 
Venis – Playing the Fool – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006


Playing the Fool

Jutel, Annemarie

Review: "Not a Games Person" by Julie Myerson (London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2005)

Searle, Jim

Review: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, "Conversations on Science, Culture and Time" (Translated by Roxanne Lapidus, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004)

 7 Junctures, 2, Jun 2004
EDITORIAL
In Junctures 1, Annemarie Jutel described the mission of this journal as seeking to establish
“conversations and collaborations between people who do not necessarily already interact.”
Peter Stearns confirmed the importance of this undertaking through his own discussion of
interdisciplinarity and its role in the furthering of knowledge. Thus far, however, contributions
to the journal seem to be multi-disciplinary rather than interdisciplinary, although the editors
have uncovered “diagonal axes”1  in both issues. Jutel identified “weight” and  “otherness” as
common sub-thematic threads within the first issue devoted to the body. This time around,
with the second issue, I find traces of an “inter-semiotic”2  , which Julia Kristeva’s “Institutional
Interdisciplinarity in Theory and in Practice”, published in 1998 as an interview with Alexia
Defert in editors Alex Coles’ and  Defert’s The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity 3  , enables me to
point out.
Kristeva speaks lyrically about being at the crossroads between disciplines, in “the very process
of thinking caught in its unfolding”.4   But, she also points out that interdisciplinarity can be a
“site where expressions of resistance are latent …as specialists are often too protective of
their own prerogatives”; or conversely, that it can become dangerous and even caricatural
when people “think their specialization is interdisciplinarity itself, which is tantamount to
saying that they have a limited amount of knowledge of various domains and only fragmentary
competences!” 5 She advocates for an interdisciplinarity which can avoid these extremes in
four related ways:
Research should come from the base of a pyramid and work its way up, with researchers
finding their own connections within their everyday practices, meeting with one another to
learn “how to discuss both their competencies and the outcome of their interaction, and
therefore contributing to the exposure of the risks of interdisciplinary practice.”6  Junctures
strives for this ‘bottom-up’ trajectory by bringing researchers together and by inviting, amongst
others, emergent researchers to engage with its themes.
Kristeva also argues for an interdisciplinarity which does not become reductive and thereby
lose “scope” and “full dimension”.7  In this issue of Junctures, arguments for and through
complexity theory (Cubitt); dynamical systems theory (Araújo & Davids); an acknowledgement
of the ‘many’ and the ‘multitude’ sacrificed for the sake of industry (Dolan); an argument
against rigid systems (Rewi); and strategies for countering systemic hegemony in discourses
of technocracy (Williamson), form diagonal axes across contributions by researchers from
divergent disciplines (Screen & Media Studies; Human Kinetics & Physical Education; Rhetoric
& Creative Writing;  Maori Studies; and Information Technology).
The necessity “to see representation itself, but also the necessity to see that which is not
represented”8  constitutes another register of Kristeva’s argument in relation to
interdisciplinarity. In this issue of Junctures, painter Simon Ingram considers German systems
8
theorist Niklas Luhmann’s notion of “second order observing”, i.e. “’that if an observer is to
make observations that in any way ‘see’ the world – as opposed to imposing an a priori
observational structure on the world – they must take into account the ways in which they
see. This means the observing of observations…’ .” 9  In a book review included in this issue,
photographer Di Halstead writes: “Our training to see the picturesque and the scenic as
systems of representation in the landscape has determined the way we view the land…[and
has made us aware of the] uses of the scenic and picturesque to sell, to colonise and
commodify our land.”
Kristeva emphasises the importance of integration between theory and practice: “The prime
material must always be returned to; it must not be forgotten in favour of theory; on the
contrary it must be enriched and explained in an unprecedented manner in order to take the
theoretical text somewhere new…I value concrete experience.”10  In this issue of Junctures,
researchers from a variety of disciplines argue with Kristeva for engagement with “dimensions
and materiality” (Cubitt from Screen and Media Studies); “tactile and textural experience”
(Thompson from textile practice); and Margo Barton writes: “As a milliner I…love to create
millinery that is real, to steam and stretch, to stiffen and wire, to use felt, straw, feathers and
plastic”; while Ingram explores how painter Robert “Ryman’s work manages to show us the
ways in which things ‘are things’; the ways a thing, in this case a painting became itself (the
‘thing-ed-ness’ of a thing).”
Junctures not only invites submissions from all disciplines but also engagement with and
discussion concerning interdisciplinarity itself. It agrees with Steven D. Brown where he quotes
Michel Serres and Bruno Latour and writes: “Reason is to be found across the entire fabric of
the modern world: ‘In a certain way reason is, of all things in the world, the most equally
distributed. No domain can have a monopoly of reason, except via abuse.’11  We find reason
by looking to local practices, and particularly local languages. Every language has its own
stockpile of wisdom. The problem is not the overcoming of such wisdom by a more superior
form of…reason, but rather of learning how to ‘speak all languages’ such that one may develop
a ‘tolerant ethics, of third-instruction, a harmonious middle/milieu, a daughter of two banks,
of scientific culture and of knowledge culled from the humanities, of expert erudition and of
artistic narrative’.” 12  *
Leoni Schmidt
Managing Editor: Creative and Performing Arts
* Thank you to colleague Bridie Lonie for bringing this text to my attention.
 Junctures, 2, Jun 2004
 9
1 Julia Kristeva uses this phrase repeatedly to discuss dynamic interaction between theory and practice
and between disciplines (see endnote 3 for the full reference).
2 Kristeva argues for a grounded  inter-semiotic in the making, a bridging between sets of signs, “as
opposed to some kind of Esperanto, or some kind of abstract language originating from nowhere”,
endnote 3, 16.
3 Alexia Defert’s interview with Julia Kristeva is published as “Institutional Interdisciplinarity in Theory
and  in Practice”, in A Coles and A Defert (eds), The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity, (“de-, dis-, ex” , 2,
London: Black Dog, 1998), 3-21.
4 Ibid., 3.
5 Ibid., 6.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 6, 19, 20.
8 Ibid., 20.
9 N Luhmann, “The Modernity of Science”, in “Special Issue on Niklas Luhmann”, New German Critique,
61, Winter 1994, 28.
10 Kristeva, 9.
11 S D Brown, “Michel Serres: Science, Translation and the Logic of the Parasite”, Theory, Culture and
Society, 19 (3), 2002: 9, quoting M Serres and B Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and
Time, trans. R Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 112.
12 Brown quoting M Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge, trans. S F Glaser and W Paulsen (Ann Arbor:
Michigan University Press, 1991), 164-65.
 Junctures, 2, Jun 2004


Editorial

Heidema, Johannes

Labuschagne, Willem

Emancipating Agents: Need Schrödinger’s Cat be let into the Chinese Room?

McKinlay, Pam

Colophon: Junctures, Issue 3:body#2

Lonie, Bridie

The Journal for Thematic Dialogue
unctures
14: peace
July 2011
Junctures is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives Works 3.0 New Zealand licence 
(cc-by-nc-nd), unless otherwise indicated. Copyright in all images remains with the artists, unless otherwise indicated.
 
BRIDIE LONIE
Editorial: Peace, Responsibility and the Other
7Junctures 14, July 2011
BRIDIE LONIE
Peace, Responsibility and the Other
Out beyond ideas of right and wrongdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there. 
Dscalal ad-Din Muhammed Rumi.1 
This issue of Junctures grew in part out of an interdisciplinary symposium on Art and Law hosted 
by the Dunedin School of Art and the Otago University Faculty of Law in October 2010. Mark Stocker’s 
review of that symposium in this issue indicates how frequently speakers drew on law’s function as 
a set of terms that resolve conflict through the delineation of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and how art tended 
to problematise simple divisions between those two terms. The very close relationship between the 
words ‘peace’ and ‘law’ can be found in the etymology of the word peace, which lies in the Latin 
word pax, meaning a contract or pact. This takes us quickly to the role of parliaments – that word 
itself derived from the French word parler ‘to speak’ and hence to come through conversation 
from dispute to agreement. For other cultures, for instance those with a Buddhist focus, relatively 
comparable terms and concepts present peace as a transcendent experience, or a value in itself, 
a state of being that is at rest. It was interesting, then, to find the fragment cited above from a 
text by the thirteenth century Sufi thinker Dscalal ad-Din Muhammed Rumi in Wolfgang Dietrich’s 
exploration of differences in the nature of the term peace.2  Rumi’s suggestion that finding peace 
might require a transcendence of the issues around which disputes are formed is provocative and 
its relevance immediate.
Given those etymologies and the Eurocentric focus of this journal’s readership, it should not have 
surprised us that responses to our call for submissions tended to find the idea only in opposition, that 
is, often only in a negative sense. If there is not war, then there is peace. If there is not violence, then 
there is peace. If there is not violation, then there is peace. Peace is degree zero, the tabula rasa 
from which conflict will again grow. For this reason, each author in this issue constructs peace as 
kind of dialogue, a process, a conversation and a negotiation. In this desire lies the active principle 
of peace; that it is always in production.
Symptomatic of this flavor, a further commonality has emerged in a concern with paradoxical 
states; undecidable situations that reflect suppressions, excisions and mirrored positions. Agreement 
in such cases is made difficult by a lack of common principles, or by an inherent ambiguity in the 
establishment of power relations and shared suspicion, doubt and uncertainty. As a counter to these 
situations, several of the essays draw on post-structuralism’s methodologies, arguing in different 
ways that what is needed are tools that reveal underlying fault-lines, gaps or implicit rather than 
explicit power relations. The essays present complex situations in which competing and sometimes 
EDITORIAL
8 Junctures 14, July 2011
equally valid claims need negotiation. Two such frameworks appear frequently, because of their 
recognition that some situations cannot be resolved through dialectical processes. These are Italian 
political philosopher Giorgio Agameben’s study of “states of exception” and Emmanuel Levinas’s 
sense that part of the human condition is the unknowability of other people.
For the first authors, Brendan Hokowhitu and Tiffany Page who, as tangata whenua, lead the 
sequence of texts, the state that is called peace within Aotearoa New Zealand is instead one of 
violence, the violence endemic to the process of colonisation and its inevitable suppression of 
difference and of subjectivity. Hokowhitu and Page carefully analyse the possibility that a unity 
constructed by the process of colonisation is one that remains dependent upon the action of 
colonisation and has little purchase without that.
Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the notion of the “state of exception” explains its history as a 
means of suspending the law of the state, a legal position which is both a limit to the legislative 
power of the state and a limit operating within the legislated field, in that the state can suspend 
its own laws.3  Agamben explains how this state of exception is endemic in the histories of those 
legislated communities we know as nations. It is, for example, currently employed in the suspension 
of normal law in the region of Canterbury following the series of earthquakes in 2010-2011. That 
same state of exception was for a time employed in the ‘terrorist’ raids in 2009 in this country. 
Hokowitu and Page take this back to the suggestion that colonisation was not recognized as a state 
of war but instead as a suspension of law, leading to an intrinsic contradiction in the notion of a 
peaceful colony. If peace is the ability to live one’s life supported by the law, then its alternative is 
the operation of the law against its own citizens. If the contract of law is the operational arm of the 
notion of peace, then any suspension of law is of great concern.
Today “states of exception” have as much to do with environmental events as they have to do with 
the naked exercise of imperialism, and with climate change this kind of absence of the law is likely 
to be more prevalent. Cameron Bishop considers the ways in which human subjectivity has been 
seen as a war with the non-human as well as with the human Other. He considers the ways in which 
climate change disasters re-present the human to itself through a re-focus on the specious division 
between the human and the non-human, emphasizing the ways in which this binary is unsustainable.
Brendan Hokowhitu and Tiffany Page, Cameron Bishop and Dorothee Pauli also draw on the 
ethical position advanced by twentieth century French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas around 
alterity.4  Difference is generally seen to be the cause of dispute and, dialectically, its dissolution 
or synthesis the resolution. Levinas argues that difference is not dialectical – that is, it is neither 
oppositional, nor negatable.  He was concerned with limit experiences. His experiences in the 
death camps and his subsequent life as a psychoanalyst led him to the position that there is no 
easy equivalence between beings, and that the recognition of difference is the ethical imperative 
that frames our lives. For him dialogue will produce a sense of strangeness, leading not so much 
to communication, as to responsibility: 
The face in which the other – the absolutely other – presents himself does not negate the same, 
does not do violence to it as do opinion or authority or the thaumaturgic supernatural. It remains 
commensurate with him who welcomes; it remains terrestrial. This presentation is predominantly 
nonviolence, for instead of offending my freedom it calls it to responsibility and founds it. As 
nonviolence it nonetheless retains the plurality of the same and the other. It is peace.5  
As the feminist writer Heather McPherson reminds us, the need to make peace with our own 
wars, historic and familial, remains an active force throughout historical epochs and throughout 
generations, occurring in a matrix that inextricably links the private and the public, the immediate 
and the historical.
9Junctures 14, July 2011
This inextricability is also articulated in the common use of the concept of biopolitics. Michel 
Foucault used this term in his understanding of the production of subjectivity within structures of 
power. The idea acknowledges the ways that all aspects of the human condition are invoked within 
political organisation, and that nothing escapes that organisation; value, spiritual life, ethnicity 
and cultural identity; nothing; all relationships are formed within it. Hence any negotiation – any 
contractual process, any negotiation with difference – has to be understood within this context, 
which will differ according to site and time and which engages the whole context of being.
 Using this notion and citing Agamben, Levinas and Gilles Deleuze, Cameron Bishop argues that 
humans are in three ways at war with our ecology, however much we might appear to be within it. 
As animals we fail to recognise other animals. As products of the biochemistry of this planet we fail 
to see our place within it. As humans constructed within relationships we fail to see our own part in 
the faces of those around us. These relationships are the subject of post-structural thought, which, 
growing from phenomenology, propose different ways to think about the ‘Other’. Bishop’s argument 
draws on a further concern in the work of Agamben, his idea of the human experience as founded 
on inhibition and disinhibition. The non-human in this model is characterised by its failure to have 
consciousness of otherness.
In what ways do humans make contracts, negotiate, broker peace, or prevent war based on a 
division between one group and another and the placing of one’s group needs against the Other’s? 
Is the most significant step in the making of a contract clear and equivalent communication, or is 
it, as Levinas would argue, responsibility for an ethical response to the Other? 
Communication is certainly important. In their essay Willem Labuschagne and Johannes Heidema 
consider cognitive psychology’s concern with language, discussing its firm belief in the possibility 
of the transfer of value-laden communication, given an understanding of the ways that humans 
frame communication through metaphor. George Lakoff, an American cognitive linguist, undertook 
a close analysis of the metaphors of war deployed by the United States government; his work alerts 
us to the simplicity of the narratives endemic in the rhetorics of power.6  It is interesting to read 
that in the seventeenth century, German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, as a 
diplomat, sought to develop a common European language in the relatively recent presence of the 
use of Latin for that purpose. His approach was to see diplomatic communication as a matching 
of objectives through the production of evermore accurate algorithms. Such attempts argue for the 
position that humans want to resolve conflict, and that conflict is something that can be resolved 
through the production of sameness rather than the recognition of difference. Problems with the 
take-up of universal, constructed languages such as Esperanto (the word is derived from the Latin 
word for hope) indicate that such solutions are as yet in their infancy.
Art is a particular form of communication. As Russian art historian Boris Groys argues, such 
events as the 9/11 bombings were produced by thinkers who had a clear understanding of the 
relationship between the aesthetic and political power of the imagery that would result from them; 
the role of artists is to counter the sublime dramas of such images with others that challenge and 
undermine that power.7  
Dorothee Pauli’s concerns lie with the ways that artists can engage critically in political life. There 
are histories of works that satirise, represent and challenge political acts. Sometimes they do this 
by presenting material in such a way as to produce an empathy with the subject of discrimination 
and violence. At other times, they present information in a more impartial manner. As Groys argues, 
such works are also evidence of the ways that art as a form is implicated in, or relevant to, political 
events. Pauli demonstrates how different approaches can undermine and challenge the images that 
are now common to our psyches and, without which critique will continue to function insidiously. 
10 Junctures 14, July 2011
The subjects discussed by Pauli are again events which occur within “states of exception”; that is, 
events that occur in situations where the rule of law has been suspended by the state. Again, we 
might think of Levinas’s argument that we must first acknowledge the responsibility each holds for 
the other before seeking consensus or agreement; and that such events occur within contexts that 
are at times undecidable.
Pornography is a term used to characterise another kind of violence that occurs within a state 
which is characterized as being at peace. Artists operate at the edges of experience, at perhaps limit 
places or occasionally, operating as “states of exception” in this regard; galleries negotiate with and 
mediate between their publics; artists and audiences, funders and administrators. Jenny Harper 
considers changing approaches to artists’ freedom to exhibit given the increasing relationships 
between exhibiting galleries and state funding. Art is not always transparent to meaning and has 
particular conventions and particular and specific functions within societies. Harper’s discussion 
presents very clearly the conflicts that lie not only between artist and institution but within the 
individual’s own mixed position as agent for an institution and as herself the consumer and therefore 
the interpreter of an artwork’s validity and power. Perhaps in such instances the term peace remains 
more closely with its Latin than its Buddhist nature: as in a conflict held in a temporal and perhaps 
tense stasis through the careful analysis of contextual issues.
The role of the artist is therefore complicated, and Gilbert May, in a review of Nina Katchadourian’s 
Seat Assignment, discusses Plato’s suggestion that the artist should by definition trouble the state 
but at the same time the state should exclude the artist to maintain its domestic peace. Does this 
place the artist in a perpetual state of exile, as is often argued?
If we take the notion of peace to be, as Dietrich argues, necessarily plural and “a dynamic 
equilibrium,” then clearly ways of negotiating within difference are vital.8  Willem Labuschagne 
reviews Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom’s Working Together, a discussion of ways in which negotiations 
around the commons, and around specific instances of resources such as water, require particular 
and specific recognitions of difference and also different approaches to research, involving an 
acceptance that mixed methods are vital in the production of understandings around different 
values, experiences and needs. Interdisciplinary research is not only desirable but also necessary 
as we negotiate with positions that may never be reducible to a common understanding. 
The common element in these texts then is the need for careful negotiation across difference, 
in order to achieve the non-violent sharing of life that is commonly regarded as peace. While we rely 
on laws to provide the frameworks that maintain a state of peace, these frameworks are fragile and 
easily placed in suspense. While information flows may also seem essential to the maintenance 
of peace, an understanding of the nuanced and contextual nature of information appears equally 
necessary. The resolution of disputes may occur only through the recognition of irreconcilable 
difference. We are writing in the context of the liberation of information through the Wikileaks 
process and the related but appalling hackings of personal data by the newspaper The News of the 
World with its subsequent closure. Is it information that we need for security? Or something less 
immediately satisfying but ultimately more stable, an understanding of personal responsibility in 
the careful, engaged and emotionally intelligent search for conversation with and across difference, 
meeting in that field beyond the contested positions of right and wrong? 
11Junctures 14, July 2011
1   Cited in Wolfgang Dietrich, “Beyond the Gates of Eden, 
Trans-rational Peaces” in The Palgrave International 
Handbook Of Peace Studies, A Cultural Perspective, 
Wolfgang Dietrich, Josephina Echavarria Alvarez, Gustavo 
Esteva, Daniela Ingruber and Norbert Koppensteiner, eds. 
(London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3.
2   Dietrich, “Beyond the Gates of Eden, Trans-rational 
Peaces,” 14. 
   Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago and 
London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
3   Emmanuel Levanis “Ethics and the Face” in Totality and 
Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne 
University Press, 1969).
4   Levanis “Ethics and the Face,” 203.
5   George Lakoff, The Political Mind, Why You Can’t 
Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th 
Century Brain (New York: Viking, 2008). 
6   Boris Groys, “Art at War” in Art Power (Cambridge, Mass., 
London, England: MIT Press, 2008), 121-130.
7   Dietrich, “Beyond the Gates of Eden, Trans-rational 
Peaces.”


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