Symposium: Injury, Global Justice, and the Political.

Our interdisciplinary symposium brought together scholars and artists to discuss the subject of injury, focusing on the concept and its generative potential in reflecting on agency and mechanisms of repair and redress. The assumption that underpinned the title is that the production of injury, whether by war or stemming from inequalities of access to resources and rights, must be understood in political and not simply normative terms if we are to move towards healing, reparation and justice.

That the symposium had to be interdisciplinary bears the imprint of the Mapping Injury project itself; to understand injury, the potential of political agency, and the mobilisation of mechanisms related to repair and redress is to understand the complex relationality that places the subject in relation to structures of meaning and power, time and space, the symbolic and the material. It is no surprise that such work must be interdisciplinary. The symposium navigated the intellectual terrain created at the intersection of psychoanalysis, international relations, and the arts (see Events pages for a full list of participants).

Doing conceptual work suggests a problem already identified, concepts established, and theoretical insights defined. Yet we know that our concepts are replete with contention, hence the choices made. In relation to issues of ‘global justice’ and the political, the Mapping Injury project recognises that the concept ‘injury’ bears what Wittgenstein referred to as ‘family resemblances’ to, for instance, ‘trauma’ or ‘harm’. The project emerged from the PI’s research on war and conflict, the mark of war, understood as injuries, to bodies, psyches, communities, and populations, as well as politics and its institutions, public infrastructures, and lived spaces. Using the concept injury to also reflect on practices considered of the ‘zone of peace’, of the everyday and the routine, enables us to think of the global entanglements that, on the one hand, produce injury and, on the other, provide the potential for mobilisation and mechanisms of justice, political and legal. Just as wars of the recent past and present have targeted populations racialised and deemed lesser of worth, so too in widening the concept beyond war we place the lens on everyday racialisation of populations, differentiations of worth and value, and the colonial legacies that persist (see our Mapping Injury: Colonial Legacies exhibition) .

Conceptual work is not about ‘mirroring’ a world out there but the recognition that concepts have capacities; in making worlds, defining the limits of knowledge, making distinctions. The ‘family resemblances’ that ‘injury’ suggests enable us to reflect on its relation to ‘trauma’ (Karin Fierke, Raluca Soreanu), but also to ‘hurt’ and ‘scars’, each suggesting a temporal element to the concepts we use. Does injury suggest immediate impact while ‘trauma’ or ‘scars’ point to their longer-term impact, in the way that, as I indicate above, war might make its mark, not just on those immediately targeted but well beyond, both temporally and spatially? Fierke suggested that ‘trauma’ captures the ‘lingering’ and ‘reverberating’ impact of injury. This temporal element might be problematised further when injury is considered in relation to differentiations of class and gender, as Shirin Rai did in her presentation on the concept of ‘depletion’, where the work of ‘social reproduction’ goes unrecognised, reinforcing, as Rai put it, the ‘ripple effects of harm’. The temporal aspect of harm is also captured through the work of artist, Ndidi Dike, who spoke of the everyday objects shown in her works, evoking the routine workings of the international political economy and its impact on populations.

Psychoanalysis provides a conceptualisation of time that is constitutively related to the subject. As Raluca Soreanu outlined in her presentation to the symposium, here the subject seems ‘split’ or ‘fractured’, vulnerable to ‘contagion’. How does the subject articulate trauma, and through that articulation present with renewed trauma, only now related to the moment of articulation. The formulation ‘memory wounds and wounds towards memory’, as quoted by Soreanu, points to the ‘scar tissue’ that is unravelled in the psychoanalytic scene. Yet Soreanu’s research examines this scene when rendered in public spaces.

What are the spaces where healing resides? What constitutes healing and how does it relate to justice, when the ‘private’ enters sociocultural, political, and legal spaces? These can be spaces replete with the violence of non-recognition yet provide the potential of justice when rendered of the public, seen and heard. Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas are two artists whose works, as discussed by Khalil Joreige at our symposium, use the tropes of archaeology to uncover the layers of destruction and reconstruction in Lebanon. We learn of Khiam, variously a former prison, a museum, and site of continued ruination in the south of Lebanon, through a temporal concept used by the artist, ‘latency’, or ‘latent images’, the seeing and not seeing at one and the same time. We know from Michel Foucault that archaeology reveals fragments and traces, and it is this that perhaps best captures fractured pasts, ruined landscapes, and the shadows of communities destroyed and displaced. Joreige and Hadjithomas place these traces, fragments and shadows in our gaze, so that we might see. As does Tally de Orellana, curator, who, in discussing her recent exhibition, Unreliable Witness, and the work of the artist Dom Bouffard, revealed the challenges of capturing the ‘moment of shock’ as the moment ‘something happens’ in the gallery space where sound and sign meet in uncovering trauma. The fragment and trace are evident here too, where the archival page, there to recover a past, is marked as a way of ‘appropriation’.

How do we move from the trace and the fragment to the recovery of absent voices, bodies, lived spaces? Does the ‘recovery’ of history give voice? According to Zeynep Gulsah Capan, the quest to ‘recover’ remains constrained by the regulatory rules that history as a discipline imposes; the archive and the evidence base and not their constitutive exclusionary limits. Referring to Edouard Glissant’s conceptualisation of historical time, speculative in its literary rendering, poetic in its form, Capan suggested it is not so much ‘can the subaltern speak?’, as Gayatry Spivak asked, but ‘can the shadows speak?’ Perhaps it is only through art and literature that we begin to see the shadows. Ritu Vij, in her consideration of another resembling concept, ‘precarity’, again drew on literature to focus on problematising the distinction between the ‘precarious’ and the ‘subaltern.’

The question of ‘who speaks?’ injury is core to our understanding of the emergence of political agency in relation to justice. The question is imbricated with asymmetries of power. As critical theory recognises, words can carry agential properties. Pinar Bilgin, considering ‘who speaks security?’, and drawing on Edward Said’s concept of ‘contrapuntal reading’, recharges core questions of the politics of absenting in the discourses and institutions of international security. Who is permitted to speak security in the devastations of war and colonial dispossession? Bilgin’s reading of Edward Said is resonantly engaged with his writings on Palestine. Read contrapuntally, we begin to see the paradoxical absences in discourses of security that have long framed this conflict.

Words and the terms of articulation must hence be considered in any political understanding of global justice. This is evident in legal spaces, where law demands distinctly defined ‘evidence’, as outlined by Lara Montesinos Coleman, Owen Thomas, and Gustavo Rojas Paez. Critical understandings of law, its limits, and potentialities, place the lens on juridical practices that determine whether an ‘injustice has taken place’. Yet, being ‘critical’, for Lara Coleman, is not a matter of being ‘for’ or ‘against’ law, but to understand that violence might reside in the very legal frameworks called upon for redress.

A short blogpost cannot do justice to the rich papers presented in a two-day symposium. Some are not covered above, though their significance is evident in the themes covered, including memory and ‘temporal others’ (Anh Nguyen), ‘anger’ as a mobilising force (Chaeyoung Yong), the impact of violent conflict on landscapes (Pauline Zerla), and the role of the postcolonial state in an unequal world (Paul Witzenhausen). The symposium provided an opportunity for deliberation and reflection, and above all, for the mobilisation of interdisciplinary tools in developing our focus on injury, global justice and the political.