Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Butler, and Ameena Mathews: Mix of Ambiguity and Shouting:

On the eve of turbulence where Syrian violence continues, Israel seems ever closer to bomb Iran, and Egypt has become more enraged, fear of war between worlds, clashes of civilization induced from a market out of control. But a common desire wants to push past greed and general sovereignty.

Gloria Anzaldua mentions the ideal ‘towards a new consciousness’, one that involves a Tolerance of Ambiguity, where the “borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirables out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior” (Anzaldua, Borderlands). Violence is a pattern. Such patterns and habits that lock us in are the enemy within. “Rigidity means death.” Rigid war profiteers, capitalizing on perpetual confrontation over oil, resources, and objectivity of desire.

The inner war, the borders of self and other should be inclusive and not exclusive; “breaking down the paradigms” is the duality of transcendence. Anzaldua persists that the “First step is to take inventory…Just what did we inherit from our ancestors? … This step is a conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and all religions. … We must surrender all notions of safety, of the familiar” (Anzaldua). Deconstruct in order to construct. The “whole struggle is to change the disciplines and overcome the internal struggles.”

Frantz Fanon urges the opposite. He urges that violence is the only way to “explode the former colonial reality.” For such a struggle overcomes unknown facets, “as the struggle enfolds, the power of ideology is elaborated,” and a ‘spectacular of voluntarism’, overcomes the ‘obscurantist tendencies’ (Fanon, Wretched of the Earth).

Yet Ameena Matthews, working with CeaseFire.org, an organization in Chicago consisting of ex-gang members, seeks to ‘Shout at Violence’. Matthews and her co-workers attempt to re-direct gang violence away from brutal means. “Violence is a disease. It does not solve anything.” She continues in a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, “We as Violence Interrupters stop the violence from one person to another… We just get right in the middle of it because our goal is to save a life and be proactive not reactive” (Matthews).

Violence hurts the innocent.  Violence objectifies the value of human life. In Judith Butler’s reflections on the Subjects of Desire, a reinterpretation of Hegel, she states “Desire is in part a desire for self-reflection, and because desire … as a cognitive effort to thematize identity, Desire and Reflection are not mutually exclusive terms” … Desire is an ambiguous project of life (Butler).

Butler’s ‘ambiguous project of life’ moves along the similar route as Gloria Anzaldua’s ‘tolerance of ambiguity’. Butler reflects, “Identity is not to be forfeited simply because there is no guarantee of its success … both arbitrary and doomed failure, the striving to know one’s self to think the conditions of one’s own life, is a function of the desire to be free.”

“Desire can relieve human beings of their Consciousness of their own negativity” (Butler). To grasp what is lacking without the violent urge to destroy. “The Negative exists in us and we must come to terms with our own negativity in order to accept what we cannot control” (Butler).

This possibility to create anew, hopes to avow an advocated violence, but one fears today violence is inevitable because too many pattern-prone powerful interests cannot self-reflect on their own negativity, and do not have a tolerance of ambiguity.

Ameena Matthews shouts at violence, “You deserve to be loved!” Violence won’t solve the problem; it avoids the problem rather than being constructive.

But is this a Catch-22? Are we left either doomed to be objectified by the hegemony, or empowered to demand subjectivity? Still that is the point of ambiguity, the opportunity for the new unknown.