Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment

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Snow is adept at historicising her cases in the context of their communities. Her final chapter on disability is crucial to the monograph. Any discussion of ‘freak power’, or freakery, that fails to attend to the disabled body in the wake of Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s landmark Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body is missing something. Discussing writer and artist Bob Flanagan, who lived with cystic fibrosis for decades, Snow reminds us that what we call the performance of self-injury, or body in crisis, passes as daily life for a good number of individuals. Flanagan’s ‘refusal to entirely condemn cystic fibrosis and its effect on his quality of life, choosing instead to see it as. . . “empowering” is not just defiant’, Snow writes, ‘but punk, turning affliction into enlightening material’. Valuations like ‘quality of life’ are suddenly thrown into question: how can one begin to criticise or define self-injury, if some bodies inhabit perpetually precarious states anyway?

Cis white women who make this kind of work, Marina Abramović or Gina Pane, for example, do so to exorcise “ the feminine itself, a self-lacerating admission of the same terrible feeling of inherent victimhood”. That is, these artists make a spectacle of female suffering through pain. A blending of art and pop cultural criticism about people who injure themselves for our entertainment or enlightenment. Snow writes with such kinetic, sensory power here, alongside her characteristic, roving intelligence, that I felt I’d (somewhat queasily) witnessed, as well as read, this gripping exploration of pain and performance. Which As You Know Means Violence is as smart, fearless and funny as its many sensitively drawn subjects. Brilliant.”– Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road A brilliant, bracing and often funny debut, Philippa Snow’sWhich As You Know Means Violencecasts a compassionate but rigorous critical lens on self harm as art and art as accident. The smartest book I’ve read all year, and one I will return to for years to come.”– Allie Rowbottom, author o f Jell-O Girls and Aesthetica.Crucial to all Snow’s artists is the use of pain as a conduit to authenticity, as a way to access the real. What feels striking is how staged and less-than-real these pursuits sometimes appear. Indeed, something that Snow only discusses towards the end of the book is what happens when things go wrong (she explores the tragic death of Pedro Ruiz at length). The ways in which the lure of pain, in its proclivity for accident, offers an epistemological break from what is knowable. Snow’s career in cultural criticism perhaps most consistently attends to what Hunter S. Thompson called ‘freak power’. That might not be obvious from her by-lines on the Gossip Girl and Sex and the City reboots. But it doesn’t take long to realise that an analysis of the smoothest, most normative cultural object is just another way into a consideration of the ‘freakish’. In holding up a looking glass to the most seemingly glossy surface, Snow implicitly asks: Why? And why not otherwise? Why is SATC’s Samantha not weirder? (As Snow asked in her LA Review of Books review of And Just Like That in January.) Why are things, generally, not weirder? Which As You Know Means Violence takes up the question in the context of works that do dare to be weird. Snow has somehow created an enjoyable—indelible- book-length meditation on pain. Most notable is its critical analysis of hurt in the culture industry at large.”– Stephanie La Cava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You.

HC: In the book, you quote the artist Nina Arsenault: ‘Everybody’s lives are mythic, everybody’s lives are big. It’s a lie of TV, capitalism, propaganda, that our lives are casual … ’ I think this also, in a way, describes your approach – that you assume there’s intelligence and meaning in most things and set out to find it. As far as the argument about self-harm, real, staged, and even fictional, is concerned there is not a lot new here. But it is presented as a more coherent whole than in many other publications. This helps the reader to make a better evaluation of the premise(s) and more important decide where they believe the line is between art and, well, whatever you want to call the other side of the line. As far as the basic argument, I don't think there is really that much debate about the validity but about the degree. I wish I could write like Philippa Snow. Every essay she writes does exactly what she’s trying to get it to do; every text she writes about is transformed, new; and it’s funny, it’s all so funny and sad and right. For goodness’ sake, buy this book.”– Phillip Maciak,LA Review of Books A short, sharp stiletto of a book that gets to the point of how our inner pains become public across the highs and lows of (un)popular culture.”– Adam Steiner, Louder Than War

Hunter S. Thompson at his home in Aspen, Colorado, 1997. Courtesy: Wikicommons; photograph: Helen Davis