11 Violence

“Lookin’ at me curious, a young Iraqi kid (“Huh…”)

Carryin’ laundry, “What’s wrong, G? Hungry?”

“No, gimme my oil or get [fuck] out my country!”

And in Arabian barkin’ other stuff (“Jihad! Muhammad! Jihad! Mahmood!”)

‘Til his moms come grab him and they walk off in a rush

Distrust, feelin’ like I’ve pissed upon wound” Mos Def, Auditorium, 2009

General Colin Powell makes the case for the presence of weapons of destruction at Iraq in a special session at United Nations, February 2003 [Full C-Span record]

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Truth and lie in an extra-moral sense

Socio-politically, violence has intersecting instrumental and expressive dimensions (Riches, 1986; Aretxaga, 2005). According to Max Weber, state claims monopoly over its legitimate use. Thus, in rule of law, violence is not annulled but absorbed into the body of the state. In a democratic society, legitimacy of this monopoly is radically opened to criticism.

There is an immanent open-endedness to the question of legitimacy in the ideal form of democracy. Between undefinable concept of infinity and always-already determined identity of society, there is categorical incompleteness to the set of answers that can be given to the question of what constitutes a legitimate order. We argued in this study of political sociology that logical incompleteness and temporal unfolding are essentially linked. The meaning, instruments, subjects, and field of politics/violence are created in the space opened between these two concepts. Subjects of violence as perpetrators, victims, and witnesses are not external to the field but emerges in concrete relations to the political field whereby meaning is inscribed on bodily practices engaging materiality such as building barricades or living in a heightened atmosphere of fear because generalized state of exception (Feldman 1991).

Yet the intelligibility and expressivity of these inscriptions will vary depending on the availability of an abstract language, i.e. a theory, for applying to concrete contexts. By these theories, mechanical reduction of force whereby an ontological and epistemic continuity is achieved across corporeality of bodies and materiality will complicated and deepened by way of psychologization and informatics/cybernetics (Aretxaga 2005, p. 204; Clough 2008). From the model of political bodies blocking a street and creating an autonomous zone to algorithmic serialization of affect through digital temporality, in 21st century elaborations of new virtual to actual circuits become possible as in a board-game whereby contours and strategic context are constantly pregnant with change. Recent uses of strategic games in the development of artificial intelligence crystallizes this paradigmatic shift. Therefore, the plane of knowledge complicates a pure conception of violence as relations between forces.

If power operates through production of knowledge exceeding the sphere of law, whereby subjects internalize relations of power produced around expert-knowledge and media-systems, the phenomenon of violence gets entangled with the processes of normalization. Command becomes a rule structuring subjects, a rule becomes a design determining possibilities. Then, identification of non-violence is also problematic.

If there is no similar claim to monopoly over violence in the international contexts and if international, transnational and post-national currents become definitive for political relations demonstrated by the networked production of violence, global circulation and dominance of Capital and dispersed flow of humans caught in metastable conditions of precarity; Weberian orientation that foundationally shapes classical political sociological understanding proves to be insufficient for contemporary political realities.

Thus, from sanctioning mechanisms that hold social norms together to exceptional acts of transgression, from ever evolving instruments of surveillance and warfare to modes of resistance, violence produces political meaning and therefore begs questioning. Yet the very same normative character complicates its study. Therefore, it is only possible to speak of “constellations of violence”. As in stellar movements that only temporarily produce centers and alignments, the topic of violence where mathematical physics of force impossibly meet the value, meaning and non-identity of political action eschews centering and standardization. As a result, state cannot function as the epistemological arbiter of the status of violence. The social text that gives it meaning and the media that carry the message across spacetimes, traverse transcendental posture of state. There is no atemporal transhistoricity of state present uniformly across epochs. Of the status of the what’s external to state, Deleuze and Guattari writes in A Thousand Plateaus:

“Not only is there no universal State, but the outside of States cannot be reduced to “foreign policy,” that is, to a set of relations among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two directions: huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire ecumenon , at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of the “multinational” type, or industrial complexes, or even religious formations like Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc.); but also the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue to affirm rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of State power. The modern world can provide us today with particularly well developed images of these two directions: worldwide ecumenical machines, but also neoprimitivism, a new tribal society as described by Marshall Mcluhan.” (1987, p. 360)

The status of violence gets knotted in the characterization of the relation of what lies outside to state. Notice Deleuze and Guattari employs two registers. Rights and images. Exteriority is the ground of asserting rights and offering images. Former is already encoded in the juridical epistemology and latter navigates the theoretical domain where images are seen as the condition of possibility of thought its modes of perception and imagination.

Thus, all the attempts at standardizing the study of violence has to reckon with its double relation to measure. As long as it is a search for political effectivity, either in the mode of domination or peace, war or resistance, there is an urgent interest in calculating the affordances of deterrent ,disciplinary and biopolitical power. As long as, violence puts into play irreducible values and perspectives, the uniformity of its one dimensional measure is predetermined and exceeded by a multiplicity.

Affordances of the study of violence

“The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history-the “philosophy” of this history because only the idea of its development makes possible a critical, discriminating, and decisive approach to its temporal data. A gaze directed only at what is close at hand can at most perceive a dialectical rising and falling in the lawmaking and law-preserving forms of violence. The law governing their oscillation rests on the circumstance that all law-preserving violence, in its duration, indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence it it represents, by suppressing hostile counterviolence. (Various symptoms of this have been referred to in the course of this study.) This lasts until either new forces or those of earlier suppressed triumph over the hitherto lawmaking violence and thus found a new law, destined in its turn to decay. On the breaking of this cycle maintained by mythic forms of law, on the suspension of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded.” Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence

Given its complexity, an engagement with the intricacies of how violence comes into presence as a social phenomenon promises to bear many interesting fruits on meaning-making processes emerging out of different modes and medium of interpretation.

By the study of violence, students of political sociology can learn how meaning is made and contested in a given culture. Adolescent rebellion against parental force/authority, is an assertion of identity and freedom. How is this break of tie/unit done? The inevitable style involved in differentiation displays creative capacities inherent to subjective meaning-making processes. National independence is also birth of a possibility of self-determination. It requires both might and a story. The story of independence contributes to the making of a new integrity and might allows solidification of relative arbitrariness symbolic decisions and demarcations —flags, borders, codes, histories. In culture, by transgressing symbolic binary organization of culture (e.g., man/woman; father/mother; active/passive etc.) ensuring its predictable continuity and reproduction, free play of meaning asserts separation of labor and creativity from their social functionalist appropriation. Georges Bataille calls this non-utilitarian consumption. A possibility of rising above servitude to necessities.

Crossing the binary of powerful and powerless, the ideological acceptance of colonization either as opportunistic collaboration or as the only exit from the preceding relations of power further complicate the matrix of development. Analogous to calculation of minimum amount of tax one has to give up, the hitherto oppressed are selectively and strategically absorbed into the dominant political regime to help with its periodic legitimacy crises rendering the visibility and measure of violence and its compensation/expiation further murky. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten suggests perhaps there is a distinction between brutality and violence.

It is possible that in social theory economical perspective held the center because it help create a sense of functional and purposeful self-replicating system out of social interactions and history. Epistemic bias of the researchers end up projecting intelligibility onto the social texture that they study in order to secure continuous feasibility of their intellectual projects —in short in restoring the faith that violence can be understood, controlled, and ultimately justified. Yet the concept of violence, its sporadic and unsystematic presence is diffused to the totality of social relations and their interactions with their constitutive elements i.e. materiality and media —human and nonhuman (body, technology, environments). Violent acts constitute an incomplete set in sociopolitical theory.

Historicity of violence: body and media

Conceding with Walter Benjamin, political analysis of violence requires its historicization insofar as violence takes shape in a temporal dialectic. Sovereignty establishes itself through law-making-violence. To preserve exclusivity of this ability, it retorts to violence. Resisting illegitimate uses of violence may call forth employment of a new round of law-forming violence  – as Nina Simone expresses this dilemma in the context of antiblack racism- in its own turn. Thus, a spiral of violence forms on the stage of history. Here, the figurative distinction between ‘circle’ and ‘spiral’ is significant as in the difference between a tautology that expresses no new meaning and temporal cycles that present the conditions of possibility of surplus meaning.

Classically, the analysis of violence is shaped around three structurally given positions: perpetrator, victim and witness. Along the lines of our analysis of constitution of modern relations of power, separation of these roles into mutually exclusive subjects can be necessary but also misleading and counterproductive. As discussed in the previous chapters, network power in the age of digital technology crosses these neat classifications.

Whenever violence is thought to be controlled under the fig-leaf of law that dispenses non-violent regulation of political community, law and people refer to one another as each other’s possibility of nonviolence. Yet, if any population is an effect of contingent political technologies they do not exist trans-historically immune to the effects of history, thus cannot function as transcendent functions of intelligibility. The circularity is stabilized only in reference to hinging role played by legitimate or otherwise violence of contingent relations of power that binds signifiers with signifieds. Here the characterization of violence is not a postulate of antagonism insofar as the concept metaphorically draws on physics of force. Relation between forces can be one of resistance/imposition or attraction/allure. In either case, the symbolic characterization of violence depends on an interpretation.

Sociological meaning was proposed in different violent conjectures. Inner tensions of class-society in 19th century which were pregnant with social revolutions constituted the background of Marx and Engels’s writings. They have found in capitalism a devastating yet also progressive historical force at play. For them, history is a train that has left the station and awaiting to find its destination as it thunders through political geographies. They laid bare the inherent violence of the state in keeping at bay transformative potential of industrial society. For historical materialism, modern state is first and foremost the repressive arm of the dominant class and its colonialism. Here, the concept of violence is functionalist within a theory of effectivity of Capital. With Althusser’s elaboration of his concept of aleatory and Virilio’s conceptualization of technologically specific accidents, the logic of violence will be made heterogeneous to the logic of value.

Through the use of disciplinary violence over body, the political order functions towards generation of subjectivities. Here, ethnographic study acquires a political status in offering an interpretative framework to otherwise dismissed and trivialized public and private events. Through qualitative studies that work through by documenting the subjective experience of the objective world and the embodied processes of desire and trauma, researchers disclose the symbolic violence in the erasure of political meaning in public discourse and disavowal of incomplete series of irreducible differences (expanding from class to gender, sexuality and race) effectuated through the conflation of universal categories with uniformity and homogeneity.

These multiple layers of meaning challenge the effectivity of disciplinary power over body. Political body is more than a receptacle of power. It presents an inner elaboration of meaning, therefore a possibility of resistance against disciplinary capture. Here, political subjectivity emerges at the risk of entering into an arena of madness in the refusal of official discourse whereby the limits of articulation are tested. Nonverbal modes of communication and feelings get politicized. Where no other language is available, the very exteriority of body is used as a medium to express political messages.