11 Violence
Three perspectives
“Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
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]. His claims were later shown to be based on misinterpretation of visual evidence. Yet his presentation changed the public perception regarding the imminent war. According to PEW Research Center: “Powell’s address had a significant impact on U.S. public opinion, even among those who were opposed to war. Roughly six-in-ten adults (61%) said Powell had explained clearly why the United States might use military force to end Hussein’s rule; that was greater than the share saying Bush had clearly explained the stakes in Iraq (52%).”
“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
“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, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
Problematizing violence
Socio-politically, violence has intersecting instrumental and expressive dimensions (Riches, 1986; Aretxaga, 2005). According to Max Weber, the state claims a monopoly over its legitimate use. Thus, under the rule of law, violence is not annulled but absorbed into the body of the state. In a democratic society, the 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 the undefinable concept of infinity and the always-already determined identity of society, there is a 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 emerge 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 of the existence of a generalized state of exception (Feldman 1991).
Yet the intelligibility and expressivity of these inscriptions will vary depending on the availability of an abstract language. Only in reference to a theoretical understanding of violence, its mechanical reduction to mere application of force across corporeality of bodies and materiality can be deepened in order to attend to its psychology and relation to informatics/cybernetics (Aretxaga 2005, p. 204; Clough 2008). Even though it stands at the limit of meaning, violence carries a potential for signification, often because of its very limit-forming and limit-breaking character. The very collapse of meaning calls forth a search for restoration or creation of something to fill the void. Conversely, forceful creation of new meaning through synthesis or transduction of what used to be separate incite a chain-reaction where new networks of meaning proliferate across language. From art to testimonies, from scientific accounts to cultural memorialization events of violence have an intimate connection to signification. From the model of political bodies blocking a street and creating an autonomous zone to the algorithmic serialization of affect through digital temporality, in the 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 the 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. In such a situation, the identification of non-violence is also problematic.
If there is no similar claim to a 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 the dispersed flow of humans caught in metastable conditions of precarity; then the Weberian orientation that foundationally shapes classical political sociological understanding proves to be insufficient for contemporary political realities.
- Research the history of the United Nations —its conditions of emergence, evolutions, and the different roles it played in the last century. To what extent have the United Nations been successful in avoiding the outbreak of conflict or terminating the further continuation of violence? What are the instruments available to the UN? What are its limitations?
- Compare the work of the political body of the UN Security Council to UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).
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 demands 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 reality of violence—where the mathematical physics of force impossibly meet the value, meaning, and non-identity of political action—eschews centering and standardization. As a result, the state cannot function as the epistemological arbiter of the status of violence. Both the social text that gives violence meaning and the media that carry the message across spacetimes traverse the transcendental posture of the state. There is no atemporal transhistoricity of the state present uniformly across epochs. Of the status of the that which is external to the state, Deleuze and Guattari write 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 that Deleuze and Guattari employ two registers. Rights and images. Exteriority is the ground on which rights are asserted and images are offered. The former is already encoded in the juridical epistemology and the 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.
An ill-defined concept —with good reasons.
- Violence has physical and symbolic definitions. It is a vector of force, a quantifiable and locatable phenomenon. But what distinguishes any movement of a body from violent activity is purely a theoretical matter. In fact, the absence of force, identifiable only in reference to a preceding theoretical framework, can itself be seen as violent as in neglect, withholding and indifference.
- Violence operates on the measurable and immeasurable qualities of the unit of life. As this basic unit lends itself to quantification, the study of violence becomes a standardized field by means of rates and statistics. As life gains meaning only in relation to political contexts, this preceding universalization of category itself becomes a type of violence. The question becomes whether it is legitimate or not.
- The concept of justice hangs on the possibility of measure and proportionality. The inherent tensions of the concept of violence deconstruct the normative grounds of justice. Politics grow among the ruins of deconstructed justice.
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 with respect to meaning-making processes emerging out of different modes and mediums of interpretation.
Through 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 the bond with the family unit achieved? The inevitable style involved in differentiation displays creative capacities inherent to subjective meaning-making processes. National independence is also the 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 allow for the solidification of the relative arbitrariness of symbolic decisions and demarcations —flags, borders, codes, histories. In culture, by transgressing the symbolic binary organization of culture (e.g., man/woman; father/mother; active/passive etc.) that ensures its predictable continuity and reproduction, the free play of meaning asserts a 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.
Sense and Senselessness
“This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that man was surrounded by a fearful void—he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He also suffered otherwise, he was in the main a sickly animal: but his problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question, “why do I suffer?“ ” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
“Why God, why God do I gotta suffer?Pain in my heart carry burdens full of struggleWhy God, why God do I gotta bleed?Every stone thrown at you restin’ at my feetWhy God, why God do I gotta suffer?Earth is no more, why don’t you burn this muhf-?(I don’t think I could find a way to make it on this earth)”
Kendrick Lamar, Alan Maman, Dale Warren; FEAR.
“The philosopher of tragic insight (Erkenntnis). He restrains the uncontrolled drive toward knowledge, but not through a new metaphysic. He does not set up a new faith. He feels the vanishing of the metaphysical ground as a tragic event and cannot find a satisfying compensation for it in the motley spiraling of the sciences. . . . One must willingly accept even illusion-therein lies the tragedy.”
“Tragic resignation. God knows what sort of culture it will yield! It begins from the back end”
Cited by Marianne Cowan in her introduction to F. Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic age of the Greeks (p. 16)
What study of violence affords
Through the study of violence, scholars can trace the development of technology in the context of political struggles. While in historical materialism, technology is conceived as the technology of the production of social life, this production theoretically means production of both economical value and political relations of production such as the law and the means of repression. Thus, as much as it is commonplace to think of means of production as economical means in the narrow sense, means of production are also means of violence, i.e., the capacity for extracting value (stealing according to class interest, as the hyperlinked interview with Nina Simone lays bare).
Crossing the binary of the powerful and the powerless, the ideological acceptance of colonization either as opportunistic collaboration or as the only exit from the preceding relations of power further complicates the matrix of development. Analogous to the calculation of the 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, thus rendering both the visibility and the measure of violence, as well as its compensation/expiation, further murky still. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten suggest that perhaps there is a distinction between brutality and violence.
It is possible that in social theory economic 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, consciously or unconsciously, 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
As Walter Benjamin pointed out, the 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 the exclusivity of this ability, it resorts to violence. Resisting illegitimate uses of violence may call forth the employment of a new round of law-forming violence— e.g., 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 the constitution of modern relations of power, the 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, that is, they are not immune to the effects of history in their very categorization, thus the category of population and actual populations cannot function as transcendent functions of intelligibility. The circularity is stabilized only in reference to hinging role played by the violence (legitimate or otherwise) 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 the physics of force. The 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 conjunctures. The inner tensions of class-society in the 19th century—which were pregnant with social revolutions—constituted the background of Marx and Engels’s writings. They discovered in capitalism a devastating yet also progressive historical force at play. For them, history is a train that has left the station and is awaiting to find its destination as it thunders through political geographies. They laid bare the inherent violence of the state in keeping at bay the transformative potential of industrial society. For historical materialism, the modern state is first and foremost the repressive arm of the dominant class and its colonialism. Here, the concept of violence takes on a functionalist character within a theory of the effectivity of Capital. With Althusser’s elaboration of his concept of the aleatory (i.e., random or chance) historical developments 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 the body, the political order functions towards the 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 document and work through 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 the 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 the body. The political body is more than a receptacle of power. It presents an inner elaboration of meaning, and 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 the body is used as a medium to express political messages.
This is the line of research developed in the feminist anthropologist Begoña Aretxaga’s ethnographic excavation of the Dirty Protest of Irish political prisoners. In this work, she critiques the lack of an elaboration of the unconscious in theories of violence and power, such as theories of disciplinary violence and its investment in the body (Aretxaga 1995), which often merely follow a bureaucratic, disembodied logic devoid of unconscious motivations and feelings. In her psychological reading, the very particular almost senseless acts of resistance developed in response to the stripping of the political status of prisoners—whereby they were no longer permitted to wear their clothes instead of prison uniforms— have to be conceptualized on the grounds of unconscious bodily elaboration of a meaningful response to the colonizer’s discourses and techniques of infantilization.
She argues that as long as bodies are conceptualized merely as surfaces where political instrumental reason inscribes itself on the mute moldable body and in the response of prisoners, as weapons wielded by political intentionality that’s essentially external to animating bodily affects, the unconscious bodily sources of the creation of exceptionally idiosyncratic acts of resistance to control, such as smearing walls with feces and menstrual blood would be inexplicable. Yet these very acts also bear quasi-universal traits in the way different cultures operationalize the body to express meaning. Before discursive language, infants communicate through the nonverbal medium of their body. Political language has deep roots in the domain of the archetypical language of culture and the unconscious dynamics of psychological development.
If the body has an active unconscious memory and affective dynamism beyond rational inscriptions and conscious decision-making, it can then display the subjective reception of the excess of rationalist techniques of disciplinary power by laying bare the colonialist, infantilizing, and gendered meaning of the power relations through the work of condensation done on the primordial symbols and bodily excreta (Freud 1955, 345). Through the body, the effaced dimension of sexuality also breaks through whereby women’s use of menstrual blood disrupts the asexual language of politics haunting the sterility of public discourse. Thus, particular experiences of subjectivity, that of violence and resistance, is conceptualized to open up a critique of the hegemony of rationalist structuralism in academic readings of the cultural and political domain. (Aretxaga 1995). This makes possible an attention to subjectivity and experience before their sacrifice to the formation of discourse (Bataille 1988 ). Thereby, it becomes possible to argue that the body carries with itself also a nonverbal archive of political time.
Here, a theory of the unconscious is critical to understanding political meaning. The subject is not transparent to herself. Subjects are formed at the intersection of both historical discourses and bodily affects which are themselves informative. Excited, anxious, serious; the body’s affect stands at the limit of discourse’s ability to inscribe physicality with meaning from outside. Language, or the textuality at large is crossed by different ontological registers. Here, the unconscious is a domain of elaboration, similar to the way Georges Bataille spoke of the sovereignty of aesthetic composition (Bataille, 1993).
The unconscious, as the irreducible, withdrawn-yet-present blind spot of subjective meaning-making, establishes relations of power beyond conscious registers. Power becomes psychological. The dominant mode of warfare, counter-insurgency, permanently affecting both Western and non-Western societies in the 21st century, operationalizes psychology to achieve a variety of political aims (Khalili, 2012). Not so different than the production of consent, to psychologize here means something more complex than the generation of desire for a war-effort and the alignment of subjectivities with the dominant economic order—without, however, necessarily contradicting these powerful forces. The chain that connects political will to the subject’s participation might involve more than the single step of linking personal desire with political aims through leveraging of salaries or social validation. Unconscious elaboration across interpersonal networks enveloping both human and nonhuman bodies eschew linear causation as the pervasive and essentially unstandardized character of violence produce unpredictable effects. As Spivak suggests, perhaps there is the possibility of reabsorbing the value created before its appropriation—if only one is fast enough or one knows how to maneuver.
“Body as Missile—We take up our place or places in the social order not just as disembodied minds, but as corporeal beings. The concept of “identification” often inclines us toward thinking exclusively of a cognitive process, a feat of imagination. However, the mimetic propensity activated by conflict and aggravated by television is an ontological matter, involving the physical presence as much as, if not more than, ideation.”
Drawing on Kleinian psychoanalysis, Joseph Redfearn (1992) speaks of “an explosive self.” Moving beyond pure mechanics of weaponry, the splintering is given an unconscious determination. Here critical media theory finds a resonance between private psychic mechanisms (such as splitting, projecting parts of the self) and postmodern war-based governance (Broughton 1996). Synthesizing the psychoanalytical concept of our imaginary access to (political) reality (the lived world is something imagined not just perceived) with new speeds invented through projectiles, a dynamic and historically specific concept of affect-as-information (Clough, 2008) can arguably be developed. This will counter and substitute the commonplace perception of digital content as something instantaneous with varying speeds of connecting and disconnecting, accelerating and decelerating reality. Here, reality is never merely given but composed in an ongoing fashion. The processual conception of time deconstructs linearity and thereby creates the conditions of possibility of novelty. This can be best summarized as the constant conjunction of historicity with experimentation.
After the technical affordance of instantaneous communication through radio-broadcasting and live TV (Heidegger, 1999, 91-98; Dienst 1994), realism and immediacy are reinvented with different premises serving not only the compensatory and witnessing needs of subjects but also the expansion of governmental apparatus. Realism is operationalized in war-making efforts during the live broadcasting of the 1st Iraq War. The cameras attached to the endpoint of dropping missiles and imitating homemade videos in their low-pixel quality had created an intimacy across civilian population and the military by way of identifying with the first-person view of warfare (Broughton, 1996). As a result, affective investment in warfare was achieved through the call to witness and identify with the war effort, entangling the domestic population in the US with war fronts elsewhere. Thus, there is a circular resonance established between the local psyche and the politically operationalized weaponry similar to the circularity mentioned earlier in between the people and the law.
“Destructive acts may seem the absolute antithesis of communication. We commonly hear of “random” violence, “senseless” brutality, or the “madness” of war. Typically, if any meaning is attributed to an act of destruction it is, at best, restricted to an instrumental purpose: the achievement of some goal, such as the acquisition of territory, the monopolization of a valued resource, or perhaps just the distancing of self from other. Nevertheless, violence-however “antisocial”-possesses no less meaning than any “social” act. If anything, its destructiveness may witness a surplus of meaning (Bataille, 1988a), a spilling-over not of formless aggression but of pointed, poignant emotion, stemming from excessive, idealized ambitions, extreme guilt, or even an overly acute sense of justice (Klein, 1977a). From this point of view, the trajectories of munitions reinstate-in however abstract, stereotyped, or dangerous a manner-the desire for communicative contact.” (Broughton, p. 146)
Coda | Carbon Democracy: Political power in the age of oil, Timothy Mitchell, 2013
In this work, Mitchell threads the logics of energy-production, political economy, geopolitics and the possibility of democratic self-governance. Countering the orthodoxy of political scientific literature, he challenges the explanatory power of mere oil-revenue used as a bribe to ward off democratic demands of the population by the local autocratic regimes. Instead, a deep historical analysis is offered to explain how the very process of production and movement of energy-sources offer and limit the possibilities of political action beyond the universal equivalent of money acting as a epistemological suspensor. Students are invited to delve into this seminal work to explore how the transnational logic of Capital interact with so-called local contexts such as custom and religion.
- According to Mitchell, under what conditions are repressive instruments such as military intervention or paramilitary acts used?
- How does the history of energy-production challenge the association of liberal democracies with the intensification of non-violent communicative action in the expanding public sphere?
- How do the very liberal countries professing a commitment to the freedom of public speech stand against the formation of deliberative mechanisms in the region?
- How do you think the epistemology of race can become productive and counterproductive in understanding the operativity of violence and the establishment of dominance in the region, considering the strategies used during public relations campaigns and shifting alliances established between Western and Middle-Eastern powers?
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