FORCE-OUT-OF-PLACE Reflections on the ISRF Annual Workshop 2019, “The Question of Violence” Andrew Robertson Andrew Robertson is a freelance editor and teaches on a political/media literacy programme for pre-university students
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o begin at the end: I found the formulation of violence as “force out of place” (offered by the Director of Research) a productive thought for the closing session. My immediate association was with the concept of dirt, which Mary Douglas once defined as “matter out of place”.1 For the unprecedented numbers of human beings on the move—whether as voluntary migrants, internally displaced persons or refugees—being spoken of and treated as matter-out-of-place is, well, commonplace. The same is true of many overlapping experiences of colonization, labour, and incarceration. Lauren Martin and Ilay Ors showed how waves of migration overlap with each other and with previous histories of containment, for example where new arrivals are crammed into former prisons and mental hospitals, or forced into cashless economies. Not for nothing does Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago refer, with bitterest irony, to “A history of our sewage disposal system”.2 (Are the water metaphors we have just used, or as they appear in the tabloid press, any less dehumanizing? What about “cesspools” of crime?) Speaking of prison literature, the penultimate session threw up Gramsci (courtesy of Andrea Ruggeri) but also a surprising number of references 1. Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Purity and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 2. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. T.P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), chapter 2. 27
