FORCE-OUT-OF-PLACE

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

To 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 to fiction and Russian fiction (Elizabeth Frazer discussed War and Peace) as supreme expressions of violence and our understandings of it: in other words, recommended reading for social scientists.

I thought of the backwater physician in Chekhov’s story Ward Six, who aspires to evidence-based practice but is starved of conversation, and falls into the dangerous habit of participant observation. And Chekhov’s medical student in A Nervous Breakdown revising for exams, idly painting the internal organs onto the skin of a prostitute who is doomed (by the gentry, by inequality) to disease. Etymologically, and like matter-out-of-place, force-out-of-place is suggestive of a close relationship between violence and obscenity.

This was something touched upon by several of the research presentations, as well as group discussions and artistic performances: issues of euphemism and dirty language (including gesture, sick jokes, officialese) for distasteful reality; degrees of “un/say-ability”; sexual violence as constitutive or side-effect of policy; “dirty wars”. Among them Martin Thomas and Deana Heath on colonial violence in Algeria and India respectively, and Catherine Charrett on Palestine and the Oslo Accords. In short, someone or their actions could be out of place as a matter of geography or culture, law, ethics or aesthetics. War and empire produce lasting ruptures across all these domains, and more.

On the smaller scale, any experience of social mixing may produce a feeling of being out of place. Several participants reported suffering “impostor syndrome” in the academy, or particularly when studying violence without knowing if it makes a positive difference. Social research itself can be a form of violence. But so too, I suppose, can its absence be.

Among the crimes of war—or everyday governance—is to make someone out of place wherever they are: to render them stateless, nameless and faceless; or as shown in Greg Constantine’s portraits of Myanmar’s Rohingya, at the same time the opposite: named, documented and photographed to excess, by an excess of the state (obliterating individuals, communities and cultures). The medieval formula for excommunication made a similar point: damnation attached to every part of a person’s body, at all times and in the course

of all bodily functions. 3 In the bureaucracy-enabled age, whether through card indexes, hate radio, or the bureaucracy in your pocket (social media), the spectre of concentration camps never fully recedes. Daria Martin’s film Tonight the World retrieved the trauma of forced displacement in the face of Nazism through the unusual route of a grandmother’s dream diaries (and Mark Whitehead looked at why some are quitting the biggest collective diary in history, Facebook).

But after the Twentieth Century’s horrors how do we get there, again, of all places? In the pre-conference event we had listened to militarization as lived experience (Lucy Newby; Sophy Gardner): for militaries and paramilitaries, even for minors who are not (or not yet) recruited, and we discussed that this involves detachment—even dissociation. But, the two last sessions insisted, violence also has to do with attachment— hence our basic human capacities and how they are first acquired. Between the two is an ambiguity in the concept, and an ambivalence in our attitudes (Elizabeth Frazer). Many would agree that force has a place in some situations, genuine self-defence among them. And for many of us this extends to the use of lethal force. This suggests further formulations: violence as “force-out-of-place-in-place” (just war or just violation, as variously discussed by Cian O’Driscoll, Craig Jones and Rita Floyd) versus “force-out-of-place-out-of-place” (wars of aggression; wars on your own population or biosphere—Peter Newell, Alexander Stingl and Jonathan Saha presented on environmental themes). Violence can be a challenge to order, or it can be part of the order. For Max Weber, the state is that which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of… force-out-of-place. Significantly, he attaches legitimacy via a successful claim to the monopoly on the authorization of the use of violence, not the violence directly, hence the legitimacy involves a positive (empirical) element. 4

Whether to call dispossession “economic/slow/structural violence” was not a matter of complete consensus, but other research along these lines included Sarah Marie Hall on reproductive inequality (focusing on childlessness) under austerity; Alan Thomas on the winners and losers of post-2008 global financial policy; Robin Smith on monopoly and coercive demonetization in Croatian agriculture; and Gábor Scheiring on Hungary’s double transition from state socialism to its vaunted illiberal democracy. Perhaps we did not discuss anti-EU, illiberal democracy ‘closer to home’ in the UK, because there are so many other interesting and urgent things to discuss (and of course, distracting the public with English nationalism for three years and counting may have something to do with this).

But for me and no doubt for others, Brexit was an invisible thread connecting many of the presentations—not least Michael Waite’s account of the BNP (British National Party, now defunct) when it was elected to local government in Burnley, and Burn/t Out, Casey Asprooth-Jackson and Brendan Ciarán Browne’s exhibition about displacement in Northern Ireland. The latter reminded us how far polarization can go: to a point where loss of a home comes far down the list of deserving traumas and griefs. 5 Those based in mainland Great Britain do need reminding, it seems, despite Northern Ireland having been thoroughly criss-crossed by social science (compounding what local inhabitants refer to as a sort of collective “memory fatigue”). On this side of the Irish Sea, Belfast’s pristine street murals remain the faithful prop of television news; political graffiti was Athena Hadji’s subject, and specifically, its selective erasure in a politically sensitive site of Athens. 6

Another theme that did not come up much was violence as part of nature, nature as red in tooth and claw, or humans as “naterally wicious”. 7 Alexander Stingl’s discussion of global biomass policy, for example, was very much focused on the institutions—such as corporate law firms—that draw the boundaries of nature in practice. Many of the presentations having an empirical focus, the articulation of a unifying theoretical framework for violence at different scales was not of central concern (Claudio Lanza on mimetic rivalry was among the exceptions). There may also have been a collective concern not to legitimize violence by naturalizing it; the panel discussions kept their distance from both rational choice accounts and “spontaneous” violence, instead emphasizing social organization with specific histories.

So what stage of history, of violence-accumulation or accumulationviolence (to follow Jonathan Saha) are we in now? Hyper-specialization (including in universities), risk management, possibly even a weaponization of everyday life (branding as identity, or love-out-ofplace), even where there is relative stability. During the group work on violence and humour, many of us reflected on the populist turn as a kind of false comic relief, whereby entrepreneurs of entertainment and transgression (politicians as comedians, clowns or licensed fools—but who take risks with others, not themselves) are adept at by turns ventilating and ramping up the tensions in our societies. Populism, then, can involve humour-out-of-place. If it also carries the threat of authoritarianism—not allowing people to think—then a narrowing of humour (toward that which is threat- or rivalry-based, or instrumentalised) might be among the cultural casualties. In authoritarian regimes, laughter has been much studied as a form of non-violent resistance, escapism, compromise or concession to truthtelling. “Explaining the joke” aside, participants did maintain their own sense of humour: a necessary piece of equipment for social enquiry.

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.

3. As recorded by Ernulf, Bishop of Rochester: ‘May he be cursed wherever he be, whether in the house or the stables, the garden or the field, or the highway, or in the path, or in the wood, or in the water, or in the church. May he be cursed in living, in dying, in eating and drinking, in hungering and thirsting, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in standing, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in bloodletting. May he be cursed in all the faculties of his body…’.

4. ‘Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions beginning with the sib have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory (…) at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it.’ (Emphases added.) Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1918), <http://fs2.american.edu/ dfagel/www/Class%20Readings/Weber/PoliticsAsAVocation.pdf>

5. What makes the downplaying of historic forced displacement in Northern Ireland striking, perhaps, is that housing inequalities were among the proximate causes of inter-communal conflagration in the late 1960s. Arguably, mass homelessness has been gradually normalized in mainland Britain since the 1980s, but in circumstances that can be presented as apolitical and largely the results of failures and choices at a personal level. Jacob Rees- Mogg’s statement that Grenfell Tower victims lacked the “common sense” to disobey the London Fire Brigade’s stay-put policy (early in the 2019 general election campaign) is only the starkest example of that. Rees-Mogg subsequently apologised and adopted a lower profile.

6. And on that basis (foregrounding paramilitary motifs) convey a city apparently looking to the past. But there are many murals in Belfast that contest this, and look instead to a less divided future.

7. A recurring phrase in Great Expectations. See Chapter 5 of Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Harvard University Press, 1992) on the manifestations of repressive order in Dickens’ novel.