VIOLENCE AND AMBIVALENCE

VIOLENCE AND AMBIVALENCE

Dr. Elizabeth Frazer ISRF Academic Advisor

The thought that ‘violence’ is ‘force out of place’ (Louise Braddock’s formulation, as cited by Andrew Robertson) makes of violence a normative concept—that is, calling an action, an event, a process, or a relationship violent is evaluative, it already implies wrongfulness, badness, deviance. Many thinkers and actors go along with that. State authorities have traditionally called the actions of their military and civil personnel ‘force’, claiming the legitimacy, by legal authorisation, of powers of arrest, imprisonment, physical injury, and the like by officers. But legitimacy is claimed here also by the rhetorical device of differentiation and distinction. The selfsame actions or events that are violent if perpetrated by an ordinary person are force if perpetrated by a police officer. Perhaps more strikingly, activists and critical thinkers also go along with this distinction, insofar as they are concerned to re-classify some allegedly violent actions and events as force. The resistance of protesting groups and classes to the authority and domination that oppresses, exploits and injures should properly be seen as political power and effort, it can be argued. To be sure, sometimes the dynamics of state, authoritative, force in conflict with civil, resistant, force mean an escalation to violence. To understand this as a conflict between state force on the one hand, and social violence on the other, though—which is how disorder in the context of demonstrations or strikes is frequently represented by state authorities and by conventional and social media alike—is unjustly to deny the legitimacy of social force for political purposes. It is also wrongly to allocate responsibility and blame for violence to deviant social actors, rather than to violent state officers and institutions.

So this idea that force can be justified and legitimate, but that perpetrated by the wrong persons, or for the wrong purposes, or in the wrong—excessive, uncontrolled, overly injurious—manner it is violence, and wrongful or bad, has plausibility. A difficulty with such analysis, though, is that it leaves the idea of ‘justified violence’ as a null category. Yet, surely, violence can sometimes be justified, just as sometimes it might not be. We cannot really be satisfied by a conceptual analysis according to which violence cannot be rightful. All this highlights what I think is the inevitable ambivalence in our thinking which holds both that violence is wrong and that some identifications wrongfully deny that violence is violence in order to evade censure; and that violence might be right, and also might be wrong, and that tracking violence as such is not, in itself, to track what is blameworthy.

This ambivalence about violence is matched by an inevitable ambiguity in our conceptualisations of it. A violent action, event, process or relationship will be of such force, velocity and suddenness that it is unevadable by sufferers, and is normally injurious to those sufferers. This, the history of political thinking reveals, is the anchor conceptualisation of violence, the core theme on which variations are played, and from which expansions of the concept proceed. Violence is not necessarily injurious: it can fail to injure, because the recipient is so resilient or resistant, or because of luck, or because of ineptitude on the part of the perpetrator. But such failure does not make the process, event, action or relationship non-violent. Counterfactually, violence injures. A further pressing puzzle about the logic of violence is the push—an ethical push, and a theoretical one—to reason backwards from injury to infer that the process, action, event or relationship that caused it must have been violent. The thought that structured distributions of goods and bads, benefits and burdens, advantages and disadvantages account for premature deaths, for suffering and want—for injury—makes the thought that structures therefore are violent pressing. But logically that violence causes, or even is, injury, does not entail or imply that all injury is caused by, or is an element of violence. There might be other ways of injuring, other causes of injury. Obviously, the point is that there is ethical and political reason to judge that structurally determined injury is blameworthy. This is reason to name the process that injures ‘violence’—as we have seen, that name already encompasses censure. The allocation of responsibility is a political, as much as an ethical or legal matter; the identification of an action, relationship, or process as violent is, itself, a political move. But those who oppose structurally determined injury politically are liable—especially if their political action takes the form of protest—to be accused of violence themselves.

Such ambiguities in interpretations and constructions of violence are evident in Robertson’s reflections on the Question of Violence, and in the other contributions to this Bulletin. In commonplace discourses and practices, the identification of crime with violence, and the identification of violence with a certain kind of person, means in the first place that terrible crimes are overlooked, omitted from the social and political imagination of crime; and second that persons stereotypically associated with ‘violent crime’ are stigmatised and even criminalised by association, independent of any actions of theirs. Henrique Carvalho, in his contribution here, considers the delimited social constructions of both crime and violence such that the acts and omissions of corporations—injurious and deadly though they demonstrably are—are outwith the scope of either category. Jonathan Saha looks back to the Marxist identification of primitive accumulation— of territory, people, resources—as a key moment of violence, going on to focus on how colonial accumulation is, among other things, an accumulation of violence: a building up of a stock of violent practices, violent assumptions, violent relationships, not only between colonisers and colonised people, but also violence perpetrated on animals, on landscapes, on the world. This accumulation means that commodities, artefacts, objects are not only condensations of labour, as in Marxist theory, and the objects of exchange and circulation, but should be analysed as condensations, accumulations, of violence. Both Saha and Carvalho urge the perception of violence in places and phenomena hitherto thought of as innocent of violence.

Beth Epstein considers the contestations in (some) French political discourse and practice, challenging the denial of racism, and state and elite ignoring of structures and patterns of ethnic and cultural difference and disadvantage. Some black women’s groups practice political separatism for the sake of organisation and empowerment by resisting the state-administered, violent policies of integration (which have always co-existed, of course, with elite spatial isolation in suburbs and centres of wealth, and accumulation by endogamy). But Epstein finds in certain banlieues a practical, civic living together—a viable challenge to political separatism, elite segregation, and forcible integration alike. Although she is far less focussed than Saha or Carvalho on re-cognition, re-identification, or re-location of violence, nevertheless this analysis is suggestive of the violence of integration and segregation respectively, and the possibility of a non-violent social, political, life.