“Violence as Dignity”

J.M. Bernstein, Philosophy, The New School

Wednesday, March 16, 2011
5 p.m. | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall | UC Berkeley

In an incident in Auschwitz, Jean Amery describes how, at a particular moment, he was forced to give "concrete form to my dignity by punching a human face." Bernstein's paper will interrogate the thesis, common to Amery and Frantz Fanon, that, as a consequence of the particular character of human embodiment, violent reprisal belongs to the grammar of human dignity.

J.M. Bernstein teaches philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His most recent book is Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting. He is now completing a work provisionally entitled Torture and Dignity.

Part of the Why War? Seminar Series.

Prelude to a Foucaultian Black Swan

A Million Dollar Wacquant

"In a half-coma, I keep hitting and breathing in synch, throwing a punch with every gulp of air I expel. I have the sensation of being mounted on a machinery of which I'm both the engine and a piece" (66).

"Theoretical mastery is of little help so long as the move is not inscribed within one's bodily schema; and it is only after it has been assimilated by the body in and through endless physical drills repeated ad nauseam that it becomes in turn fully intelligible to the intellect. There is indeed a comprehension of the body that goes beyond—and comes prior to—full visual and mental cognizance. Only the permanent carnal experimentation that is training, as a coherent complexus of 'incorporating practices,' can enable one to acquire this practical mastery of the practical rules of pugilism, which precisely satisfies the condition of dispensing with the need to constitute them as such in consciousness" (69).

Erased Lynchings

Ken Gonzales-Day's Erased Lynchings in preparation for our visit to MOMA.

Violence and Sustenance

Violence on the human body is something that seems to be a common part of existence. The objective and subjective violence which Zizek introduced us to are incorporated into the life of any member of the human race. It is important, however, to remember the contexts in which the body finds itself. It is easy to react to common themes, crime and the chaotic nature of life, by inducing fear through reactive appraisals. Therefore, it is essential to an understanding of our state as perceptive students of violence to evaluate those areas where a certain measure of control exists. For those who sell their bodies for money, for those who place themselves into physically harmful situations, we may measure the limits of such interactions. I believe and have experienced a modicum of such bodily resolve. Boxers place themselves and their perception into the fray continually. In Wacquant’s piece, “The Street and the Ring”, one may consider such a life. Life outside of the ring is chaotic and uncertain, especially in the area where Wacquant did his research. Inside, it is tightly measured and considered. This dichotomy relies on a close and personal relationship between the boxer and the manager. It seems an essential component to personal development, especially when contending with the uncertainties of life, to embrace an honest approach to discipline, but more importantly, to these supportive relationships. Otherwise, one may simply be trying to beat down a brick wall of uncertainty their entire life, perpetuating and sustaining an unnecessarily “violent” inner life.

When "Accounts" Go Viral

What are the ethical implications of "accounts" to violence that then become fodder for viral music videos like the one above? Why was the original narrative not treated more seriously? Why does the utterance, "I was attacked by some idiot in the projects," become the stuff of comical hodgepodge such that this video peaked at 89 on the Billboard Hot 100? What is being misrecognized here?

For More: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPAeXI5rN9E&feature=related

Theory and the Self

To begin to unravel symbolic violence, please see this clip starting at Start at 6:03. We might also watch this clip in class. Here Bourdieu clearly delineates the psycho-somatic implications of symbolic violence that renders this theoretical concept more than "mere rhetorical usage" (Collins 24).

This video, from an interesting documentary on a wide variety of philosophical topics titled "Examined Life", addresses aspects of Butler's writing in "Against Ethical Violence": The systemization of interaction; the conception that an individual must facilitate their own 'narrativization' to interact with another person; why the body is a part of this collective rhetoric. This segment also seems to support the insights into address which Butler reflects upon when she writes, "...if there is an ethic to the address, and if judgment, including legal judgment, is one form of address, then the ethical value of judgment will be conditioned by the form of address it takes (Butler 46)." In other words, the value attributed to any interaction is based upon the type of interaction taking place. This seems intuitive, though it is important to recognize how abstract the notion of legality is when encountering someone in need or in danger. This interaction, fashioned by value and the form of judgment-potential, is what we must see as tentative and foreign to reactions of violence in response.

'To Bring an Oeuvre to Life'

I call misrecognition the fact of recognizing a violence which is wielded precisely inasmuch as one does not perceive it as such. / What I put under the term of ‘recognition’, then, is the set of fundamental, prereflexive assumptions that social agents engage by the mere fact of taking the world for granted, of accepting the world as it is, and of finding it natural because their mind is constructed according to cognitive structures that are issued out of the very structures of the world. What I understand by misrecognition certainly does not fall under the category of influence; I never talk of influence. It is not a logic of ‘communicative interaction’ where some make propaganda aimed at others that is operative here. It is much more powerful and insidious than that: being born in a social world, we accept a whole range of postulates, axioms, which go without saying and require no inculcating. This is why the analysis of the doxic [doxa: common belief] acceptance of the world, due to the immediate agreement of objective structures and cognitive structures, is the true foundation of a realistic theory of domination and politics. Of all forms of ‘hidden persuasion’, the most implacable is the one exerted, quite simply, by the order of things…

Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, Symbolic Violence

Just a series of tentative, if not naive questions here:

What do we do with ‘misrecognition’ vis a vis personal behavior? To know there is plenty of misrecognition and to act accordingly? To believe we can interrupt or intervene it by individual behavior is to invite waves of anxiety, isolation, depression— and then the building of subcultures around these behaviors, anxiety, isolation, depression— is this a cost ‘we’ ask one another to pay? This, in a heroic-- but always limited-- attempt to spare one another the costs of daily life? Is that what 'politics' is? A kind of intervention that rests on a 'consciousness' or language? I will have to borrow from some one that kind of youth; I could only hope they would never foreclose.

Working Out Scheper-Hughes

Here are the questions we might want to consider to conclude our conversation about Death without Weeping: As given in the chapter we are reading, does everyday violence lean toward physical violence or structural violence? What does everyday violence look like (pg. 230)? What does the body have to do with violence, bodies worth living, bodies that matter, bodies worth grieving? How might the traffick in children be understood as a form of violence (pg. 239-246)? How can the hospital be understood as a Foucaultian “institution of violence” (pg. 246-249)?

Moldova Confessions

This video features Nancy Scheper-Hughes discussing organ commodification. The man from Moldova also provides a revealing demonstration of Butler's ethical violence. We might consider how Dan Rather's questions are constructing a narrative of victimhood that ends with "Is there anything else that you want to say, anything else that you want to know about this," as if the man's experiences can be tied into a bow and settled in a slogan against organ trafficking. He breaks down. Finally, you might note that the "scar" on his body does the work of giving empirical evidence of his experience.

Favelas

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/11/28/brazil.rio.violence/index.html?eref=edition#

It is interesting to note how incidents like this, on behalf of the military, legitimize the methods of the police. It is assumed that the drug dealers are playing by their own rules instead of adapting to and exploiting a corrupt system. The impoverished people they supposedly prey on do have rights to security, though this "crackdown" comes as a result of the international press and their interest in showcasing the powers of states.

Statement from Vets for Peace on Egypt

Hi folks!

Again, I am mostly just practicing my blogging here in this post and getting familiar with this
format. I recommend everyone check out the Statement from Veterans for Peace, entitled

"Regarding current events in Northern Africa", dated January 31st, 2011.

Please go to their website if you are interested in this statement. You can view it at
www.veteransforpeace.org

Yours in the struggle for a better world,
dogwood

Definitions of Violence(s) For Our Time

Subjective Violence: the most visible violence performed by clearly identifiable agents.

Objective Violence: violence inherent in the “normal” state of things. It is “invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”

There are two types of Objective Violence:
Symbolic Violence: violence embodied in language and its forms, which Heideggar called “our house of being.”
Systemic Violence: violence as a consequence of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.

Physical or interpersonal violence is defined here as the violation of the self by an Other. This violence, what Bourgois calls intimate dimensions of violence, is “directly” (my quotations) physical, emotional, and/or psychological.

Everyday Violence: “Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formulations.”

Structural Violence: “Such suffering is structured by historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces that conspire—whether through routine, ritual, or, as is more commonly the case, these hard surfaces [of suffering itself]—to constrain agency.”

Symbolic violence: “Symbolic violence, to put it tersely and simply as possible, is the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity.”

Ethical Violence: the linguistic-ontological-social demand “that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require others to do the same.” This ethical violence is symptomatic in the requirement for narratives of the self to be given in tight form, in a straight line, with coherence and cohesion and conclusion.

To be sure, you will come across a few more type of violence: psychological, political, cartographic, spatial, disciplinary, etc. We will not define them here, but if you find a violence hobbyhorse, we can always add the term to our constellation of concepts.

This video emerged in June, 2010 in Seattle. It could be New Year's Eve 2009 on the Fruitvale Platform Station. It could be LA 1992; Benton Harbor, 2003; Paris, 2006. A Seattle friend recently forwarded it to twenty of his friends, many of whom defended the police officer. I wrote a basic response that I think in may ways parallels Zizek's project in 'Violence'-- it's an attempt to move from the static, immediate violence of individuals to a longer temporal scale of structural violence. If it is too basic, please forgive. A question I have in coming into this class (admittedly late) is the efficacy of using the term 'violence'-- it seems that this term operates in the moral realm: i.e. force plus morality equals 'violence'. 'Force' could allow us to talk about the possibility of 'liberatory' violence, rupture, insurrection. It seems that we find ourselves left with the (dead?) legacies of the 'violence/non-violence' identity formations assembled in 60s and 70s social movements. How to leave the moral realm? How to address and confront the violence of capital and the state así es?

Without further adieu,

It's hard for me to take this act of force outside the context of the long legacy of state violence against minorities (I would say the euphemism 'people of color' here, but I think 'minority' is more accurate/useful in this specific schemata) in this country. Certain bodies are criminalized by the state while others are not. Criminalization means a lot of things; it means racialized incarceration rates, it means systematic exclusion from certain jobs on the one hand and unions on the other, it means long histories of displacement, it means real estate redlining, it means a cultural arena that presents your gender/sexuality as deviant, it means a racialized disparity of wealth, and sometimes it means a cop punching you in the face, or shooting you-- that is to say, direct force deployed against one's body. I'm not making this up, race informs how someone experiences an institution such as the police department.

Taking this into account, I don't think it's worth considering how scary it is to be a cop. I think we consider and internalize the point of view of the state very often-- if not all the time-- because we're convinced that we have a stake in ‘maintaining state power’/‘the social situation as is/a national stability. On the other hand I do think it's worth considering how scary it is to be pushed around by some man with a gun who represents the state (which is to say, he represents court hours, possible fines, possible jail time, the real possibility losing one's jobs, one's federal grants, one's children, etc.) for crossing the street-- just because he can humiliate her. And if she didn't fight back, as limited as it was, then it would have meant that she didn't know what the police are, but in fact, as she shows, she does. It's unfortunate to me that the others around didn't step up for her, to get the cop to leave. For me her fighting is about dignity, it's about context. We don't seriously understand what that cop's act of force is-- that is to say, beyond a 'did she deserve to be punched in the face?', which is really to ask 'didn't she ASK for it?'-- until we understand WHY she is in the position of being punched in the face by a strong arm of the state. What she demonstrates in her fighting is that she understands why. We can only hope to catch up.

Our Movie Monday

"The exemplary figures of evil today are not ordinary consumers who pollute the environment and live in a violent world of disintegrating social links, but those who, while fully engaging in creating conditions of such universal devastation and pollution, buy their way out of their own activity, living in gated communities, eating organic food, taking holidays in wildlife preserves, and so on" (Zizek 27).

Zizek

“This paradox signals a sad predicament of ours: today’s capitalism cannot reproduce itself on its own. It needs extra-economic charity to sustain the cycle of social reproduction.” (Zizek 24)

Zizek asserts that the needs of capitalism are hidden by bland and tepid policies and philosophies. Billionaires cajoling their stockholders with "ruthless speculation" while assuaging the guilt of their common public consumers with huge investments in progressive policy and intellectualism. This desire to fuel their idealism through continued assertion of a violent system exposes our own fallacious desire to participate in the system. Our good intentions are flavored by real ascetic commitments to systematic change on behalf of those on the receiving end, on the wrong side of the tracks; those desperate to take some sort of dignity away from these boundless speculative capitalists.

I am not quite sure where Zizek hopes to release his activism. In new systems? Nihilism? The system cannot change on its own. It refuses to.

Alex

David Kato, Gay Rights Activist, Is Killed in Uganda - NYTimes.com

David Kato, Gay Rights Activist, Is Killed in Uganda - NYTimes.com

"My underlying premise is that there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with it [violence]: the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking. A dispassionate conceptual development of the typology of violence must by definition ignore its traumatic impact" (Zizek 4).

The challenge presented by Zizek is a difficult one: how can we not be horrified by the senseless murder of David Kato? I, for one, cannot escape from the grief, disappointment, and anger of another life lost to closed-mindedness and intolerance. I can, however, use the conceptual framework of violence offered by Zizek to move beyond my instinctual reaction for a "SOS call to stop violence" and proceed to an "analysis of that other SOS, the complex interaction of the three modes of violence."

The basic fact of the physical, subjective violence of Kato's murder is clear. Nothing more needs to be said here. The objective, ideological violence of the hate crime against an openly gay man in Uganda is also clear, as is the role of the American Evangelicals who arrived in Uganda to perpetuate their Christianity-driven homophobia. The third piece of Zizek's triumvirate of violence, systemic violence, is also visible in the murder of David Kato. It seems that Ugandan political leaders were contemplating a new law that would sentence openly gay men and women to the death penalty. Such intolerance for basic human rights by members of the Ugandan political system basically sanctioned and encouraged the horrible act undertaken by Kato's killers.

A thorough analysis of violence must, as Zizek alludes, take into account the interaction of these three forms of violence. I realize that my analysis of Kato's murder using Zizek's conceptual framework of violence is brief. However, I believe that it can serve as a useful starting point for providing a more complete account of hate crimes against gay men and women and make visible the invisible forms of violence.

Time: June 5, 2006

"When the media bombard us with those 'humanitarian crises' which seem constantly to pop up all over the world, one should always bear in mind that a particular crisis only explodes into media visibility as the result of a complex struggle. ... To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim to the struggle for hegemony in suffering. It should have struck to the list of usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, or the families of 9/11 victims and how they have coped with their losses" (Zizek 2008:3).

Course Description

This cross-disciplinary course will explore and evaluate various forms of violence: physical, psychological, everyday, structural, symbolic, and ethical. We will critically plumb the depths of an expanded violence—beyond the folk notion of violence as synonymous with physical force—to determine whether an enlarged understanding of violence offers analytical value. Taking violence to task will allow us to interrogate the fertility and futility of potentially substituting violence for ethnoracial domination, gender domination, transphobia, colonial domination, poverty, state abandonment, and other categories of social coercion and inequality.

The course will be divided in four sections. The first section will focus on charting theoretical territory. The next three sections will foreground violence in relation to the body, space, and the state, respectively, by navigating more concrete empirical cases while continuing to broaden our theoretical terrain. The sequence from the ostensibly specific and personal body to the seemingly remote and impersonal state will guide us into rendering visible otherwise invisible forms of violence. Finally, this course will appraise whether an expanded notion of violence can be traced on and through the body as a social object available for social scientific inquiry and analysis.

The ultimate goals of the course are to familiarize students with various theories on violence, to introduce students to the violence literature, and to provide students with an enriched social scientific vocabulary to question and critique multifarious forms of coercion.