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THINKING AGAINST VIOLENCE

We are immersed in a relentless stream of real and virtual violence. How can we break the cycle?

Natasha Lennard interviews Brad Evans

December 16, 2015

Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer whose work specializes on the problem of violence. The author of ten books and edited volumes, and over fifty articles, he serves as a Reader in Political Violence at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, the University of Bristol, UK. He is the founder and director of the Histories of Violence Project.

Natasha Lennard: The premise of your book Disposable Futures is that “violence is ubiquitous” in the media today. There seems to be plenty of evidence to support this claim—just look at the home page of this news site for a start. But the media has always been interested in violence—“if it bleeds, it leads” isn’t exactly new. And the notion that there is just more violence in the world today—more violent material for the media to cover—doesn’t seem tenable. So what do you think is specific about the ubiquity of violence today, and the way it is mediated?

Brad Evans: It is certainly right to suggest the connections between violence and media communications have been a recurring feature of human relations. We only need to open the first pages of Aeschylus’s Oresteia to witness tales of victory in battle and its communicative strategies—on this occasion the medium of communication was the burning beacon. But there are a number of ways in which violence is different today, in terms of its logics intended, forced witnessing, and ubiquitous nature.

We certainly seem to be entering into a new moment, where the encounter with violence (real or imagined) is becoming more ubiquitous and its presence ever felt. Certainly this has something to do with our awareness of global tragedies as technologies redefine our exposure to such catastrophic events. But it also has to do with the raw realities of violence and people’s genuine sense of insecurity, which, even if it is manufactured or illusionary, feels no less real.

One of the key arguments I make throughout my work is that violence has now become the defining organizational principle for contemporary societies. It mediates all social relations. It matters less if we are actual victims of violence. It is the possibility that we could face some form of violent encounter that shapes the logics of power in liberal societies today. Our political imagination as such has become dominated by multiple potential catastrophes that appear on the horizon. The closing of the entire Los Angeles city school system after a reported terrorist threat yesterday is an unsettling reminder of this. From terror to weather and everything in between, insecurity has become the new normal. We see this played out at global and local levels, as the effective blurring between older notions of homeland/battlefields, friends/enemies, and peace/war has led to the widespread militarization of many everyday behaviors—especially in communities of color.

None of this can be divorced from the age of new media technologies, which quite literally puts a catastrophic world in our hands. Indeed, not only have we become forced witnesses to many tragic events that seem to be beyond our control (the source of our shared anxieties), but also accessible smart technologies are now redefining the producer and audience relationships in ways that challenge the dominance of older medias.

A notable outcome of this has been the shift toward humanized violence. I am not only talking about the ways in which wars have been aligned with humanitarian principles. If forms of dehumanization hallmarked the previous Century of Violence, in which the victim was often removed from the scene of the crime, groups such as ISIS foreground the human as a disposable category. Whether it is the progressive liberal, the journalist, the aid worker, or the homosexual, ISIS put the human qualities of the victims on full broadcast.

One could argue that by focusing on “humanity” when considering acts of violence—the human face of victims—we assert that the human is in fact indispensable (we might think of, say, newspaper paeans to victims after massacres). But you argue that this does the reverse and that violence-as-humanized and human disposability go together. Can you explain this a little further?

What we are engaging with here are two distinct types of violence, which, although appearing separate, often link and connect in subtle yet complex ways. On the one hand, we can point to the widespread disposability of human populations, those countless, nameless, and faceless victims, who experience violence often. Such populations live out a wide range of human insecurities, indignities, oppressions, and hardships. Yet these “disposable” populations, which are often contained, at times overspill their confinement to reveal the violence of the hidden order of politics. This is true whether we are talking about the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been galvanized by the spectacle of police brutality, or the bodies of refugee children like Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed up on the shores of a Turkish beach.

On the other hand, we have more orchestrated spectacles of violence, from real events to cultural and entertainment productions, which prove to be deeply significant in the normalization of violence and in producing the conditions for violence to come. We can explain this in terms of the interplay between disposable lives and sacrificial violence, onto claims for militaristic forms of justice. A number of philosophers have attended to the relationship between violence and the sacred. What concerns me are the ways in which sacrificial victims become loaded with symbolic meaning to sanction further violence and destruction. That is to say, how the spectacle of a truly intolerable moment is politically appropriated to sanction further violence in the name of the victims.

We have seen a terrifying example following the recent attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino. As the Islamic State, or ISIS, continues to push the spectacle of violence to the nth degree, it brings together the sacrificial and the disposable in challenging ways. ISIS has a clear strategy that seeks to maximize its exposure through the most intimate forms of sacrificial violence. There is, however, a further outcome to its violence; it creates the very conditions in which a violent response becomes inevitable. Its violence seeks to create disposable futures. By focusing precisely on populations which are actually most likely to resist the calls for further war and violence, what is effectively witnessed is an assault on the imagination and the ability to steer history in a different direction.

Faced with such spectacles, our complex range of emotions—sadness, horror, fear, anger, and concerns for the safety of families, friends, and loved ones—are consistently mobilized to justify a violent and militaristic response. Or as President François Hollande of France recently remarked, what’s now needed is the purest form of justice, a “pitiless war,” as if the previous age of violence was somehow marked by compassion. This raises serious questions about how we might even think about breaking the cycle of violence, as the future already appears to be violently fated.

It seems that the media only access the humanity and struggle of oppressed populations once we have had (literal, visual) exposure to spectacular violence enacted on their bodies. I think of the example you cite—of the child Aylan Kurdi dead on the Turkish beach or of the unarmed teen Michael Brown’s body seen lying in the Ferguson street for three and a half hours. And that the corpses of privileged white people are often not used as a media spectacle in the West (indeed, publications and social media platforms scramble to ban ISIS execution videos). Does part of our world being “violently fated,” as you say, relate to the fact that we often only find empathy and solidarity after we’ve seen people as victims of violence?

There is also a need to be mindful here of the power relationships invested in what we might term the mediation of suffering. How we encounter and narrate the spectacle of violence today is subjected to overt politicization, which prioritizes certain forms of suffering, and, in doing so, concentrates our attentions on those deaths that appear to matter more than others. Politics in fact continues to be fraught with claims over the true victims of historical forces. Part of our task then remains to reveal those persecuted figures subjected to history’s erasure. But we need to go further. Indeed, while much has already been written about the recurring motif of the victim in terms of developing forms of solidarity and togetherness, there is also a need to be mindful today of the appropriation of the humanitarian victim—who is now a well-established political figure—for the furtherance of violence and destruction in the name of global justice.

In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argues that there is objectively less violence in the world, but it is not clear to me how we could or whether we should quantify the history of violence in this way. It makes no sense, to me, to say there is more or less violence now than ever. Or at least I would challenge any attempt to do so as problematically historicist—privileging our current notions of what violence even is as something timeless and unchanged throughout history. But we can talk about a spreading spectacle and its qualities. How do you respond to efforts and findings of Pinker, which are being popularly accepted?

There are a number of issues to address here. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that many dedicated organizations and individuals are doing tremendously important work documenting the casualties of war and conflict. Whether we are talking about the meticulous research involved in revealing the forgotten testimonies of victims, or efforts to record and detail the “collateral damages” of more recent campaigns, these measures are crucial in holding power to account. No life should be collateral. This requires recording and continued vigilance.

Yet, as you intimate, there is a need to avoid falling into the methodological trap set by the likes of Pinker. Not only does his work lead to the most remiss historicism as violence can be judged in terms of various scales of annihilation, it is ethically and politically compromised in the extreme. These attempts to offer quantitative reflections on violence in fact lead precisely to the forms of utilitarian calculations through which some forms of violence are continually justified or presented as the “least worse.” As a result, the human dimensions to the violence—for example, the qualitative aspects of it—are often written out of the script.

Such approaches are in fact incapable of answering the ethical question “when is too much killing enough?” Just as there is no clear line to be drawn concerning levels of tolerable casualties, can we justify the acceptance of 1,000 deaths but declare 1,001 too many? Each form of violence needs to critiqued and condemned on its own terms. Only then can we think of breaking the cycle of violence by moving beyond overtly politicized dichotomies as good and bad, just and unjust, tolerable and intolerable, that rely upon such quantifiable derivatives.

Pinker’s specific claims are historically dubious in respect to the relationship between liberalism and violence. What is more, the classifications he uses conveniently fit his preexisting normative positions and worldviews. Yet, as we know, what actually constitutes an act of political violence is intellectually fraught and deeply contested. The recent mass shootings in the United States, for example, illustrate how both the naming and quantification of violence remain loaded with political determinism. While some incidents, like the massacre in Colorado Springs, continue to be narrated by focusing on the mental health of the individual perpetrators—hence avoiding any broader systemic critique of gun laws, political allegiances, and religious beliefs, et cetera—others, such as the recent attack in San Bernardino, immediately connect individuals to broader historic forces.

What about how we use the term “violence”? I have written before that it is used carelessly in the media. For instance, I have seen news reports that say a situation “turned violent” when in fact only property was being damaged or destroyed. That suggests that property can be a victim of violence. With regard to Ferguson, reports said that protests “turned violent,” which suggests the situation was not violent already, ignoring the fact that there is no background state of peace or nonviolence when young black teens are being gunned down by police with impunity. Do you think we need a better conception of what actually constitutes violence? Do you agree that the word itself is used irresponsibly? How might we conceive of a better way to apply the term?

Violence remains a complex problem that defies neat description. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin saw the task of developing a critique of violence adequate to our times to be one of the most significant intellectual challenges we face. How can we critically engage the problem of violence and remain ethically sensitive to the subject while doing justice to its victims? Too often violence is studied in an objective and neutral way, forgetting that human lives are being violated and that its experience is horrific and devastating.

Violence does, however, remain poorly understood if we simply attend to mere bodily attacks. Not only is psychological abuse clearly a form of violence, often we forget how some of the most pernicious and lasting casualties of war are intellectual. There is also a compelling case to be made for arguing that extreme social neglect, unnecessary suffering caused by preventable disease, and environmental degradation could also be written as forms of violence, given their effects on lives. Key here is to recognize both the systematic and all too human dimensions to violence, which requires us to look more attentively to the multiple forms violence can take, teasing out both its logical consistencies and novelties.

You do, however, raise an important point: once we start to objectify violence—for instance, argue what its main referent objects should be—it is easy to retreat back into established moral and normative positions that neatly map out justifiable versus unjustifiable forms of violence. The justifiable being the violence we are willing to tolerate, the unjustifiable the intolerable. With this in mind, it’s much better to ask how violence operates within a social order. By this I mean to question regimes of power, less by their ideas and more by the types of violence they tolerate, while asking how such violence serves to authenticate and disqualify the real meaning of lives.

So where does this leave us intellectually? Rather than encouraging a debate about the true meaning of violence, I’d like to deal with your final question by proposing the urgent need to think against violence in the contemporary moment.

As Simon Critchley intimated in a very powerful piece in “The Stone” in 2011, breaking the cycle of violence and revenge requires entirely new political and philosophical coordinates and resources to point us in alternative directions.

I’d like to add to this discussion by drawing attention to Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker, which is still arguably one of the most famous human embodiments of philosophical and critical inquiry. The symbolic form given to Rodin’s isolated and contemplative sculpture alone should raise a number of critical concerns for us. Not least the ways in which its ethnic, masculine, and all too athletic form, speaks to evident racial, gendered, and survivalist grammars.

But let’s consider for a moment what the thinker is actually contemplating. Alone on his plinth, the thinker could in fact be thinking about anything. We just hope it is something serious. Such ambiguity was not, however, as Rodin intended. In the original 1880 sculpture, the thinker actually appears kneeling before The Gates of Hell. We might read this as significant for a whole number of reasons. First, it is the “scene of violence” which gives specific context to Rodin’s thinker. Thought begins for the thinker in the presence of the raw realities of violence and suffering. The thinker in fact is being forced to suffer into truth.

Second, there is an interesting tension in terms of the thinker’s relationship to violence. Sat before the gates, the thinker appears to be turning away from the intolerable scene behind. This we could argue is a tendency unfortunately all too common when thinking about violence today. Turning away into abstraction or some scientifically neutralizing position of “objectivity.” Yet, according to one purposeful reading, the figure in this commission is actually Dante, who is contemplating the circles of hell as narrated in The Divine Comedy. This is significant. Rather than looking away, might it be that the figure is now actually staring directly into the abyss below? Hence raising the fundamental ethical question of what it means to be forced witness to violence?

And third, not in any way incidental, in the original commission the thinker is actually called “the poet.” This I want to argue is deeply significant for rethinking the future of the political. The Thinker was initially conceived as a tortured body yet also as a freethinking human, determined to transcend his suffering through poetry. We continue to be taught that politics is a social science and that its true command is in the power of analytical reason. Such has been the hallmark of centuries of reasoned, rationalized, and calculated violence, which has made the intolerable appear arbitrary and normal. Countering this demands a rethinking of the political itself in more poetic terms, which is tasked with imagining better futures and styles for living among the world of peoples.