°Afformative flashes
I thought I might extract some threads from the discussion on Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” that’s been happening over at Long Sunday. Craig has been kind enough to try and focus some of the discussion as it turned toward Benjamin and Foucault, and around the question of power.
And the discussion of Benjamin and the party-form, prompted by Jon’s contribution, moved on to questions of one’s relation to the law and human rights.
A couple of other fragments of the discussion, as I was prompted to be less obscure than usual:
‘Afformative’ comes from Werner Hamacher’s essay “Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’” in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds) _Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy - Destruction and Experience_.
The opening para:
Walter Benjamin’s essay, “On the Critique of Violence”, provides an outline for a politics of pure mediacy. For Benjamin, the means for such a politics may be termed ‘pure’ because they do not serve as a means to ends situated outside the sphere of mediacy. Such ends could only be ambiguous - they would claim to be removed from or even superior to the sphere of means but would in fact be merely historical positings whose mediacy is masked by isolation. Means which may be termed pure, on the other hand, are not on the order of posited norms - and certainly not on the order of legal norms or of models for binding interactions to be followed by the members of a society. Politics and violence can be termed pure only if they manifest a form of justice untainted by the interests of preserving or mandating certain ways of life, untainted by positive forms of law. While all that is law must rest on law-making, law-positing, law-imposing violence, and such law-imposing violence is represented in all law-preserving or administrative violence, the idea of justice cannot depend on the law’s changing powers of imposition. Justice must therefore belong to a sphere equally distant from the law on the one hand, and fromm the violence of its imposition and enforcement on the other.
In this sense, the afformative is what he distinguishes from Austin’s performative (obviously) as this ‘pure mediacy’. To continue:
[A]fformative, or pure, violence is a ‘condition’ for any instrumental, performative violence and, at the same time, a condition which suspends its fulfillment in principle. But while afformations do not belong to the class of acts - that is, to the class of positing or founding operations - they are, nevertheless, never simply outside the sphere of acts or without relation to that sphere.
And Amie Marker draws the threads of the symposium together in just a couple of eloquent paragraphs, which end with this quote from A Une Passante:
Un éclair…puis la nuit!
Do read the whole comment.
To which I can only add - and so as to tangle the threads even further - that it might be worth exploring the relation between the party-form (particularly as this bears the logics of ‘class-for-itself’/'class-in-itself’ distinction) and the figuration that Amie mentioned. Flashes, indeed.
I find this discussion at Long Sunday really very difficult to follow.I have a hard time seeing just what is at stake in there, or even what people’s positions are. I am sceptical that you are all reading from the same page. Moreover, it seems to me that Benjamin is being read strictly through a Derridean angle, or the Agamben twist which doesn’t seem to me very different, though perhaps I am missing something. I wonder in discussions like this why it is that people cannot state clearly what they want to say.
But one thing that I feel sure enough to comment on is that all this talk of means and ends strikes me as a huge mess. The problem, in my view, is that there is no obvious distinction between means and ends apart from some arbitrary arrangement of means and ends. Nothing particularly interesting stems from it. When people talk about means without ends, or the idea of acting without stipulating some kind of political ideal or goal - the affirmation of rights - or whatever else, it makes no difference, not only are they are still reconstructing the ‘metaphysics of means and ends’ for themselves, for these are also goals, but they are sort of using words without meaning. Even moving away from a distinction between means and ends is an end, or a means, depending on how one looks at it.
I don’t think anything earth shattering comes from this. The same thing that makes it meaningless to try to distinguis means and ends at some metaphysical level (or alternatively, gape in amazement when that turns out to be foolish) makes it senseless to rail against it. Not dramatic, or radical, or threatening, just incoherent.
Another way of putting the same point is that ‘means’ and ‘ends’ are just a way of describing action. It works sometimes, when there is a goal, it doesn’t work at other times, when there isn’t one. But human action is very rarely without purpose. The debate viewed from this angle appears to be that there is something fishy about talk of purposes. That, to me, only has meaning if one has a very metaphysically or ideologically loaded notion of purpose. But it is easy enough not to have one of those, and besides the debate is clearly not confined to such ideologically elaborated, that is to say, specified subsets of notions of purpose. It seems to be about purpose as such. So what gives? I kind of fail to see how you could even assemble a sentence, ask and answer a question, wish for something - anything involving intentionality, if the critique is that radical. If it is that radical, it seems to me it is just obviously wrong, maybe crazy, like a weird avant garde version of eliminativism. But as I said, I fail to follow most of the discussion.
Any chance someone can parse this for us a little bit?
(btw - A, sorry if I double submitted this; browser seems to have screwed up; also - sorry to hear the troll incident. That’s totally fucked. )
TCO [December 7, 2005 @ 12:23 am]
Moreover, it seems to me that Benjamin is being read strictly through a Derridean angle, or the Agamben twist which doesn’t seem to me very different, though perhaps I am missing something.
For what it is worth, I can assure that my contribution does not come from a Derridean or Agambenian perspective. Frankly, I’m not sure if I understand either Derrida or Agamben, thus it would be nonsense for me to approach Benjamin through them.
The problematic through which I entered the discussion was, on the one hand, an attempt to understand a recurrent dynamic between ‘constituent power’ and ‘constituted power’ (to use Negri’s terms) whereby the radical, democratic, revolution power of ‘constituent power’ always becomes ‘constituted’. In other words, the reaction (the ‘Thermidor’ in his terms) is what ‘makes the revolution legal’. On the other hand, I have a long-standing attempt to make sense of Foucault’s divergent, contradictory and, at best, suggestive comments on power. Thus, Foucault distinguishes, on the one hand, an ‘analytic’ moment (’power from below’, ‘there’s only power where there is resistance’, etc, etc) and, on the other hand, a formative or technological moment (sovereignty, discipline, biopower, security, governmentality). I’m never sure how the connection is made from the analytic moment to the technological moment. The only thing that I’m sure of is that it isn’t a problem of micro/macro (in sociological terms) or molecular/molar (in Deleuzian terms).
So, narrowly, what is at stake is (1) whether Foucault is (for me) ultimately coherent or not; (2) if “post-Foucauldian” work (for instance, Nik Rose and his school, but also the Italian “quasi-Foucauldians”, like Agamben) has any value. More broadly, if the answer to one or the other is “no”, how then do we come to a coherent position?
Craig [December 7, 2005 @ 6:47 am]
T, you don’t have to be sceptical about whether everyone’s reading from the same page. I think it’s clear that’s not the case. Which doesn’t seem a problem, but might also suggest that Derrida and Agamben don’t loom as large as you think.
That said, it would be impossible to read Benjamin’s essay without reading it through something. Derrida’s reading is perhaps a reading by way of the Holocaust. Agamben’s reading is by way of the camp. And they are in some ways at odds with eachother over the law.
But the discussion at LS is interesting, for me at least, for the ways Craig, Amie, Jon, Nate and myself, despite the different touchstones (Foucault, Nancy, Hamacher, et al) are reading WB’s essay in the context of a deep dissatisfaction with the swings (and continuity) between (in Benjamin’s terms) law-making and law-preserving violence or, in another idiom, constituent and constituted power, or in an idiom I prefer, between subject and citizen.
That this latter reading happens in the midst of a global war - and its particular characteristics as the export of democracy and effusive theocratic violence ‘on both sides’ - should indicate what some of the obvious stakes are here. Beyond any proper names.
I tried to be more modest, though, and suggest that one of the stakes is the contract, both the ’social contract’ and the wage contract - though I think the terms of these are in no way distinct from the war, from the play between law-making and law-preserving violence.
Maybe that’s one way to get around the macro/micro distinction, but also Jon’s work on affect is important here too.
s0metim3s [December 7, 2005 @ 10:14 am]
There are a number of points there, I think they are interesting, but could perhaps be discussed more clearly by ditching Benjamin, Foucault and so on, all of whom raise extremely difficult questions of interpretation.
- The idea of separating Foucault’s counter-power and power as analytical and technological moements seems to me to dissolve the whole point of Foucault’s work, which was seemed to me to be a kind of power monism. If there is one kind of power that works when we resist, another that sets up the problem (or what is really the same thing, that these are different ‘aspects’ of an unspecified power), then I am not sure that is so different from the position taken by his liberal critics. I doubt that is the right reading. Maybe I have misunderstood you.
- If the issue is about the constitution of laws and the transformation of the framework of laws, or the transcendence of the juridical framework - if it is about these institutional questions, then there is much to be discussed. But it strikes me that if that is so, then there is little to be gained by the hacking away at the talk of means and ends. To me it becomes a poltiical matter, one of empirical research, rather than the analysis of categories like constiuent and constitutive power, which are words we use to talk about the world.
- I suppose that is my main disagreement with all this talk, which is that Negri, and the reconstructed Benjamin here, talk about law-making violence and law-preserving violence as if there were really different things out there in the world, rather than an abstract analysis. I find it a very frustrating and mystifying gesture when people take such terms, which are proposed in order to distinguish certain kinds of violence, and then puzzle over how it is that such a thing could exist or be overcome.
- Sorry to use a provincial example, but right now there is a review going on about the Macquarie fields riots. There is a sort of community conciliation thing going on, kind of modelled on restorative justice practices. It is a farce, I think, but lame as it is it is still very much opposed by the police, which just wants the community to be harshly punished for the sympathy the rioters received. Well, it has emerged that during the riots, the police seriously considered shooting the rioters. That emerged, because a cop who showed up at the reconciliation wanted to intimidate the participants. Now look at that - you have a situation in which there is slight suspension in the law, for the purpose of strengthening the community/state nexus. The police then says something that amounts to - well, fuck you, obey us because we can kill you. That speech act, is that law making or law preserving violence? A strict distinction here leads to all sorts of paradoxes. What does that show? One way of describing the situation is to say that there are these two kinds of violence, but that in actuality, due to various supensions and dislocations, they operate jointly, or you can make an argument like Agamben’s, attractive in the present setting given degree of suspencion of law, which exposes the force of law as a violence that is both/and, etc… You can do that. Or, you can say: well, these are not very good categories. We should analyse power in society differently.
My inclination, is that a monist reading of Foucault’s power hypothesis is far more adequate, particularly if we pare down the ontology. But really, I don’t know, I only think something is fishy here…
(Ok, I’ll move this to my blog, I am sorry to spam here)
TCO [December 7, 2005 @ 7:59 pm]
Doesn’t the concept of afformative violence speak to something about the violence of the riots?
s0metim3s [December 7, 2005 @ 8:11 pm]
The idea of separating Foucault’s counter-power and power as analytical and technological moements seems to me to dissolve the whole point of Foucault’s work, which was seemed to me to be a kind of power monism.
That could have been his intention, but it is not wha he did. Reading the work carefully reveals a number of problems: (1) when the analytical moment is present, the technological moment is absent — the inverse holds true; (2) there is a ‘break’ between his works running from Discipline and Punish and La Valonte de savoir (and the concurrent lectures ‘Society Must be Defended’, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics) and his latter ‘ethical’ works, specifically The Care of the Self and The Use of Pleasure. This is reflected in the analytical statement contemporary with these works: viz, the “Preface to The Care of the Self” and the two essays in “The Subject and Power”; (3) as a result, the already weak concept of the ‘political’ in the earlier phase is completely obliterated by the ‘ethical’ in the later phase.
But, you are right, in a sense, that power is a monism or ontology: throughout, Foucault holds the metaphysical position that “With power, there would be nothing”.
But it strikes me that if that is so, then there is little to be gained by the hacking away at the talk of means and ends.
For what it is worth, neither word appears in my contribution to Long Sunday or in what I’ve written here.
I find it a very frustrating and mystifying gesture when people take such terms, which are proposed in order to distinguish certain kinds of violence, and then puzzle over how it is that such a thing could exist or be overcome.
This makes little sense: you appear to be suggesting that if we didn’t have a concept of “violence” (or whatever), we wouldn’t have to overcome violence. Not sure what this could possibly mean.
Craig [December 8, 2005 @ 3:35 am]
I have no idea what ‘afformative’ means, other than it is not what Austin meant by ‘performative’. I do think the idea of a ‘pure’ violence, or ‘pure’ law, or something being ‘purely means’, is just confused. These words make little sense without a frame of reference, which means they can never, as matter of principle, be ‘pure’. If someone cause nonintentional harm to someone else, say as a result of a fit (note the necessarily nonmental causation…), we would not say that that violence occurred ‘prior’ to intentional violence, or at a more fundamental level, we would just not call it violence at all, much as we do not call tigers and snakes violent without ‘anthropomorphising’ these, ie. attributing intentions and a mind to them. If you go and ask the people at Macquarie fields why they rioted, they don’t grunt and yell, they have all sorts of reasons, they’re actually pretty coherent. Maybe those reasons don’t amount to much, or maybe they do, but why buy into the story which has them just reacting for unconscious reasons or social determination, really as if they were having a fit? Just because no party and no formal organization exists to represent these, it doesn’t mean that they are not just ordinary political desires, rather than the expression of some obscure non-performativity, whatever that means. At any rate, I think that if you believe the reverse, that would take some showing, and not by means of further analysis of Benjamin and pals.
I’d erase the last paragraph above - I think the problem is much simpler actually, the terminology is inadequate, that’s the end of the story.
TCO [December 8, 2005 @ 9:42 am]
‘Afformative’ doesn’t describe a lack of intention, even less is it another way of replaying the distinction between organised (conscious) and unconscious (unorganised) action, utterances, etc.
Which is to say, to this:
If you go and ask the people at Macquarie fields why they rioted, they don’t grunt and yell, they have all sorts of reasons, they’re actually pretty coherent. Maybe those reasons don’t amount to much, or maybe they do, but why buy into the story which has them just reacting for unconscious reasons or social determination, really as if they were having a fit? Just because no party and no formal organization exists to represent these, it doesn’t mean that they are not just ordinary political desires.
I’m perplexed as to why you’d imply I might suggest such a thing, ever. Not least because I’ve talked about Mac Fields in the context of making a similar argument.
Anyway, it’s because I’m concerned not to assert those boundaries of the political - in which statements and actions become intelligible as political precisely by positing norms - sometimes ‘alternative’ ones - that the concept of the ‘afformative’ seems promising. Eg, migration does not posit norms. See where I’m going? It might not turn out to be a particularly useful concept, but for the moment, it seems interesting to me.
s0metim3s [December 8, 2005 @ 11:26 am]
Angela, of course I did not mean to suggest you, of all people, would be saying that people either subscribe to a party line or are just like pinballs bounced around by social forces. I am expressing myself poorly, as usual. It’s just that the discussion of means and ends, law making and law preserving violence, constituent and constitutive power seems to suggest that there is some hard problem in stating what these political aims are, or how to understand them, and that problem to me appears strongly related with the idea that somehow, these terms denote actual forces, independent of our attribution of a frame of reference (I’m not implying a isomorphism between the various terms , just a common interpretation of what they mean).
I tend to think that ‘norms’ are posited whenever we speak of someone doing something intentionally, because intentional action can succeed or fail. This is really a triviality. Even what you and Brett have been developing can be described in these terms, since I know you are not kaleidoscopes but people making an argument. The discussion is really about whether we should assume that the criteria of succeess are those of the actors, or those of - for instance, in the case of Macquarie Fields - the police, or Class War, or the ISO, or someone else. There are different criteria, related to very different horizons of action. There are also norms that are inherent to purposive behaviour, institutionalised norms and prescribed norms, which may have little to do with either institutional or inherent norms - I think that maybe we are confusing these sometimes. At any rate, the main task I see is that we should try to understand what interests are at stake in these.
With migration, I think it is more that politicians and sociologists of all stripes impose norms on it, because whilst there is no norm to migration from the perspective of those doing the migration (there is only the purpose act of moving, with its own norms which are quite besides the point), there certainly are norms from the perspective of population control. I think we agree strongly that this is the problem. I think we disagree somewhat on how to proceed from there. I sort of think that we should reject the norm, abandon the normative ontology of nation states, and so on. But I don’t see this as related to overcoming norms as such, which to me seem unproblematic in themselves, really just a feature of how we describe purposive action, and not particularly interesting. I think, maybe I am wrong, you disagree strongly with this. As I understand you, you think there is something fundamentally wrong with the construction of purposive action when we turn to norms and standards of succeess and failure, that this plays into a construction of a temporal ethic of detainment (sorry to make that up, I didn’t know how to parse it otherwise), detainment in expectations, etc… I don’t necessarily think this is wrong, actually I think some of your examples are convincing and quite interesting, but at the same time, if I look at it like an anthropologist, I think you generalise far too quickly, and if I look at it as an activist, I think that the conditions you impose on action are far too harsh. Either way, I think that the attribution of norms is trivial, hence not the source of the very serious problems we face, which are rather caused by certain groups of people having the power to set norms for others, to enforce these, to act as corporate and national entities, etc…
TCO [December 8, 2005 @ 1:03 pm]
Again, it’s not about denying purposive action, even if such a concept should be troubled a great deal, for a number of reasons, which I won’t unpack here because it doesn’t seem the most pertinent issue here. Nor is the issue of ’success and failure’ what I was thinking of - the temporal logics of detainment that B and I wrote about recently has a lot more to do with the borders of politics.
I sort of think that we should reject the norm, abandon the normative ontology of nation states, and so on. But I don’t see this as related to overcoming norms as such
But the material basis of norms, insofar as it is possible to posit those norms, assumes violence. So, what may seem like a trivial point about normativity, from an anthropological perspective, is I think actually and always a political, materialist point about “certain groups of people having the power to set norms for others, to enforce these, to act as corporate and national entities, etc.”
This is why the question of law-making and law-preserving violence becomes a question, a predicament, that cannot be answered by seeking to posit another set of norms (laws) that must, so as to actually be posited, have recourse to law-preserving violence. The oscillations between actually-existing and performative recourses to the state, might be exemplified by, say, the relation between actually-existing migration policy and the performativity of ‘refugee advocacy’. Now, the latter may or may not finally get around to being materialised in policy - policed - but we can be sure that, if they were, they would still entail violence so as to police the border, so as to (continue to) discern who are, and who are not, deserving of being classified as refugees. In the meantime, its very performativity is the semblance of the ontological normativity of the nation-state.
s0metim3s [December 8, 2005 @ 1:44 pm]
I think this is a puzzle that only exists thanks to the distinction between law-making and law-preserving violence, but that’s a distinction that is drawn by the analyst. There is no such thing in the world - there we find just violence, in endless permutations and contexts, with infinite creativity of ends and means. We categorize some of those as law-preserving given certain understanding of a context, and as law-creating given another. Now, if this starts giving us lots of headeaches, because, for instance, it turns out that there is no easy way of making the distinction in important cases, or because it turns out that we come up with paradoxes like the one you outline, I don’t think it makes much sense to ask how to overcome the distinction or work something out beyond it - it’s made up, an analytical tool. To overcome it seems easy enough: chose some other way of cutting the cake.
The ‘paradox’ I mean is the appearance that any critique of a norm must specify another norm, and since there are two kinds of norms, the violent and the differently violent, that will involve violence. Well, yes. But is it true that all norms are based on violence, or is that just a side effect of a definition? That’s why I introduced the distinction between inherent, institutional and ethical norms, and the criterion of fulfillment. That’s a plausible, more general understanding of norms that allows us to see that there different kinds of norms, including many that are not based on violence, and are in fact not ‘posited’ with the expectation anybody else will follow them - an example would be a normative action like drawing yourself a nice picture. Is it violence to put a bad line in, or to restrain yourself from doing that? And contra my own argument in Notes on Consensus , is it violence if we strike an agreement to do something, and I feel compelled to do it?
If refugee policy a la A Just Australia were enforced, so we had, you know, only shorter detention in moderately cruel facilities with relatively equal absence of just process - well, that would suck, and 99% of the ‘refugee movement’ would oppose it. But you’re stacking the deck focusing on this kind of norm - ie. legislative bills. We obviously agree with those. But what about other norms - like that which says a fair/revolutionary/desirable/tolerable/insert predicate state of affairs would involve there not being any controls on border crossings?
TCO [December 8, 2005 @ 3:32 pm]
I think this is a puzzle that only exists thanks to the distinction between law-making and law-preserving violence, but that’s a distinction that is drawn by the analyst. There is no such thing in the world - there we find just violence, in endless permutations and contexts, with infinite creativity of ends and means.
Given your resistance to analytical categories (in the first sentence), on what possible basis could you assert that there is “just violence” (in the second sentence)? “Violence as such”, “just violence”, “mere violence” or “violence” remains, as it were, an analytical category — distinct, say, from “just power”, “mere power”, “power” or whatever. By cutting out the foundation upon which to distinguish forms of violence from violence as such leaving only violence as such, you’ve destroyed any possible grounds upon which to distinguish violence as such from power as such, force as such, or, even, love as such. Hardly a valuable — or useful — move!
Craig [December 9, 2005 @ 12:44 pm]
Following on from Craig’s response - and because in some ways I think the issue of gewalt and it differing senses of ‘force’ as well as ‘violence’ relates strongly to that of labour - the question of the distinction between labour as potentiality and labour as labour-power might well be an analytical one, but it’s also the basis on which one then talks about border crossings as potentiality. Particularly insofar as borders are a means of filtering bodies into labour-power. Now, I know you’ve heard me argue this before.
As for refugee advocates, I am pretty sure, and going by experience and previous arguments, that they cannot be persuaded to oppose border policing if they, in turn, are persuaded that certain people are not bona fide refugees but ‘criminals’.
s0metim3s [December 9, 2005 @ 3:54 pm]
Craig’s comment above, and the last one before, are I think, plainly confused. I should say that while I found Craig’s contribution lucid and interesting, I don’t understand the criticism. I am obviously not saying that violence doesn’t exist, or that we only need to get rid of the word ‘violence’ for it to go away. This is of no consequence to my argument.
Suppose someone distinguished between ‘virtuous’ and ‘evil’ beachballs. Ok, we’d wonder why the hell they’d do that, and maybe there is a reasonable answer. The distinction would stand or fall on that, and that alone. But supposing that there is no reasonable answer, or that we could never decide which beachball is virtuous and which one is evil, we woud abandon the distinction - we would say, this is the source of the confusion, it explains little about the beachballs. (We would not go on talking about how there is some feature X, say the ‘chthonic apocalypsis of evil balls’, that accounts for the ambiguity of virtuous and evil beachballs.) In no sense would doing that imperil the existence of beachballs, or our belief in beachballs.
I think that the distinction between law-making and law-preserving violence, while not as stridently silly as the example above, is similar in the sense that we may safely reject the distinction without worrying about vanishing with violence itself.
Benjamin’s terminology is a theory, if it fails we can give up on it without the world evaporating. As it turns out, I actually rather like Benjamin and I don’t think his distinction is valueless. My commentary is intended (a) to show that there are obvious limits to it and that (b) it is not reality, but a not particularly satisfying description of reality. Maybe, however, Benjamin thought that there really were two kinds of forces, different in nature, and he had just discovered these. If that is so, then I think he is wrong and quite unhelpful, but I don’t think that is what he thought.
As for how I can talk about violence without having some theoretical definition of violence, that’s obvious. I don’t have to presume a ‘pure tea cup’ to talk about tea cups, or ‘pure anger’ to contrast ‘anger’ with a psychological theory which purports to give the meaning of anger. At any rate, we all agree that there is violence, so it is a moot point. The question is whether the theory developed by Benjamin to account for certain kinds of political organization is true, or meaningful, or helpful, or something else.
Ghost of the Machine [December 9, 2005 @ 4:01 pm]
At this point, T, I’m not really sure what your point is, or what you’re taking issue with. Those remarks seem so generally applicable to any theory considered in an abstract sense that I can’t see why they’d be particularly shattering of Benjamin’s. Not least because WB was hardly one for caring about the eminence and perfection of analytical categories. For him, they were ways to prise things open. I think they work for me in a similar way. If these particular ones don’t do that for you, so be it.
s0metim3s [December 10, 2005 @ 11:43 am]
As for how I can talk about violence without having some theoretical definition of violence, that’s obvious. I don’t have to presume a ‘pure tea cup’ to talk about tea cups, or ‘pure anger’ to contrast ‘anger’ with a psychological theory which purports to give the meaning of anger.
Your example is confused: the example, rather, is how do we recognize that Earl Grey and English Breakfast are both types of tea and not coffee (be it French Roast or Shade Grown Fair Trade Arabica) or pop (be it Orange Crush, Coke or Pepsi). And that’s where we appear to disagree. As I understand your comments — and still do with the most recent — you suggest that we can talk about violence (or tea), but it makes little sense to talk about “law preserving violence” (or Earl Grey tea). This, clearly, is nonsense.
As theoretical concepts, they (law preserving/making) may very well be inadequate, but — once again, as I continue to understand your claim — that is no reason to get rid of analytical distinctions entirely.
At any rate, we all agree that there is violence, so it is a moot point.
That’s a start. Now, can we distinguish between different types of violence? Can we claim that we want to endorse certain instances of violence and condemn others? Can we develop a way of distinguish violence from power? Violence and freedom?
Craig [December 10, 2005 @ 12:53 pm]
The whole point is that ‘law-making violence’ isn’t like earl gray tea. We can all agree that there is earl gray tea, and that there is orange pekoe tea. They taste different. But suppose half the time you put earl-gray tea in a cup, it tasted like orange pekoe, and vice versa - ie. there was no sensible way of distinguishing these. That’s the situation WB’s distinction is in.
Of course we can distinguish various types of power and violence - you just have to do better than say that some of it is law-making and some of it law-preventing and there is this third mystical kind that will somehow transcend all of it. I obviously don’t oppose ‘analytical categories’ - ie. tentative distinctions. I just want them to be good ones, that actually pick out differences. WB’s distinction doesn’t do that. It creates a whole bunch of weird paradoxes and leaves most of the violence and law in the world untouched.
If WB was saying: sometimes, violence reinforces laws, and sometimes, it takes violence to introduce laws, or even to establish a system of legality, then well, that would be great, but singularly uninteresting. John Locke and Hobbes argue that. What he is saying instead is that you have these two choices of violence, and only some kind of rupture will give you a third. I am more inclined to talk about various institutions, what they do, how violence and implicit/explicit threats of violence are used to maintain them, how laws come about without violence sometimes (and are no more desirable for it), all the time trying to reduce the term violence to some concrete manifestation, a specific instance. When people start talking about monster concepts like ‘modernity’ and ‘the citizen’ in general, I think my brain just shrivels up. I feel very inadequate for a task like that!
Ghost of the Machine [December 10, 2005 @ 3:57 pm]