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