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Saturday, May 02, 2009

More On Violence

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, an exchange with "Seth":
Dale, when you say that "Violent revolution unleashes forces as bad as the ones it would address," do you see that as being always true?

Well, this is politics we are talking about and so one can never say never when all is said and done... But, as far as it goes, yeah, I do think it is pretty overwhelmingly generally true that violent revolution unleashes forces as bad as the ones it would address.

This is not to say that this means that there actually always will be nonviolent alternatives available -- the organized criminality of Nazi totalitarianism as discussed by Arendt in "Moral Responsibility Under Dictatorship" and the organized criminality of colonialism as discussed by Fanon in "Concerning Violence" in Wretched of the Earth both seem to demonstrate that violent revolution indeed can be justified.

But it is crucial to note that this justification does not circumvent the recognition by either Arendt or Fanon that this justified violence nonetheless unleashes forces as bad as the ones it would combat. It's just that for those caught up in that organized violence, the exchange of one evil for another is literally the only available route into history. No reasonable or ethical person under any circumstances but those would ever affirm the evil of violence once they understood this reality.

These circumstances of organized criminality differ in kind from the evils confronted even by King in the segregated South, even by those who suffered under the flabbergasting dictatorship of Stalin, or who suffer and die now from neoliberal precarization in a planet of slums (as described so well by Mike Davis among other). This is absolutely not to diminish the suffering or horror of the latter forms of violence and exploitation as against the former, but to grasp structural differences in the organization of these horrors that impact the resistances actually available in the face of their evil.
I agree that in this context, "progressive reform is all that remains [and] it is pointless to contemplate whether or not it is 'adequate' to the weight of incumbency and injustice," and I think that this perspective offers a way out of many forms of political apathy, and undermines many tendencies toward the fetishization of one's politics, and the consequent fracturing of the power that's available to be taken up in the space between people.

Me, too.
But couldn't that formulation, conceivably at least, measure out differently in a different place, or even here at a different time?

You can be sure that it does and it will. Plurality is the occasion of the political, unpredictability the ineradicable price of its freedom. Still, the general principle that violence unleashes forces at least as bad as the ones it would combat remains both profound and very useful to remember when the chips are down and to weave as deeply as may be into one's personal practice, even, or especially, when it seems difficult, all the same. At any rate, that's my personal call.

4 comments:

Seth Mooney said...

"it is crucial to note that this justification does not circumvent the recognition by either Arendt or Fanon that this justified violence nonetheless unleashes forces as bad as the ones it would combat. It's just that for those caught up in that organized violence, the exchange of one evil for another is literally the only available route into history."

This suggests, to me, that there is "something other" than revolutionary goals at play in the thinking of activists who, having other "available routes into history," nonetheless elect violence as the means to pursue their goals. This seems all the more true in the American context in which there isn't anything that confirms a causal relationship between progressive political change and the use of violence by activists, though I think Ward Churchill, in _Pacifism as Pathology_ makes a pretty strong case that the success ascribed to the movement led by King likely wouldn't have been achieved if there hadn't been parallel movements unwilling to disavow violence.

In my own thought, reading Arendt has definitely make me aware of a "something other" in my constant need to assert that I'm, say, "not a pacifist" (which i'm still not) or that x or y group in x or y place is totally justified in using using violence in response to the violence forced upon them (which in most cases they probably are). I've thought of that "something other," to the extent that once aware of it, I can try to suss it out and take a look at it, as being an evidence of my own will to power, and it's inspired a new measure if healthy self-criticism in my political engagements, which can only ever be a good thing.

But now that I'm looking at it, I see that this thinking has conflated power and violence.

I can accept that I have a will to violence, indeed, it would seem that I have no choice. But that's not necessarily a problem. One can work against one's proclivities, here, much like the sense in which, knowing that by having been socialized in a racist society, one must understand themselves as having been made a racist to some extent. Owning the racism that has been my inheritance is, for me, the starting point engaging in coherent anti-racist political work. Procedurally, that maps pretty well onto this newly-visible facet of me that I'm calling a will to violence.

What seems more interesting, and likely more problematic, is that the power in Nietzche's Will to Power, so far as I understand it, can best be understood in terms of the individual (it's role in zeitgeist notwithstanding), which suggests that it falls outside the sphere of politics, and wouldn't, for Arendt, have anything to do with real power, which exists only in the context of plurality.

Unknown said...

"It's just that for those caught up in that organized violence, the exchange of one evil for another is literally the only available route into history".

Are you saying that in order to be remembered in the future as having made some kind of progress towards "peace" one must occasionally resort to violence, or that in some cases the only way to make any kind of difference in the direction of peace one must occasionally resort to acts of violence that might put them in an unfavorable light in future historical lenses?

I've always wondered when someone in such a situation would know that the only recourse left is violence. Sure, in some situations (Pearl Harbor, etc.) you might get a pretty clear signal on the subject, but in oppressive circumstances like what you seem to be talking about, there's no clear event or moment at which attempts at peaceful reconciliation is beyond possibility, when violent action is the only way to bring about change (which obviously won't in any way assure peaceful change). Isn't that how oppressors manage to keep the victim group in a disadvantaged place for interminable amounts of time--by claiming that change must come slowly and peacefully?

Not really sure where I'm going with this. I've read the Fanon book that you mentioned, and my understanding of it was that Fanon was saying that because of the often brutal circumstances of colonial North Africa, the rebels in question often didn't necessarily recognize the potential repercussions of violent protest. I read later that some people interpreted the text as saying that the only effective means of change was violence, but I also heard that this interpretation was in part due to Sartre's rather passionate introduction to the book, that it was Sartre who was advocating violence, not Fanon. Also, didn't Arendt promptly write a counter-argument to that section of the book?

Dale Carrico said...

Are you saying that in order to be remembered in the future as having made some kind of progress towards "peace" one must occasionally resort to violence, or that in some cases the only way to make any kind of difference in the direction of peace one must occasionally resort to acts of violence that might put them in an unfavorable light in future historical lenses?I wouldn't want to offer up anything like that generalization as a guide to practical conduct. The only generalization I have proposed here suggests very much the contrary sort of principle, namely, that the resort to violence always unleashes forces at least as bad as the ones it would combat.

It's obviously true that sometimes people make recourse to violence because they see no alternative, and it is true that in retrospect such rationales are sometimes accepted as justifications and sometimes they are not. You wonder: when someone in such a situation would know that the only recourse left is violence.The crucial thing to grasp is that you cannot know. Think about King's "Letter from Birmingham City Jail." The bumper sticker people tend to take from that piece is that "Injustice Anywhere Is Injustice Everywhere," as though King is proposing that we already know of what justice consists in all its instances. Of course, reading the text itself we realize that this particular sentence arises in the context of a dispute, not at all a universally accepted assertion, between King and the "fellow clergyment" whose editorial he directly addresses in the Letter, a dispute in which the question at hand is what does it mean to describe somebody as an "outside agitator" in a world of complex mutualities.

Much more substantially, King declares that it can be just as much a demonstration of one's fidelity to the rule of law to violate the letter of the unjust law in the full expectation that one will suffer the unjust penalty for that violation as to obey the letter of the just law in the full expectation that one will escape any unjust penalty thereby.

What matters about King's declaration is that in judging the law unjust and soliciting its unjust penalty through a violation, one expects to expose its injustice and so contribute to its improvement. But one cannot ever actually know whether or not one's judgments in these matters are indeed the right ones or whether this strategy is one that will vindicate your judgment or rewrite the law in your own image of its more perfect justice.

It may be that your violation is judged as a violence and its punishment just and the letter of the law will be consolidated in the image of injustice by your lights. This is especially true in the sorts of struggles King is writing about, in which, as he also says in the Letter, it is so easy to mistake the exposure of social violence (through demonstrations and civil disobedience, say) as the comission of social violence (undermining conventional mores, disrupting public order, fomenting unrest, say).

there's no clear event or moment at which attempts at peaceful reconciliation is beyond possibility, when violent action is the only way to bring about change (which obviously won't in any way assure peaceful change). Isn't that how oppressors manage to keep the victim group in a disadvantaged place for interminable amounts of time--by claiming that change must come slowly and peacefully?Indeed. King pointed out that the privileged rarely relinquish their privileges voluntarily, and hence pleas for moderation (nonviolent resistance is not, in its nonviolence, also automatically "moderate") often amount to de facto endorsements and enforcements of the unjust status quo, whatever the expressed convictions of the "moderators" toward the unjust realities at hand.

But again, the lack of a palpable guarantor that one's judgment will be endorsed, that one's resistance succeed in re-enacting the rule of law differently is inescapable, since these are political phenomena we are talking about, phenomena arising out of and in the midst of the ineradicable diversity of the peers with whom we collaboratively and antagonistically share and substantiate and change the world, peer to peer.

This is the risk of the political as such, the register of its freedom. It is a mark of this very risk that while King is canonized as a prophet of nonviolence Fanon is often viewed as a glorifier of violence, despite the fact that it is the historical conditions into which they would intervene that distinguished them most in many cases, while their radicalism reveals profound continuities (of course the domestication of King's radicalism by way of his distorted canonizzation is part of this story).

All this provides some context explaining why for Arendt political judgment is illuminated by reference to aesthetic judgment: we release meaningful and beautiful forms into the world, we assess forms as meaningful and beautiful, and in so doing we offer up our judgments to the tribunal of public assessment. That the aesthetic object or event is valu-able is objective and universal, that it is valu-ed is subjective and contingent.

In offering up the judgment -- or our political opinions -- to the hearing of our peers and owning up to it we engage in a transaction in which we are substantiated (even if our judgments are not always so substantiated) as judges, as agents, as peers among peers, an experience of freedom (the Founding Fathers described this experience as "public happiness") we cannot produce on our own, on which we depend on the presence of a diversity of others. It is crucial to grasp that politics so construed is the opposite of violence -- indeed, Arendt describes "nonviolent politics" as a redundant expression.

I read... that some people interpreted [Fanon's] text as saying that the only effective means of change was violence, but I also heard that this interpretation was in part due to Sartre's rather passionate introduction to the book, that it was Sartre who was advocating violence, not Fanon. Also, didn't Arendt promptly write a counter-argument to that section of the book?I definitely do not agree that Fanon is making an argument that the only effective means of change arises from violence. I think even when he is backed up against the wall and argues that violence is justified by the inescapable violence of organized criminality in colonial administration based on racism, he also knows that the effectiveness of this means is undermined by the afterlife of violence in the new order it would establish and also he pines quite clearly in "Concerning Violence" but even more stunningly in Black Skin, White Masks for the life-giving world-building practice of politics, peer to peer, in terms very close indeed to Arendt's.

While it is true that Arendt is one who decries Fanon as glorifying violence in her "Reflections on Violence" -- albeit recognizing the sophistication of his case and the circumstances that probably justify his acceptance of violence in the colonial instance -- it seems to me her understanding of the political provides one of the best ways of grasping the significance of Fanon's project as an emancipatory one.

RadicalCoolDude said...

In his book How Nonviolence Protects the State, anarchist Peter Gelderloos criticizes nonviolence as being ineffective, racist, statist, patriarchal, tactically and strategical inferior to militant activism, and deluded. Gelderloos claims that traditional histories whitewash the impact of nonviolence, ignoring the involvement of militants in such movements as the Indian independence movement and the Civil Rights movement and falsely showing Gandhi and King as being their respective movements' most successful activists. He further argues that nonviolence is generally advocated by privileged white people who expect "oppressed people, many of whom are people of color, to suffer patiently under an inconceivably greater violence, until such time as the Great White Father is swayed by the movement's demands or the pacifists achieve that legendary 'critical mass.'"