People like Gandhi and Dr. King and so forth had a project of 'non-violence'. But they were already aware of all available 'structural' and 'repressive' forms of violence because they took care to investigate actual complaints of abuse. They firmly believed that the power of Religious faith could change the serial rapist or murderous sociopath into a kind and loving person. They preached the doctrine of 'radical and redemptive equality' of all creatures before the Merciful Creator.
The 'tensions of social life', leading to violent acts expressive of resentment or retribution, arise when a thug bumps into a guy from a rival gang, or when he sees a lone woman, whom he resents for being 'out of his league', and decides to beat and rape her. To tackle this problem, local authorities may improve sporting and cultural facilities for young people. Gang-bangers may learn to compete in sports or music. Instead of dealing drugs they may find ways to cooperate to provide merit goods from which they can make a living. What notion of 'equality' is involved here? The answer is it is treating people who are violent as if they respond to the same sorts of incentives as you would. At the margin, there may be pathological cases- but that would be a medical problem. Equality is not necessarily a 'radical' or 'redemptive' notion- though it may be so for Religious people or Liberation Theologians who affirm 'original sin'- Equality is a purely economic and legal notion of a common sense sort. Human beings are much alike. They have similar needs and desires. Moreover, there is generally a 'win-win' cooperative solution which precludes violence.
This is in fact the 'folk theorem of repeated games'. But it is merely common sense.
Can a political philosopher really add anything to a type of 'phronesis' most people throughout history have always already possessed?
Brandon Terry: You begin The Force of Nonviolence with a problem that hangs heavily over contemporary debates within social movements and in some corners of academia: How does an apparently moral argument about whether to be for or against violence quickly turn into a debate about how violence is defined and who is called “violent”? For example, activists in the Movement for Black Lives have described a wide range of social phenomena, from mass incarceration to dominant norms around gender and sexuality, as state violence. Their critics meanwhile have accused them of promoting or inciting violence, especially against police officers. And as you point out, these attributions have real consequences, as we can see with DeRay McKesson, the Black Lives Matter leader being sued by a police officer injured at a protest McKesson organized.Previously, the organizer of a protest was shielded from this sort of prosecution on the grounds that the State could use it to effectively deny citizens the right of peaceful protest. It remains to be seen how the Supreme Court will rule.
However, this is irrelevant to what Butler is saying. The fact is philosophy has never claimed to be able to say what is or isn't violence anymore than it can say what is or is not cancer. If a person says they have suffered violence or someone else says so on their behalf, then some judicial procedure may inquire into the circumstances. The judgment will be contingent on matters of fact as well of those of law. In other words, the empirical component in the judgment means the issue is not philosophical.
If there is a 'link' between an 'ethical critique' and asking how and why people say certain things represent violence, then it must be the case that the ethical critique 'carves up the world according to its joints'- i.e. has some special property such that knowing the theory will enable one to make judgments of fact.
Some worry that the idea of violence today has become an unsustainable inflation of the concept that renders it incapable of doing the normative or analytical work that some activists and scholars are asking it to perform. They worry that without a clear and constrained definition of violence, one on which we could get some consensus, our uses of the term are going to lead our moral judgment astray. It will make public debate even more acrimonious. You seem to be skeptical about these criticisms, and you even charge them with a bit of political and critical naivete. How do you see the link between the ethical critique of violence and the interrogation of how and why we name certain practices or phenomena violent?
But this is impossible unless we live in an Occassionalist universe. Thus, if you believe in Darwin, you must dismiss this entire line of thought as wholly magical.
There is no aesthetic critique which enables us to predict what is or isn't beautiful. If there were, artists could just learn the theory and start producing masterpieces. Similarly, there is no 'ethical critique' which will enable a police officer to decide whether or not Bo Jo tripped me this morning when I was jogging causing me to fall and tear my jogging bottoms. I'm sure it was him- though I didn't see him distinctly. Still, it's the sort of thing he would do- right? Lock the bastard up.
Judith Butler: The Force of Nonviolence is not primarily about violence, it’s about nonviolence, and whether it can still be defended, given all the realistic and strategic arguments against it.It is probably not a good idea to defend a type of nonviolence which prompts actions which lead to lots of people suffering injury and death. Thus my nonviolent demonstration of sar katna- the ancient Indian sacred sword dance which involves cutting people's heads off- should not be endorsed as an expression of Ahimsa by Jain or Hindu philosophers. Why? Because, it is very violent and messy and involves significant loss of life.
In other words, it is a matter of fact, not philosophy, whether a claim to be practicing Non-Violence is true, not false.
And yet, in order to make an argument for nonviolence, one needs to know what violence is; if the book’s general claim is that we ought to be refraining from violence, we still need to be able to identify violence. That’s where this complex question arises: How do we identify violence? What forms does violence take?Violence is associated with damage. This is a matter of fact which a Jury of the peers of the victim can assess. By contrast, philosophy can do nothing in this arena. It has no way to prove that its mere operation banishes all violence to the fourteenth dimension replacing it with Japanese tigers made of chocolate.
There are lots of very easy answers to it. But it is not a sensible question.
There’s no easy answer to that question,
but I would say that very often moral arguments about nonviolence tend to imagine an individual making a decision about whether or not to engage in an act of violence, either to hit someone, or to use an instrument to injure somebody, to use a gun or some military weapon, and yet violence cannot be restricted to the form of the single blow.So, moral arguments are useless. We can't restrict violence to the form of a single blow as opposed to a continuous interaction with chocolate Japanese tigers from the fourteenth dimension.
We know that there are forms of violence that don’t involve inflicting a blow on another person.Indeed! Because chocolate Japanese tigers from the fourteenth dimension gruzticify the factoxiyt of the underlying hypokeimenon in a manner I have explained in my next book.
The minute we accept that there is such a thing as institutional violence, or indeed symbolic violence, we are in a much more complex field.Because of all the chocolate Japanese tigers which keep showing up.
But I don’t think we should throw up our hands and say, “Oh well this is all too fuzzy, we can’t make our way here.”Why not? Is it coz you get turned on by chocolate Japanese tigers?
Michel Foucault distinguished between forms of sovereign violence, whereby a king, a monarch, or someone vested with a sovereign power, decides who should live and who should die.What was the point of doing so? Did it help anybody? The fact is lots of people who were sovereigns ended up with their heads chopped off. And most people with the legal authority to kill people are not sovereigns at all. Foucault was a cretin.
And there’s a form of violence that he called biopolitical and that Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics: violence that leaves a set of people to die, abandons them to death, or refuses to offer the assistance that is necessary in order to save their lives.This is what happens to most people everywhere. There is always some medical procedure which could prolong life a little bit but the thing costs too much. Currently, if only ten million dollars were spent on me everyday, my expected date of death would be significantly prolonged. Moreover, thousands of my potential children have never even been born just because not enough money has been spent on persuading women to inseminate themselves with my seed.
Those policies and institutions that let people die—that take away food stamps, or take away health care, or take away shelter—are not only exposing people to mortality, they’re exposing people to mortality at differential ratesButler sounds pissed about this. Why didn't she find a cure to cancer or invent a new type of renewable energy and thus increase the amount of resources available for increasing the life span of her fellow human beings? Is it coz she was stupid and studied a shite subject?
In the United States, we see that black and brown people, who are disproportionately poor in this country, are differentially exposed to that kind of violence and that kind of mortality rate.Indians are brown. There are 4 million of them in the USA. They are disproportionately rich. Why? It's coz they do useful stuff. No doubt, that will change as time goes by. What matters is whether stuff you do is useful and meritorious and whether you want to live a long, healthy, prosperous life.
So maybe nobody is hitting them with a stick, or shooting them in the head, but there is an institutional violence at work, one which distinguishes between lives worth preserving and lives regarded as not worth preserving. So a differential calculus is at work, and it’s an implicit feature of policies and institutions like that. That’s one way of understanding institutional violence.Why is Butler talking about 'differential calculus'? It has no application here because there is no Central Planner solving a set of equations which are smooth and display convexity. It is quite true that 'Institutions'- like Criminal Gangs or the Police Force- find it pays to kill people who may kill them but to merely extort money from those who do useful things. Such Institutions have to compete for resources. If Institutions concentrate on killing good guys doing useful stuff they crash quite quickly. One reason is that a more effective coalition kills off their members.
It is very stupid to 'understand' institutional violence as having an aim independent of its own method of recruitment and maintenance. This is because violence has to compete for resources. The thing is essentially competitive. That's why Kung Fu masters keep challenging each other to fights. By contrast, Gandhi didn't challenge Tolstoy to a turn-the-other-cheek competition.
Why? Would it help convicts? Why not become a prison visitor instead?
We could also look at the violence of carceral institutions in the ways that Ruth Gilmore, or Angela Davis, or Michelle Alexander have done.
Violent criminals are sent to prison to punish their violence, and yet what they enter into is another form of violence, one that is understood as legally justified.Very true. Nonviolent Doctors are sent to nonviolent Hospitals and Surgeries where they are rewarded for their medical knowledge by making a lot of money and garnering a lot of respect in a completely nonviolent manner. How come we don't imprison nonviolent Doctors while appointing knife wielding maniacs Head of Surgery at Cedar Sinai?
It’s not called violence, it’s called “necessary coercion,” or “necessary containment,” or incarceration, but it is often a form of violence, especially in the way people are treated and how their lives are regarded, and the kind of violence to which they are subjected—daily, psychically—within the prison facility.I suppose saying 'we're running a beating factory' would raise false expectations in the victims of crimes. However, people do tend to dwell on the likely condition of the convict's anus after his new cell-mates have gotten done with him. It is a small comfort- but it is a comfort.
So we can start to think about institutions as violent. But they’re not just inflicting institutional violence. They are themselves violent institutions.What good does your starting to think this stupid thought actually do you? Will it enable you to get out of jail? Will it lead to your being allowed to quit being a Professor of a shite subject and move over to being Head of Surgery at Cedar Sinai? Will your mummy be proud of you at last?
nobody gives a shit unless you have a 'threat point' involving embracing violence, or some smelly homeless dude so as to get back at daddy
When we say we’re opposed to violence, or we are seeking to embrace a philosophy and a politics of nonviolence,
we are obligated to distinguish among those kinds of violence, to rely on our colleagues who have been doing important empirical and sociological work and cultural analysis to show us when and how violence happens and to whom—hilarious! This cretin has colleagues who have done 'important work' on stuff like which guy stabbed which other guy. One theory is that it is the guy who is bleeding who is the perpetrator. Another is that we are all equally guilty except for that knife wielding maniac who is laughing his head off and slicing pieces off us.
to whom does it happen more than others, and what radical thesis about the inequality of lives pervades these disparities.Poverty and living next to shitty people. That's it. That's the whole story.
Being an American makes 'race-thinking' more fucked up than it would otherwise be.
BT: I am reminded of the essay you contributed to Robert Gooding-Williams’s volume Reading Rodney King (1993), where you focus on racial fantasies, or “racial phantasms” as you call them, following Frantz Fanon. What do you think makes race-thinking so amenable to our judgments about who or what is violent?
This was a punishment beating. It was a clear case of extra-judicial punishment. The guy had led the police on a car chase. He resisted arrest. They may have been afraid- but, at the end of the day, it was a punishment beating. Still, King had beaten a Korean shop clerk during a robbery- so the guy was no angel.
JB: You’re right. In this book I’m elaborating and revising the thesis I put forward in that essay. But in this context, I’m trying to understand why certain actions are called violent when there’s no empirical, or visual, or testimonial evidence to corroborate that claim. As you know, the Rodney King beating was already pretty outrageous, although certainly not unusual for black people, who live in worlds where police violence is constant. King was on the ground. He was not sitting up, he was not standing up. He was barely moving a limb, and somehow that video could be pointed to in a trial, and the defense attorney for the police could claim that King was a threat. And it’s really hard to understand how a black man lying on the ground, or indeed a black man running away, or a black man in a full chokehold, could still threaten the life of a policeman. And I think we could say that those are primarily states of the black body—social and political states of paralysis, threat, fear—none of which are arguably threatening, that are nevertheless cast, phantasmagorically, as states of imminent danger: as if those bodies are about to spring, to kill, to inflict mortal danger on the police who are, in fact, inflicting mortal danger.
Interestingly, the high rate of homicide within certain sub-populations has to do with an internalized view of their own peer group as likely to initiate deadly violence. This is certainly a problem which can be tackled quite quickly and efficiently. It offers no puzzles or aporias for philosophy. On the other hand, its pretending to find it all unfathomable is a godsend for virtue signallers.
‘It is not uncommon for the forces that inflict violence to point to their victims and say, “Look, this is the victim who’s actually inflicting violence on me.”’Nor is it uncommon for them to say 'Look, I was at home in bed with a cold when this shit went down- allegedly'.
We could point to that and just say, “Well, that’s absurd,” or we could say, “That’s unjust,” and we would be right. But we need to look a little bit more closely at what I call a “phantasmagoric inversion.” It is not uncommon for the forces that inflict violence to point to their victims and say, “Look, this is the victim who’s actually inflicting violence on me.” And that’s a trick of the mind, it’s a trick of the culture, and it’s a fantasy that gets shared when judges and juries look at the same evidence and decide that the policeman was just doing his job, or had good reason to think he was in trouble, or that a black man could have turned around and shot him at any moment. They are living in a panicked racial phantasm. They are in a war against black people in which they constantly imagine that those upon whom they inflict violence are the true source of violence.That was certainly the view many African Americans took of the incident. Why? Many had suffered something similar even when they were wholly compliant. Racism was a real thing. It may be less so now. But this is a matter which is eminently justiciable. Philosophy merely adds noise to signal whereas an alethic portrayal of such incidents in films or TV could do a lot to change attitudes and improve society.
In this case, nothing is justiciable. No police officer is ever guilty of shooting an African American jus' coz he don' like niggahs. That's individualism right there, your Honor. My client must be acquitted. He is as much a victim as the nice little granny he shot in the head. This whole Court is out of order coz its based on ethical individualism. Only collectivism- like that of Hitler- can give true justice to my client- who is the only victim of this grotesque travesty of Justice.
BT: How do we find our way out? I’m thinking about a powerful point in the book where you contrast your approach with a methodological and ethical individualism. We’re often given a genealogy of nonviolence that emphasizes individualism and a personal conscience, sometimes conscripting people such as Henry David Thoreau into this genealogy, and often treating nonviolence as kind of a retreat from the storm and stress of politics into a pacific region of the soul. In the book you say forcefully that this is a profound misdescription of the ethics and politics of nonviolence. You write, “an ethics of nonviolence cannot be predicated on individualism and must take the lead in critiquing individualism as the basis of ethics and politics.” Can you say more about what you see as the real connective tissue between this critique of individualism and nonviolence?
JB: If I am to understand myself as interconnected with other living beings and with life processes more generally, including all those that sustain the planet, I have to understand that when I destroy another person, or when I destroy a set of living processes, I also destroy something of myself, because the self that I am is not just this bounded and discrete ego, it’s a set of relationships.Thus if I kill your granny, I should get a share in her Estate coz she was related to me. Indeed, I was the closest person to her when I blew off her head.
I generally hold to the importance of psychosocial studies and believe my book probably belongs to that field. None of us exist or survive without a set of relationships that sustain us. That ideal might be maddening to a fierce individualist who wants to understand themself as completely self-sufficient, but the ideal of self-sufficiency is a bit destructive. We live in families and communities, and we’re also, as we know from climate change, interconnected across the entire globe. We know forms of interdependency throughout the economic world through the ravaging effects of globalization. We need to come up with another notion of the global that would avow, affirm, and strengthen our interdependency, and also the fact that we’re equally dependent on the Earth. We should strive to be equally dependent upon one another.Which is why I should be allowed to take your baby from you or move into your flat. Those Poles sure were stupid for objecting to Hitler's troops expressing their desire to be equally dependent on Polish resources. Churchill and Roosevelt were very wrong to use violence against the Nazis.
So for me, the idea of equality is not, “Oh, this individual’s equal to another,” although sometimes we must speak that way and have policies that reflect that truth. To shift the way we think about equality to help us address violence—and possibly also climate preservation—we need to move away from the ego and moral ideals of self-sufficiency. That is one reason I don’t stress the virtue of equanimity that many classical philosophers in the West have approved. One finds it in Buddhism and other religions as well. I’m not opposed to equanimity—it’s great to be calm and pacific and be able to handle life with some equanimity. I just don’t believe it can be the basis of nonviolence. We have every reason to be absolutely enraged by the systemic and local injustices in our world.No we don't. We may have a reason to pretend to be enraged, but we ought not to actually get worked about it. What would be the point?
Not a day goes by under the present regime when I’m not seized with rage of one kind or another.And Trump quakes in his boots.
The question is: What can be done with rage? We don’t always think about that, because we view rage as an uncontrollable impulse that needs to come out in unmediated forms. But people craft rage, they cultivate rage, and not just as individuals. Communities craft their rage. Artists craft rage all the time. Collective forms of crafting rage are important.But self-defeating. The guy who wrote the German 'Hymn of Hate' had to flee his country because he was a Jew. Wallowing in hate didn't work out too well for the Iraqis or now the Iranians or Libyans or Syrians and so forth.
They don’t deny rage, but they also choose not to enter into the cycle of violence. They seek to expose violence and counter it. We could have an angry and rageful art practice that exposes and counters violence without being violent.No we can't. Either the thing is violent or nobody pays attention to it. If a big bloke with a broken nose comes up to me in a bar and says 'I hate all's you Paki scum, but as a devotee of non-violence I will never harm a hair on your head no matter how much you beat me' then I understand that the guy is a weirdo who will jizz in his pants if I crack his skull with a beer mug.
Being contaminated by violence is not the same as reproducing the systemic or institutional violence that we’re seeking to oppose.Nor is it the same thing as jizzing in your pants when some rando smashes your skull in.
Why cultivate any such thing unless you feel, over the course of your long life, that your having done so had some positive effect? But, in that case, why not claim that the 'peace rays' that emanate from you have averted Nuclear War on numberless occasions. I recall my speech for the Miss Teen South India (excluding those fucking Iyengars) pageant I arranged last night. I said 'My beauty is causing world peas. Only presence of Iyengars is causing war. Kindly do the needful and non-violently eliminate Iyengars by telling them I'm moving in next door. Bastids. They all think that because Iyers don't know how to make proper sambar, I will be popping in all the time on one excuse or another and staying to dinner. It is the leading cause for all Iyengars moving out of Fulham.'
For me, the bottom line is that if I destroy another life, I also destroy myself to some degree, because relations compose who I am, and I am nothing without them. My life is not sustainable without others, and theirs is not sustainable without me. We’re attacking the social bond that holds us together when we attack each other. And I believe we need to cultivate that kind of ethos in order to support a broader global philosophy and politics that is committed to radical equality and affirms the equal grievability of lives—the equal value of lives.
What was the result of their thinking about social ontology? Anything good? No. It was Ronald Reagan who put the thing to bed.
BT: Climate change seems to play for you the role that nuclear war played for a lot of the sixties theorists of nonviolence—the invention of nuclear weapons and the threat of extinction-level events forced them to think about interconnection, interdependency at the level of ontology, social ontology.
Climate change has now superseded that in some ways and gives a kind of heft to the sort of thing you’d hear Martin Luther King, Jr., say often, about being in “an inescapable network of mutuality,” or a “single garment of destiny.”as opposed to a single undergarment of destiny which we are all obliged to wear with the result that our nuts dun git crushed something rotten.
‘It’s great to be calm and pacific and be able to handle life with some equanimity. I just don’t believe it can be the basis of nonviolence.’Coz a crazy guy frothing at the mouth spouting hate is, quite obviously, very firmly rooted in an ethic of non-violence.
But in response, as King’s Black Power critics might say: “Well sure, people are interdependent, nobody is sufficient in and of themselves, we need communities to survive, we just don’t want to be in a community with these people who have oppressed us any longer. We find living in social bonds with them to be something that is mutilating to our cultural vitality, and our self-respect.” What do you think is wrong with the longing to reconstitute mutuality in more restricted terms in pursuit of these goods?If the thing obtains simply from general respect for the Rule of Law then 'radical agreement re. equality' is otiose. It adds nothing. On the other hand, it may be that people prize equanimity and being free of anger. A few may want to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds. They may want to indulge in savage indignation and the rhetoric of hate while doing nothing which endangers their own security. Such people may want to babble on about Hannah's Aunt and other such shite. But shite is all it is.
JB: All relations among humans are vexed, and difficult, and even relations of love are structured by ambivalence. They carry within them destructive potential, and those of us who work to acknowledge the destructive potential in our relationships are better equipped to avoid acting destructively than those who pretend that there is no destructive potential. One reason I don’t hold to the notion that we need to reside in the pacific rooms of the soul at the expense of other or different rooms is that we need to struggle with our anger, our destructiveness, even our murderous impulse. We need to accept that we have all of that. Now I think among people who agree to cohabit Earth—as Hannah Arendt put it in her theorizations, among other places, about the state of Israel in relationship to the emergent state of Palestine—there does not have to be love or harmony or even high levels of integration for there to be a basic respect for the lives of others and as a premise for any kind of collaboration or integration, an acceptance of the radical equality of lives. Without those, any other form of social belonging or cohabitation reproduces inequality. And who wants that? People don’t want to live with others who despise them, or mutilate them, or regard their lives as dispensable, or who are willing to adopt and implement policies that have that effect. So there has to be a radical agreement to this equality for a kind of cohabitation to take place that would be worthy of the name.
To whom? Shitheads like Butler. But they have no influence. They have wasted their lives.
BT: Let’s explore this question of equality. As somebody who’s followed your work for a long time, I think that the book develops some long-standing themes: your interrogation of the fraught relationship of norm and exception in politics, and your linkage—especially in your work on Antigone and the series of books beginning with Frames of War (2009)—between questions of equality and questions of grief and mourning. You’ve done a lot to show us how certain populations and groups are figured as beyond the reach of humane concern and solidarity by interrogating practices of mourning and grieving as points of access, places where we might know what and whom we value, whom we imagine our lives entangle with and are enriched by, and even who counts as human.
In The Force of Nonviolence you talk not just about equality but what you call “the radical equality of grievability.”As opposed to the 'radical equality of shitting yourself out of sheer anger and frustration at all the naughtiness that is going on coz of that awful Trump.'
That is such a poignant phrase. What might such an ideal entail in practice, and why connect it to the politics of nonviolence, instead of just making it, say, a principle of justice?But why stop there? Why not demand equal cuddlability- how come everybody wants to hug the baby but not an elderly, smelly, old man like myself? Why don't we grieve equally for the guy who shot our granny and then got killed by the police?
JB: Some people don’t like this word, “grievable.” It’s an awkward word. “Grievability” may be even worse, but I’m trying to get at a quality of life. We say certain deaths aren’t grievable, or haven’t been properly grieved. We talk that way all the time. But I’m referring to people who are living in this world, and who feel themselves to be living a life that will not be mourned when it is lost, or who look at others and regard them as lives that will not be mourned if they are lost.
‘Equal grievability would mean that each life has a value and is regarded as a life worthy of living, to be lived, deserving to be lived.’
It means nothing at all. This is just virtue signalling. Butler pretends she spends a lot of time grieving. She feels guilty for not having adequately grieved for some anonymous victim of the Trans Atlantic Slave trade whose body was thrown overboard two centuries ago. But, nobody believes her. She is just pretending to be a nice person. This is 'performativity' as hypocrisy.
When we talk that way about ourselves or others, what we’re really saying is that while these are lives that can pass without a trace—one could think, for example, of those who fell or were thrown into the ocean during the Middle Passage—how do we mourn them, and what does it mean that those lives were considered ungrievable?
There would be no one to grieve them, there’s nothing in them to be grieved. There’s not value to be grieved. And I think that’s another way of getting to what some would call dehumanization, a term that we could talk about, but I’m not sure it grasps everything.We're sure you have grasped nothing- save every available opportunity to shit higher than your arsehole and burnish your reputation.
So what? She gets a bit of money for being Black and the wrong gender and too stupid to have studied something useful at College. Incidentally, her native Jamaica has a higher rate of Black homicide than the US. The truth is the condition of Black Life is only one of Mourning if illegal drug dealing is profitable. But then White or Chinese drug gangs shoot or chop up each other with just as much vim and vigor. I myself have sought publishers in vain for my poetry collection 'The condition of Iyer Life is one of Mourning' which highlights the genocide Iyengars are perpetrating on Iyers by not sharing their recipe for sambar.
Grievability is a way of thinking about value. I remember Claudia Rankine published an article in the New York Times in 2015 called “‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.’”
She talks about the sense of anxiety and fear that mothers have—though not just mothers—that bringing African American men and women into the world is bringing them into a place of potential mourning. They may be lost. They may be extinguished. They may not survive. And she writes about what it means to have a sense that lives may be lost at any moment, or that the world does not have to seek to sustain those lives and does not recognize the value of those lives. Of course, this is not a totalizing claim, but this risk is higher for some than for others.Mandatory life sentences for young offenders actually improves the life-chances of some such cohorts.
In which case, Butler should hand over her earnings to a Grieving Collective.
Equal grievability would mean that each life has a value and is regarded as a life worthy of living, to be lived, deserving to be lived. There can be no inequality there.
Now, that’s an ideal, a norm, a principle, and that’s what I mean by the notion of radical equality. If we had it and we had our understanding of ourselves as socially interdependent creatures, we would have a broader understanding of what it means to oppose violence. And I’m not interested in establishing nonviolence as an absolute moral principle that has to be applied to every instance. I’m interested in cultivating a new sense of who we are as human beings and how we treat each other on the basis of an interdependent ontology, if you will, with a historical, political mindfulness about the unequal grievability of lives in our contemporary world. Justice is great, but it would be more probable in a world in which we’d learned to think clearly about who suffers violence disproportionately and who inflicts it disproportionately.Sadly, those who suffer violence disproportionately are those who inflict it disproportionately. Professional boxers are more likely to display bruises than professional singers.
Grieving may be a good thing. It may also be a bad thing. If your plumber starts crying because of people killed during the Fan Shan massacre in Second Century Disneyland, you may say to him 'Get over it. Unplug my toilet already. Otherwise I won't pay you.' It may well be that refusing to Grieve and telling Grievers to fuck off and get a job is a socially very useful thing. If equal 'Grievability' is desirable, equal 'anti-cry-babyism' may be even more desirable. Indeed, in some cultures it is a Religious duty to tell bereaved people to stop wallowing in sorrow. A brutal sort of cheerfulness is valorised. Chasing away great big misery-guts who turn up to howl and weep is considered a valuable neighborly surface. Suppose my kid got shot by a White cop. Various disgusting people turn up to indulge in 'extractive introjection'- i.e. to confiscate my psychic pain. Under these circumstances I would feel very grateful to my neighbors, whatever their complexion, who chased these ghouls away.
Does this African American Harvard Professor really not know the answer to this?
BT: What’s always drawn me to this line of inquiry is that it makes so much sense of a lot of African American protest and African American mourning practices. The civil rights movement is shot through with all of these concerns. Why didn’t President Lyndon Johnson meet with the parents of slain African American activist James Chaney, but did meet with the parents of Chaney’s slain white colleagues, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner?
Why were Memphis sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker allowed to die in the back of a garbage truck, launching that protest movement that would ultimately bring King to the place where he would be assassinated? Even W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) dwells on this question, from his mentor to his own dying infant son: If you’re born in a society like this, will your life be grievable? Will anyone mourn your passing? Will you have any potential or possibility or standing as a cocreator of the society? Or are you already diminished?What is remarkable about this eloquent phrasing is that we all have enough 'background knowledge' to understand that what this guy is really saying is 'we grieve the death of an innocent black man at the hand of white racists, but don't get too worked up about gang-bangers shooting each other because we think white racists can be persuaded to stop being so beastly. Gang-bangers? Not so much.' In other words, Whitey be better. Their better nature can be appealed to. A few African Americans in the Academy can feel they earn their pay-check by tugging at White heart-strings or pretending to keep a lid on Black anger.
Will this young Harvard Professor have a liveable life? No! The alt-right are invading the campuses. Trump's supporters will lynch this handsome young man! Look what has happened to Roland Fryer. First they came for the sex pests and I did nothing because I am not a sex pest. Then they came for the guys selling blow and I did nothing because I don't sell blow. Then they came for those who don't pay their parking tickets and I was well and truly fucked. Who was there left to speak up for me?
JB: The question is also linked with whether your life will be liveable? Will you survive, will you persist, and will the conditions of life allow you to flourish? Some populations dispossess those who are subject to racism, to economic marginalization, or genocidal violence. They live with that question or have given up on that question.
This young Harvard Professor thinks it 'striking' that an ordained Christian Minister with a Doctorate in Theology 'wanted to preserve his enemies' lives as well.' True, the Christian Minister in question was a 'Negro' and died some decades ago. Perhaps this young savant believes that Negroes wot lived in days of yore were all 'ooga booga, me eat Whitey!' spear chucking Yalies of a type one meets tpo often at meetings of the Federalist Society.
BT: What is so striking about the language of equal grievability is that it also makes sense of King’s intervention. He said many of the same things you’re saying, but in his embodied performance, he also tried to disrupt that systemic violence without inviting the destruction of the lives of either the authors or ignoble spectators of oppression. He wanted to preserve his enemies’ lives as well.
To me that it the most dramatic demonstration of somebody who really believes in the equal grievability of lives.Why? There are people with head injuries who suffer a specific cognitive impairment such that they can't differentiate between persons. They genuinely grieve equally for all lives. But what strikes us is the pathos of their condition. It is an impairment. We would not welcome such an outcome, by reason, perhaps, of a degenerative disease, for ourselves. Rather we would prefer to cherish as special or mourn as special those who really were special to ourselves.
Should we read you as endorsing, or at least having a family resemblance with, King’s judgment that it is better to take on more suffering than you dispense?A Christian imitates Christ in taking on the sufferings of others. But Christians are assured a Heavenly Reward.
JB: I don’t know, but I do think that there are a lot of people who have every reason to feel enormous rage, to imagine scenes of destruction, and to even be overwhelmed with murderous feelings or impulse.Indeed. That's why a lot of schools in America have been turned into killing fields by disgruntled ex-students wielding automatic weapons.
The question is: To what community do we turn in such moments so that we don’t reproduce and heighten a violent world?We call in the SWAT community which shoots the fuckers. We don't turn to the Quaker or the Gandhian Community to turn up and talk bollocks.
I think of the idea of preserving the life of the one you want to kill as preserving the world you want to fight for, the world in which this kind of violence is lessened rather than heightened.Yes. Guantanamo his ass but good. Let him live as a warning to his brothers in arms.
And so it’s for the world, for a very difficult social bond, one that is full of passion, ecstatic and wonderful, but is also destructive and horrid. I guess I’m willing to take that point from Sigmund Freud; I think Fanon got it. Our relationships with others have this vexed quality. They can lift us and they can debase us, and we have to find our way. I think that those have to be collective practices; I’m not as interested in acts of individual heroism. I worry sometimes that the civil rights movement, or at least the story that gets told about it in the United States, focuses on individual heroes and heroines.As opposed to what? Collective practices of tolerating lynchings? Jus' coz your granny gets her head blown off or your pappy is hanged by his neck from a tree doesn't mean we should permit the infliction of coercive violence on the perpetrators. We should buy them a nice muffin basket instead. If the police or the FBI start asking questions, we should confess to having killed our granny and our pappy ourselves coz we is bleck and us niggahs be cray cray. In this way we can spare our neighborhood Klansmen any coercion involving the threat of violence.
Very true. Sending rapists to jail does not help women at all. We must fight for a different type of sociality where women break into jails to rescue their tormentors. They must build them nice houses and create a safe and salubrious environment for them. In between getting raped and beaten, they should also engage in climate activism. Only by fucking up the economy can you rescue the Environment from going to the Brazilian rain-forest on its Gap year and getting buggered to buggery.
I don’t want it to be a model of an individual, I want it to be a different kind of sociality that we’re trying to build, and I do see it in some of the social movements today, in some of the ways that people are working on housing projects, and climate preservation, and climate activism. I see it in many different parts of the world. In the feminist movement, in the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s not always easy. We struggle, we fight, we disagree, but we come back somehow to continue to build a world that is less violent and more free and more equal. And I think if we want to talk about justice, it would have to have all those components.
The lady who started Ni Una Menos is accused of embezzlement. It is rational to agitate for things beneficial to you. However, once agitation becomes mere virtue signalling, it is ignored as a nuisance. Society quietly suppresses the thing. In the former case, violence is an expression of preference intensity and can change the outcome. In the latter it is the behavior of a rabid dog. Thus the poll-tax agitation succeeded when vast crowds turned violent. The Government accepted that a lot of ordinary people could not or would not pay the new tax. If you tried to jail them, they would react violently. By contrast, the peaceful 'not in my name' movement, which was wholly non-violent, had no effect. People thought it was mere virtue signalling. However, once it became obvious that the Iraq war was a costly mistake, the Government quietly changed its policy.
BT: You end the book with reference to some of these movements —Ni Una Menos, the protests at the European refugee camps, the Standing Man protest in Turkey.
I, like you, take a lot of hope from these practices. But as a scholar of black protest movements, I wonder if maybe the long-term threat to nonviolent action is not that it would be falsely characterized as violent, but that it gets absorbed into our sense of the everyday and becomes what King called “a merely transitory drama.” That it becomes ritualized or folded into our sense of, “That’s what these kinds of people do.” What if it becomes a spectacle that fails to unsettle or even register as spectacle, and that might be in part because it’s not considered violence or violent enough. What do you think might break through our existing attention economy and media environment that are arguably fascinated with violence above all else?The problem here is that if you use violence to reinforce an impossible demand, you are considered a rabid dog. People are happy when you are shot in the head. On the other hand an non-violent mass movement which asks for peace on earth and good will to all men is merely ceremonial. One approves of it in a vague sort of way while making alternative travel arrangements. However, one may oneself attend such a thing in the hope of meeting nice people.
JB: You’re right to name the media, because I think more and more what we see happening, especially with violence in schools, is that kids, you know, even when they commit suicide, say, “Well, this was the only way to get my name in the newspaper, this was my only way to get attention.”Herostratus burned down a beautiful temple- one of the wonders of the world- so as to immortalize himself. That was more than two thousand years ago. How can we blame the media for this outcome?
What are they responding to? They’re on social media, they’re on the internet, and they see that an act of violence appears to break through quotidian life and grab worldwide attention. Now, the problem with that media rhythm—and there is a pattern that social media and conventional media have developed—is that it suggests that quotidian life is not violent, even though there are huge amounts of domestic violence, violence in prison, violence on the street, and violence in the workplace all the time. Actual quotidian violence gets repainted as nonviolent, and then the very dramatic violence catches attention, but only for a moment because the next one is on its way, and the next one is in competition with the last one.Quotidian violence either gets punished by the law or else a criminal enterprise burgeons and this has negative economic effects. It is not the case that the Media 'repaints' rapes and muggings as love affairs or commercial transactions.
We need to think more clearly about a media presence that counters that particular rhythm, which propagates a certain kind of lie about what violence is.There is no point thinking clearly about an obvious and very stupid lie. It is simply not the case that the media carries pictures of violent rapes under the sub-heading 'love-birds caught in the act'.
It becomes a sensationalist moment, rather than part of the structure of life. We need to turn a lens on the forms of violence that are part of the structure of life for women, for minorities, for the dispossessed, for the poor.But documentary makers and underground reporters do that all the time. Films have been made showing what happens to illegal immigrants who may suffer slave like conditions and even be subject to organ theft.
Until we do that, we will continue to think that violence is this extraordinary thing that captures attention for a minute and is then dispensed with.But the only person who has this foolish belief is Butler herself. The rest of us think of violence as something investigated by the police- unless the Mafia has corrupted or intimidated them or else there isn't enough money in the public kitty to tackle the problem.
So we have a broader problem in thinking about how the media covers violence, and how it tends to define it, which means that cultural workers and academics and artists who are really concerned with this issue need to develop a stronger media presence, or maybe even a counter-media presence, to shift the terms.In other words, a counter-media based on telling stupid lies about the media should do the very thing it accuses the media of doing. Suppose I were to say 'Bankers break into my house at night and steal all my toothpaste replacing it with a product which looks identical but is only 97% as effective in fighting plaque'. Would the rational response be 'In that case we must form a People's Banking Industry which will fix the broken Financial Industry by breaking into the houses of Bankers so as to steal all their toothpaste, replacing it with something which looks identical but is ineffective in fighting plaque.' ?
BT: A profoundly difficult challenge, indeed, but with the proliferation of cameras, the low barrier of entry to social media distribution, and the increasingly sophisticated popular criticism of media frames and narrative strategies, perhaps we might yet see our way out. Another set of crucial questions, from an exciting book full of them.So there you have it. Thanks to social media, we can at last fix the problems of Financial Capitalism by filming ourselves breaking into the houses of Bankers and gleefully replacing their toothpaste with an inferior product.
JB: That’s very kind, thank you so much.Has the young professor really been kind to Butler? If she really were concerned with making society better, he should have criticized her absurd views. But neither she nor the shite subjects both teach has any such concern. Thus the members of this delusive mutual admiration society will go on being very kind to each other in saecula seculorum. As happened to the Gandhian movement, Non-Violence as a political force will degenerate into a psilosophical farce.
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