Here's an idea, violence is the removal of choice.
Previously on Idea Channel, we've
talked about violence and how I think of violence
as a removal of choice.
Violence is the interruption of inertia, the removal
of possibility and, most importantly, of choice.
We've defined violence as the potentially aggressive removal
of an actor's choice in a situation.
The idea that violence is characterized mainly
by the inability to choose has raised questions
and inspired some confusion.
So I thought we might spend some time on it.
Violence is often spoken about as one particular thing,
bodily harm, maybe aggressive bodily harm.
The legal concept of violence cites
the use of physical force, think movement, activity, bodies.
What I'm going to argue is that violence
is about choice as much or more so than it is about bodies.
That it can, in fact, be passive and that there's
an important ethical dimension to thinking of violence as more
than just physical violence, which is only one
of many different kinds of violence.
Physical violence is the type of violence
that we hear about the most often.
It's the violence in violent movies, violent video games,
violent sports where characters, avatars,
and players are gruesomely murdered or endure
physical harm.
In violent crimes, victims are injured or killed.
But this gets complicated pretty quickly.
Let's do a gut check.
And be honest, if someone is mugged and they're stabbed,
do you call that a violent crime?
Probably.
What if they're threatened and pushed
over as their assailant takes their bag?
They fall and they bruise their knee
but otherwise they're physically unharmed,
is that a violent crime?
What about if they're threatened hand
over their bag and the mugger just runs away,
no physical contact at all.
Is that a violent crime?
I think crimes most people would call violent
tend to involve excessive force.
Force is sometimes the means, sometimes the end of the crime,
but when it comes to the phrase violent crime,
I have a sense that force is imagined
to be extreme in some way.
A bruised knee isn't the result of a violent crime
but a stab wound is.
However, typically law enforcement
would consider all of the muggings
that I described as violent.
The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, for instance,
classifies offenses which involve force or the threat
of force as violent crimes.
Implicitly, we can interpret this as support
for the idea that it's not just physical harm which
makes a crime violent but the position a victim is put
in when faced with physical harm or its possibility,
one where they have little or no agency, little or no ability
to act, to make meaningful choices.
Beyond physical harm, violence would
seem to be the whole or partial negation of agency
through force.
Personally, I first encountered a version of this idea
in the writings of theater director Anne Bogart.
In her book A Director Prepares, she
writes that an initiating creative act,
the first brushstroke on a canvas, the first set piece
on a stage, is a violent act.
It can't be undone.
Erased or removed maybe, but the initial action
lives in our history.
Decisive actions are violent when they're forceful and can't
be meaningfully retracted.
Bogart says creative decisiveness, a force which
she equates with cruelty, quote, extinguishes
the spontaneity of the moment.
It creates a point after which anything is no longer possible.
Actors, Bogart says, are heroic because they invite and work
within this artistic violence, a space of ever diminishing
creative options as they head for their performative ideal
of repetition.
Bogart was writing about the hard work of director,
not making an incisive theoretical point.
But her ideas about artistic violence
have wide-ranging applications when talking
about other kinds of violence.
They're echoed in tons of literature on the subject
and provide, I think, a good organizing concept
for the work of others.
Laura Tanner, for instance, writing seven years earlier
presages Bogart's sentiments but in application
to physical violence on bodies which do not invite it.
In her book Intimate Violence she
writes, while Freud associated scopophilia,
which is the pleasure of looking,
with the idea of taking other people as objects,
the same process of objectification
underlies violence in which violators
dehumanize their intended victims
and look at them not as people but as inanimate objects.
Tanner writes about how physical violence co-ops
the fundamental subjectivity of a human body
and its consciousness and uses it
to transform that body into a thing, something
that can't act, an object.
It uses the experience of having a body to deny that body's
own agency.
To put it in Bogart's words, physical violence and threats
of it extinguish the spontaneity of not just a moment
but a person.
To put it another way, over and above the bodily harm
that may characterize physical violence,
there's a violence-as-such that physical violence requires.
And through law enforcement and the work of Bogart and Tanner,
we've uncovered how that violence-as-such
is a force, which transforms a person into a thing,
a force which removes agency.
And that being the case, we can start to look elsewhere
for forces which extinguish spontaneity beyond the physical
and ask how they too may be seen for what they truly are,
violent.
Helpfully, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek
draws a distinction.
On the one hand, he writes of subjective violence, which
is what we've been talking about,
violence with a clear perpetrator, like a criminal.
On the other hand, he talks of the somewhat
confusingly named objective of violence, which he describes
as invisible because it's widespread,
has no clear singular source, and is very easy to confuse
with just how things are, the natural seeming operations
of languages, societies, governments, et cetera.
Nonetheless, objective violence possesses
that characteristic agency negation.
Zizek further splits objective violence
into symbolic violence and systemic violence.
Symbolic violence has a lot of forms,
one example is hate speech because it
determines the very being and social existence
of its subject.
Hate speech may not force the oppressed
to literally become how they are interpreted by bigots,
but it unavoidably affects their socially constructed image,
a force which then determines how they can or feel
they must act in the world.
Symbolic violence also exists within language
as a whole in that it coerces experiences and descriptions
of the world into its own restrictive symbology.
In the way hate speech pigeonholes
people, language itself pigeonholes reality.
Systemic violence, by comparison,
is a little more concrete.
Zizek writes that it's the violence
inherent in a system, not only direct physical violence,
but also the more subtle forms of coercion that
sustain relations of domination and exploitation,
including the threat of violence.
Systemic violence is what allows the gap between the rich
and the poor to grow.
It accounts for how oppressed peoples become and then
stay oppressed.
Sometimes, as is the case in North Korea,
systemic violence and physical violence are intimately linked.
While in other places, like many parts of the West,
systemic violence is often considered nothing
more than the rational operation of cultures, economies,
or governments.
It is simply the way things are.
Or if you like, pure ideology,
The point being, both symbolic and systemic violence
apply some measure of force, physical, cognitive, social,
cultural, ontological, such that the agency of their victim
is either partially or entirely negated.
It may not be a moment of violence, as in a mugging,
but it is a state of violence, a fact of it.
Now, a sticking point here may involve use of the word force.
In systems especially, be they linguistic, economic,
or digital, how is their force if the perpetrator is
the way things are?
Static code or literal infrastructure
slash bureaucracy.
Whatever I've claimed is being violent takes
literally no action so how is there force?
To help address this, we can take some inspiration
from Newton.
When one body exerts force on a second body,
the second body exerts an equal and opposite force.
Of course, Newton was talking about physical forces.
And forces of objective violence may not jump out of a bush
and somehow actively restrict your communication
or physically prevent you from joining the middle class.
But there are endless situations,
both symbolic and systemic, where when attempting to act,
one is prevented partially or wholly.
The use of the third law here is metaphoric.
We may push on systemic structures.
And though the structure is gargantuan, inanimate,
and rigid, it certainly pushes back.
That is its force.
That is how systems extinguish spontaneity through violence.
To circle back then to where we started,
such forces aren't normally thought violent
because violence commonly considered is active.
It's thought of as gross, excessive, vicious, aggressive,
and manic.
We think of violence as action and bodies.
But it's also a force exerted through passivity.
When we consider violence as the whole or partial negation
of agency through force and then understand
the full implication of force, we
can see how these other forms of violence
are also gross, excessive, vicious, and aggressive, just
not necessarily physically.
To me, this gets at the ethics of such a concept of violence.
It allows us to appreciate more completely what about
and in the world is violent.
It allows us to see how the use and threat of force
goes far, far beyond implements that cause bodily harm.
It gives us a strategy for considering and appreciating
more completely the methods of violence
in the world, many of which may seem deeply and deceptively
inactive.
But as we've seen and as Zizek says
in the last line of his book on the subject,
sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.
What do you all think?
I'm especially curious to hear how
you would apply this concept of violence to other things
that we strongly associate with violence,
things like sports, illness, animals, and nature, and BDSM.
We'll talk about those things in next week's comment response
video.
But before then, I would love to hear
how you would apply this concept of violence to those areas.
Let us know in the comments.
In this week's comment response video,
we talked about your thoughts regarding
3D printing and copyright.
If you want to watch that one, you
can click here or find a link in the doobly doo.
Are you or someone or you know a liberal arts unicorn?
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t-shirt featuring that very thing
in an awesome illustration by friend of the show,
Andrea slash art sparrow.
It includes my personal favorite, the slogan omnia sunt
gravia, which translates from the Latin roughly to,
all things are interesting.
If you want to grab this t-shirt,
you can go to DFTBI.com, find a link in the doobly doo,
and we'll probably also put a merch card right here.
A small bit of news from the production side of things.
We're going to try something new.
We're going to try a less strict upload schedule going forward.
What that means is if it gets to around midday
Eastern on Wednesday and we feel like we could spend
another couple hours or another day on an episode,
we're going to do that in hopes that we
will be able to make it that much better.
So if we haven't uploaded something
on Wednesday afternoon, you can look for it
on Thursday or on Friday.
The idea is that we're definitely still going
to try to release things once a week
but not be so strict as to release it at the same time
every Wednesday so we can give everything a little bit
extra polish.
If we haven't uploaded and you're worried,
you can always check in on Twitter,
on Facebook, or on the subreddit,
on my personal Twitter account.
I'll try to update those things as we're
moving through production if it looks like we're
going to be uploading at some time other than midday
Eastern on Wednesday.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit,
where I have been posting in-progress scripts
for upcoming Idea Channel episodes if you
want to read those and give us comments on them.
I would love to hear them.
Links to all those places in the doobly doo.
The Tweet of the Week comes from Erica The Dev,
who points us towards a really interesting interview
with someone who used to be-- I forget right now.
He was like the head of product or development or something
at Adobe talking about when Adobe
had to confront the fact that their software was being
pirated and him trying to convince the top brass
that that was their freemium option, which
is just such a forward looking and accepting
way of looking at that.
It's a great listen.
It's a great read.
Yeah, check it out.
And of course, this week's episode
would not have been possible or good without the very hard work
of these heroic actors.