“Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate. Its justification loses its plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future.”
Hannah Arendt, 1969, On Violence, Harcourt and Brace.
More from the family archives: my mother and father were married in August 1957, and he was then posted to Cyprus. My mother arrived to join him at the beginning of 1958. She arrived slap bang in the middle of ‘the Emergency’. By 1958, Britain’s ‘small war’ in Cyprus was reaching its end game. The emergency was a response to the paramilitary campaign of the EOKA (the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters), who sustained a campaign of bombings, shootings, assassinations and demonstrations for 4 years from 1955 . EOKA’s campaign was halted in 1959, when the British negotiated a settlement for independence with Archbishop Makarios, rather than ‘Enosis’ or unification with Greece which had been the explicit aim of the campaign. Cyprus was another of those places where the British developed counter-insurgency and anti-terrorism strategies in the 1950s.
The cinefilm from this period consists of long stretches of film taken while driving around the island; and from the air, of flying around it too. My mother always referred to this period by repeating the same anecdote – one about being escorted around town by soldiers carrying Sten Guns. It clearly left an impression.
Amongst many other things, my mother pasted into her scrapbook orders from British military officials to servicemen on how to conduct themselves (see: Viking Patrols), but also EOKA leaflets addressed to both British soldiers and to local Turkish and Greek Cypriots (see: EOKA to British Soldiers and Rumours). Leafleting was in fact a key aspect of the EOKA’s campaign, it turns out – a kind of legitimizing and/or intimidatory and/or mobilising public supplement to the use of violence. These come from June 1958, during an intensification of inter-communal violence and British clampdown.
There are also a couple of gems from October 1958, issued in the days immediately following the shooting dead of the wife of a British serviceman on the island. They provide specific instructions to households for going shopping to the NAAFI (see: Lady customers) and even more precise instructions for wives (see: Restrictions on wives) as to when and where and whom to visit.
This handful of pieces of paper are like a personal archive of my mother’s experience of colonial and anti-colonial violence, order and terror. They give a little insight into the ordinary ways in which the subjects of the emergency were constructed by various sides: as ‘youths’ and ‘mobs’; as ‘civilised persons’ or ‘agressors’; as ‘helpless Greeks’ and ‘soldiers’ obeying orders, or just doing a ‘bobby’s job’; as ‘husbands’ and ‘wives’ and ‘children’.
Apart from anything else, all this makes it a little more obvious why a move to Rhodesia may have appeared a nice idea.
Here is an interview with Simon Critchley, on his new book Faith of the Faithless, which in part continues a ‘debate’ with Zizek about violence and non-violence. You could win the book, if you know which football team he supports.
Progressive Geographies provides a link to a new site exploring the Histories of Violence, a project which goes live next week on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. On a related theme, Erica Chenoweth’s blog Rational Insurgent provides a detailed resource for thinking about nonviolent politics (a detailed overview of the practice of nonviolent politics and civil resistance is provided by the edited volume Civil Resistance and Power Politics). Chenoweth has an interesting piece in Foreign Policy examining the relevance of this strand of thought and action in the context of the Arab Spring. I suspect her argument would not convince Zizek, who used the riots in the UK last month to reiterate the broad argument about political violence he has been making for some time now. Zizek’s piece, with its impatience towards deliberating, self-organising protesters and its longing for “a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness”, reiterates the themes raised by the ‘debate‘ between Zizek and Simon Critchley a couple of years ago about how to think about the relationship between violence and non-violence in ethics and politics (most of the discussion was from Critchley, certainly all of the interesting thinking). Hamid Dabashi provides a smart and succinct riposte to Zizek’s most recent anaysis.
A week of protest, demonstrations, rioting, flash looting, vandalism and violence across towns and cities in England has been another occasion for the expression of instant opinion and analysis by academics and intellectuals.
The president and vice-chair of the British Sociological Association (BSA) made a public claim for the relevance of sociology in the wake of the riots, primarily on the grounds that sociologists know that ‘crowds are not rational’. Really? Since when? A peculiar claim indeed, one which seemed to conflate ‘emotions’ with ‘lack of reason’, and invited us to regress a hundred years or so back to Gustave Le Bon, and running counter to a wide range of social science that has spent decades demonstrating precisely the opposite.
The Mandy Rice-Davies Award for this week goes to Zygmunt Bauman, for whom these events were all a symptom of rampant consumerism – actually a widely shared view amongst much of the commentariat, from left to right. David Harvey developed the extended analogy between the ‘feral rats’ doing the looting and ‘feral’ bankers and capitalists going unpunished for their crimes in bringing about global financial chaos. An analogy which, one might suppose, did not really throw much explanatory light upon last weeks’ events at all. Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett discerned a general sense of cynicism born of inequality as laying behind the riots.
Some commentators were keen to insist on a link between these events and the Coalitions’ agenda of austerity and cuts – but the link was only presented as a ‘context’, which rather begged the important question about how the relationship between contexts and conditions on the one hand, and actions and events on the other, is actually meant to be mediated. A number of people alighted upon an academic paper which finds a correlation between fiscal austerity and social ‘unrest’, in order to shore up the argument that there was a link between rioting and cuts.
Much of the commentary I have seen has suggested that ‘the right’ is keen to deny any and all causal analysis of these events, invoking pure criminality and mindless irresponsibility. This seems to be wrong-headed, and probably continues a long-standing failure to credit the post-Thatcherite right in the UK with having a quite well-developed social theory of our contemporary malaise. There are various sorts of causal accounts on the right – from Peter Oborne, whose account alights upon inequality and unaccountable elites in a way that easily resonates in fact with various left narratives, to the lunacy of David Starkey’s claim that the riots happened because ‘whites have become black’, and not in a good way. In between these positions, there is of course the prevalent Tory position, which invests heavily in ‘culture of poverty’ style arguments, focussing on family structures, moral failures, cultures of entitlement, and the like. There is a whole strand of social thought and research informing this style of analysis of course, and it is on this terrain, like or not, that the politics of academic analysis on these issues is likely to be fought. What these classically conservative narratives have going for them, of course, is that they specify and identify mechanisms, and potential objects of intervention, which mediate between broad structural processes and observable patterns of group behaviour and individual action. It is this ‘pragmatic’ emphasis that is missing in the grander narratives of consumerism, neoliberalism, feral capitalism and the like which emanate from the left, and which makes those critical narratives politically weak – consoling in their own way, for sure, but not really identifying practical paths of action, beyond general calls either for revolution, solidarity, or to rally round and ‘take responsibility’.
Somewhere amongst all this, I did happen upon some more informative contributions, although these tended to reinforce the sense that academics are better placed to think slowly through events rather than squeeze them into their pre-existing frames. The ESRC did a better job than the BSA by publicising the work of David Waddington and Clifford Stott on the complex dynamics of policing and public (dis-)order – work that explicitly counters the sense that rioting is ‘irrational’. Society and Space re-posted a series of academic analyses of policing and urban unrest from different historical and geographical contexts. And Paul Rogers drew attention to a recently published analysis of the dynamics of urban rioting and community reconstruction in Bradford from 2001 to 2010 which also seems pertinent going forward.
None of these examples reflected directly on events of last week, but each seems to promise more by way of understanding the causes and conditions and possible consequences of those events than much of the more instant reaction. Above all, each of these examples draws into focus the intricate roles of policing in contemporary democratic politics – another issue which, it seems to me, much of the theory-left has consistently failed to think through, happy to think of policing as merely an instrument of state control and oppression, a version of ‘the repressive state apparatuses’. This week has crystallised the issue of ‘cuts’ to the public services more acutely than ever before, certainly, but not because the cuts stand as a background condition or cause. Rather, it is because the consequences for the public order, in the broadest possible sense, of shrinking the resources and recalibrating the organisational structures of agencies charged with protecting and sustaining public life have been so starkly dramatised. In terms of both funding issues but also of principles of accountability and independence, policing has suddenly become the central terrain of debate and contestation around which the shape of public life is likely to be shaped in the next few years. And it’s good to remember that it’s when the call is to “start assembling the boys from the fort” that things start to get really worrying.
Further to yesterday’s post about violence and non-violence in contemporary Theory, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl has posted some remarks on Arendt’s account of the difference between power and violence, originally made in an interesting context in Venezuela.
A feature of much of the instant commentary on political events from Tunisia to Egypt, Bahrain to Libya has been a focus on those aspects of these processes that can be grasped even if you don’t know much, if anything, about these places. This is partly what is going on around all the discussion of the role of new media in facilitating and translating contestation across the Middle East – this is the aspect of these events can is familiar even from a distance. Indeed, it’s the aspect that makes these events accessible in new ways, in certain respects, while occluding aspects that are not so amenable to being communicated through these mediums.
So, rather than focus on what is most comforting about these events – the degree to which they might confirm a certain predisposition amongst a digitally wired intellectual strata of the importance of being digitally wired, I wonder if there aren’t things about them that might unsettle received wisdom. I wonder in particular if they might unsettle at all any of the conventions of contemporary ‘Theory’? This might appear a rather obscure concern, but it’s been interesting me this week as the figure of Gene Sharp, political theorist of non-violence, has been profiled in a range of after-the-fact reflections on political upheaval in Tunisia and Egypt in particular. Sharp was mentioned in a New York Times article about these revolutions, and was then the subject of a follow-up profile. Interviews and blog notices about his influence in shaping the non-violent strategies of protestors and with links to key publications have followed.
I particularly liked the blog posts which wondered aloud who Gene Sharp was, since he doesn’t seem to figure in a canon of contemporary political thinkers. In fact, Sharp is often a focus of attention when non-violent political action shakes more or less dictatorial, more or less authoritarian regimes around the world – he is credited with influencing non-violent political movement from Burma to Zimbabwe, Iran to Eastern Europe (there is an ultra-leftist riff on the blogosphere that Sharp is just an agent of the CIA, on the grounds that the events in which his influence is so often found tend to be supported also by the US government or US-based democracy promotion programmes).
What is interesting, theoretically, about Sharp’s analysis of non-violent political action, which informs the practical strategies picked up in such diverse contexts, is a conceptualization of power as being based on consent and obedience, not premised on violence. This might sound familiar – it is a Gramscian shibboleth to contrast coercion and consent after all. But in Sharp’s work, it is the basis of a pluralist understanding of the different ways in which power structures seek and secure consent – without reducing all of these to some fundamental substance in violence and coercion. It’s this difference between power and consent that underlies Sharp’s strategic understanding of the potential of non-violent action, which has clear resonances with Arendt’s account of concerted public action, as mobilising a fundamentally different register or mode of action than that of authoritarian or dictatorial regimes. The sense that power is not reducible to violence is also found in Arendt, even in Foucault. But its remarkably common in contemporary political theory and cultural theory alike to elide this difference, and to presume that in fact violence is the substratum of all power relations, or that apparent consent is really just the product of manipulation and manufacture – i.e., just a cover for coercion, which is not, one might suppose, what Gramsci was actually getting at. The failure to think through the political implications of the fact that consent has to be won is the focus of Michael Bérubé’s book The Left at War, and John Brenkman’s The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy, great books which seriously think through the limitations of conventions of current theoretical genres in light of the spiralling politics of violence of the last decade.
The influence of Sharp’s work, and the examples of non-violent political action with which his name is often associated, is a powerful rebuke to the metaphorical over-inflation of ‘violence’ in so much contemporary theory, whether in notions such as ‘symbolic violence’, or the ontologization of violence that runs from Sorel through Fanon to Agamben. It also stands in contrast to the current excitement around The Coming Insurrection, the anarcho-communist text that has become central to the case of the Tarnac 9 (0r 10) in France since 2008, and garnered lots of attention, and a translation with Semiotext(e), as a startling new and original conceptualization of the ‘politics of neocommunism’, as one contribution to a renewed Marxism-beyond-class (what would be the point of Marxism without class?). Interpreted by the French authorities as a manual for terrorism, it’s also been described as ‘elitist revolutionary strutting‘ and identified as really just a symptom of the absurdities of a failed lineage of left theory. It’s certainly odd to find a text which identities a new subject of political revolution – ‘youth’ – but has recourse to such a resolutely middle-aged, crotchety analysis of generalised alienation. It is also notable, in contrast to the theory of non-violent political action currently being enacted in the world, how far this style of political analysis depends on drawing symmetries between the modes of action of ‘the powerful’ and those who challenge them – the theoretical significance of the rhetoric of war, attack, and confrontation in this document lies here, I think, in this moral and political failure to be able to think of politics outside of a logic of mimetic hostility. And of course, whereas Gene Sharp’s name keeps coming up when it is realised that non-violent political action is strategic and organised, the analysis of a communism-to-come that is a purely immanent resonance with the current system requires no attention at all to the hard work of political action.
Pop Theory 