Violence, Culture And Censure

Professor Colin Sumner, Colin Sumner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2005
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135741457
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Essays reflecting on our understanding and moral judgement of violence. The essays argue that even serious violence is not a simple fact, but a category of thought and practice rooted in history, culture and society.

Chapter 1

Introduction:

The Violence of Censure and the Censure of Violence

Colin Sumner

The essays in this volume are reflections upon our understanding and moral judgment of violence at the end of the twentieth century. We think they show that even a serious matter like violence is not a simple fact which speaks loudly for itself. They illustrate the theory of social censures as two-sided phenomena, partly passionate categories of blaming, reflections of anger, angst and frustration, and partly attempted descriptions of their targets. Violence is thus partly a censorious categorization of aggression and partly a form of aggression. Moreover, it is often an outcome of the social censure of others’ violations; it can be described as either offence or punishment, depending upon the standpoint of the describer.

These essays take topics of contemporary interest as illustrations of the two-dimensional character of violence. They indicate that there is an uncomfortable proximity between the politically legitimized practices of censure, trial and punishment and the practices of socially proscribed violence. They bear in mind the Nietzschean interlinking of good and evil, peace and violence, and consider the nihilism at the end of a violent century. In particular, they stand as our own small commemoration of the Holocaust.

The world of unreason was once hidden from view by its signification in dominant ideological discourses as pathological. The authoritative world of reason, embedded historically within the practices of state, capital accumulation, imperial domination, conventional masculinity and ethnic arrogance, reconstituted unreason within a scientistic grid of negative categories purporting to denigrate and exclude the integral role of unreason within the human condition. That of course by its very nature appears perfectly reasonable, for what sense would it make to celebrate the ‘dark side’ of human practice? But sights require our eyes to see them, and if our vision is already structured by a cultural sediment which limits our view of what is light and what is dark, then we need somehow to reveal that cultural structuration—for it may make us blind to the significance and nature of the world of unreason. It may even prevent us from distinguishing dark from light. The sun shades of ‘reservoir dogs’, in Tarantino’s movie, may make such a distinction difficult.

Historically, as Foucault has implicitly and explicitly suggested in Madness and Civilization, unreason has come to signify, negatively, the non-rational, the feminine, the dark, the child—like, the perverse, the bestial and the passionate. Reason has thus marked off and downgraded, or censured, much of what gives life its deeper meaning, its fundamental vitality, and its intrinsic quality as nature as opposed to machine. The unpredictable and messy natural character of the human condition is over-run and glossed over by a scientized reason determined to effect an anodyne McDonaldization of social relations, in the interests of profit, convenience, practicality, realism, stability, predictability and global domination. Nature is abducted and raped by reason, and then reason has the nerve to turn round and accuse nature of being abnormal, deviant or criminal. However, despite the crimes of rationality, masculinity and bureaucratized capital, we must not forget: Foucault did not suggest, nor did anyone else, that reason was inhuman simply by its existence, nor that masculinity and science were faulty by definition. What Foucault regretted was that we had attempted to marginalize, confine, exorcize and delete one half of the human condition—not that the other half was any more or any less ‘natural’. The romanticism of excess, passion, illogic, bestiality, femininity and childishness is not one of the more palatable features of late modern thought.

We could close ourselves off to the unreasonable desires and practices we have inside us or see around us, but what good would that do? Avoidance and denial, so evident in the amnesia of the Holocaust, never achieved any forward movement, merely a stasis of ignorance as we spin webs of anodyne discursive artifice in defence against our unending and searing pain. Intellectualization and distanciation provide no soothing or healing, but only freeze our horror in an impractical and perpetually wounding silence. Of course, it may often be hard to confront what has been censured, divided off and marginalized in this world, that tabooed topic or event which is spoken of in the hushed tones of obsessive gossip and vicariously devoured in the X-files, those X- and triple X-rated products of a media that knows only too well the fallibilites of its market (but understands absolutely nothing about its impact upon it in human terms). Few of us relish the embrace with pain or the embarassment of revelation, but just to begin to identify and classify the phenomena of ‘the dark side’, to unravel the issues and to discuss what could be different soon reveals that the unthinkable is often more thinkable than we assumed. To take some simple examples: yesterday’s ‘terrorist’ often becomes tomorrow’s leader; the slum culture’s ‘delinquent’ turns out to be less reprehensible than the corrupt politician; the responsible bread-winning husband transforms into a wife-beating ‘bully’; and the ‘deviance’ of many, when put under the spotlight of research, reappears as an editorial selection from a choice of a thousand normalities.

In fact, the world of unreason is subject to much moral, emotional and ethical judgment or filtering before it is constituted as substance, and there is, therefore, every reason for us to suspect that it may not be all that it seems. Unreason is perhaps, in part, an illusion or trick, for it is clearly defined so often by so much passionate, non-rational, infantile and bestial (mis-)judgment, that is, by elements that it is allegedly composed of in the first place. The irony. There is so much unreason involved in the so-called rational social censure of what is called crime, deviance, violence and subversion, that if we have a healthy appreciation of the humanity of truth, and the truth of humanity, we must conclude that reason is not all it seems and neither is unreason. Both, as Foucault argued in Volume 2 of his History of Sexuality, can be seen as elements in what are well described as moral problematizations. The present text can thus be seen as an exploration of the moral problematization of violence in the twentieth century.

This volume is premissed neither upon the value of the rational nor the celebration of its opposites. It is underpinned by scepticism about a hard distinction between the violent and the non-violent; the reasonable and the insane; the healthy and the sick; abuse and use; civilized and barbaric. It is of course thus conditioned by the passing of the twentieth century, which has done so much to make us question what is mad and what is normal—and how, and who is, to decide which is which. The focus of the book is upon the serious matter of violence, and its standpoint is that there is a latent violence in censure and a latent censure in violence; reason and unreason married as one, for better and for worse.

It may be that ethologists like Ardrey and Lorenz were right to highlight the constancy of aggression in human practice, but we cannot logically infer from this that violence is a universal feature of human behaviour. Aggression and violence are not the same. Aggression is action we accept, violence is action we do not normally condone. But, if this is true, the difference between aggression and violence resides not in physical action but in the meaning which we attribute to the two actions. Violence, it seems to me, is best understood as the censure of some forms of human practice as unacceptable forms or levels of aggression. Violence is a cultural and historical sign, subject to the usual human filters of interest, prejudice and principle; as a sign of disapproval, it is more arbitrary and capricious than a simple effect of its referent or target. Of course, this does not mean that its target or referent does not precipitate the censure or that such a censure would not command popular assent, but it does mean that what counts as violence is subject to the acculturated or political understandings and standpoints of the viewer, One man’s ‘healthy aggression’ is another woman’s ‘mindless violence’; one society’s blood feud is a system of social control, another’s is dangerous vigilantism; one country’s civilization is another’s barbarism; one country’s ethnic cleansing is another’s war crime.

Some censures of violence may be agreeable to us but that would not alter one iota the fact that they are still signs lodged within a culture’s moral orthodoxy or political creed; signs of human passion, interest, custom and disorder. They remain moral or ethical judgments of practice which are mainly legitimized through reference to the manifestations they condemn, the criteria and procedures of ethical judgment used, the explanations they suppose of the apparent violence, and the context in which they are made. In practice, as we know from everyday life, very often the facts of the case are more complex than they first seemed, our ethics are rarely consistently and abstractly applied, our implicit explanations are structured more by our desire to condemn than the facts of the case, and the context in which judgment is made can colour all. Thus it is that one person’s ‘necessary law and order’ is another person’s state violence, and the victim’s perception of ‘animal violence’ is the assailant’s attempt to ‘cleanse’ the world of evil.

Enforcing the law is in many cultures a legitimate form of state aggression; aggressively challenging state officials or policy is frequently an illegitimate violation of the peace. Or so the conventional theory of the state tells us. Violence is thus built into our politics as part of the unlawful, the illegitimate and the politically unacceptable. It is inherently a censure; it is not innocent of political theory nor moral judgment. It is culturally loaded in its meaning. Any social science which approaches the phenomenon of violence must therefore start by disentangling the sign from its referents, the signification from the logic and context of its practice, and the signifying agency from the case. Explanation of violence cannot proceed without this first step of cultural and political deconstruction—cultural studies, sociology of law, political theory—but, equally, it cannot rest there and must move on to explanation and ethics, a sociology of aggression and a normative jurisprudence, if it is to get to the heart of the matter. So little existing work completes each step of such a research programme; so little deconstruction of violence has begun, so much deconstruction stops with media imagery or the self-interest of legislators. Analysis of media metaphor and rhetoric needs to be combined with the search for the varied social and psychic roots of the desire to kill or to hurt, and with educated moral judgment about what is acceptable as healthy aggression and what is unacceptable and a sign of dis-ease.

Throughout, the book attempts to illustrate the way that violence is very much a social censure of perceived aggression or offence and thus a theme lodged within certain cultural ideologies of domination, namely those which specify what is legitimate violence and who should have the monopoly over it. Claire Valiér’s essay in Chapter 2 emphasizes the violent character of censure through an analysis of the censorious discourses of sadomasochism. She demonstrates that both the censure of violence and the violence of such a censure are inseparable from its constituent ideological formations. Drawing upon literature and social history, she exemplifies the power of Foucauldian analysis in this field, and also reassesses the social role of blaming practices in the light of existentialist considerations. In particular, she attempts to portray censure as a means of extending the field of the norm and to rethink the moral problematization of sexuality.

The essays on the Holocaust by David Craig, in Chapter 3, and Anthony Amatrudo, in Chapter 4, penetrate deeply into the psychological and ideological formation of German Nazism. Drawing on psychoanalysis and the history of art, they trace the origins and character of the violent potential of certain ways of thinking and being. They observe the horrific violence that can flow from certain types of censure and reflect upon the fact that even what many would see as the most censurable of violence is itself subject to considerable variety of explanation, interpretation and representation. Craig’s work is concerned with the merits of a renewal of psychoanalytic sociology and assesses the arguments of writers such as Freud, Fromm, Parsons, Marcuse and Reich in attempting to understand the mental set and social conditions which might enable some understanding of the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust. Amatrudo demonstrates that a fascist aesthetics were an integral part of the Nazi viewpoint and that even a ‘bestial’ violence such as the Nazis perpetrated was a deeply cultural form; indeed, it was rooted in a rewriting of the cultural script of German-ness and German history.

Chapters 5 and 6, by Laurence Grant and Ethan Raup respectively, draw upon theories of hegemony and authoritarian populism to interrogate the roots of state violence in Argentina and the United States. They illustrate the popular support often fuelling state policies which are severely violent, and the way that such popularity is politically constructed in particular historical and political situations. In many ways, they link our shock or horror at the forms of violence discussed in the earlier chapters with our familiarity with, and acceptance of, forms of violence which we see in the contemporary world as ‘law-and-order’. Grant’s piece draws upon Hall, Poulantzas and Laclau to explain the economic, political and cultural bases of Perón’s authoritarian populist régime in Argentina. In so doing, he interrogates the meaning and value of the category of populism for social-scientific analysis, and provides a useful illustration of the value of the concept of hegemony for critical criminology. Raup applies Hall and Poulantzas also, to explain the rising American prison population and the disproportionate censure of inner-city black people; but he develops their work significantly in drawing upon Lash and Urry’s analysis of disorganized capitalism to offer an account of the scape-goating of black crime, especially in relation to drugs, as a reflection of the processes of post-modernization. Social censure of crime is thus portrayed as a violent reflection of social-structural change and the need to maintain a conservative political hegemony.

What is culturally taken for granted as normal is thus an integral part of the violence of censure. The violence to other possible truths inherent in our common-place representations of violence is the subject of the final two essays of the book. In Chapter 7, Vicki Harbord discusses the recent representations of violence in contemporary films such as those of Tarantino and questions again the ‘imitation’ thesis so popular within media debates about media violence. Her work presents an important development of recent studies of ‘crime stories’ in the mass media by arguing that some contemporary film contains a drastically different narrative from that of conventional television crime drama and that this amounts to nothing less than the fictional disappearance of the detective and thus the demise of a mythically successful criminal justice. The loss of the hero reveals our loss of faith in the world’s ability to return us to peace. In addition, Harbord’s essay, in considering such matters as the role of special effects and product placement, in the context of film theory and psychoanalysis, sheds new light on the relationships between violence, social anxiety, commerce and moral panics in a radicalized modernity, or postmodern world. Violence, à la Tarantino and Baudrillard, becomes an aesthetic outside of a formulaic moral context, rather than a situated and meaningful representation; a movement that deeply disconcerts us and adds to the fear quotient already endemic in postmodernization.

So have postmodernist ideas of violence had a bad press too? The book ends with a consideration of the fact that the twentieth century has thrown considerable philosophical doubt over the idea that violence is unequivocally bad, and indeed has sometimes celebrated it as a cathartic or emancipatory form of release, or, in other contexts, has revealed the violence of language itself. Steve Goodman’s essay in Chapter 8 reviews the philosophy of violence in the twentieth century and interrogates the conventional, dismissive, reading of Nietzsche as a mere nihilist. Drawing upon the writings of Bauman, Sorel, Fanon, Forgacs, Cotta, Derrida, Baudrillard and Benjamin, Goodman shows nihilism to be a much more complex form than is usually thought, and its appeal to people, or its value, at the end of the century is disturbingly illustrated in a spirited defence of postmodernist philosophy.

The positive role of nihilism in the 1990s may constitute an uncomfortable thought perhaps for what some may find to be an uncomfortable book. However, as all the contributors would agree, we end a violent century with yet more severe violence all around us and with little evidence that it can be attributed to a minority of strange, diseased, people or even that it can readily be described as a behavioural abnormality.

With dis-ease ubiquitous and immorality so tightly in the hands of power, there is no better time to reassess the roots of civility and the ethics of force; or to question the very meanings of violence as a category within the social sciences and humanities.

Chapter 2

On the Violence of Censure

Claire Valiér

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche writes that ‘what we do is never understood but always only praised or censured’ (1887:219). This essay asks two questions: firstly, what place do certain blaming practices have in the mechanisms of power operating in modern Western societies? My inquiry will primarily use as its medium an analysis of the ‘talk’ about sadomasochism (see the exchange between Foucault and Alain Grosrichard in Foucault, 1980b: 221). The other question considers how else sadomasochism could operate within a moral problematization of sexuality.

Censure Seeks to Extend the Effective Field of the Norm

The theoretical framework of this essay draws in particular on the formulations of Nietzsche, Sartre, Beauvoir, Sumner and Foucault. I am going to start by discussing several essays from Mary Douglas’ 1992 collection Risk and Blame in order to elaborate my use of Sumner and of Foucault. Douglas sees the different ways in which ‘in all places at all times the universe is moralized and politicized’ as functional to the organization of societies (1992:5). She admits that her perspective is close to that of Durkheim, with the response to perceived dangers fulfilling the purpose of shoring up group cohesion. Here blaming practices are important to the making of communities—are an almost necessary part of culture. In seeking intelligibility, in asking the question ‘what was, or is, the meaning of this practice?’, there is a danger of the pragmatic question ‘how did, or does, this work?’ collapsing over into the functionalist question ‘what purpose did, or does, this serve?’. It is my argument that the work of Douglas described above has not evaded that trap, and that further it is in the work of Michel Foucault that this is most effectively problematized.

Douglas sees dangers as ‘weapons to use in the struggle for ideological domination’ (1992:13). While working from the basis of social conflict rather than ‘the public good’ or shared values, Sumner (1990c) theorizes censures as ‘negative ideological formations’. First of all, this asks the question ‘ideology in the interests of whom?’. Sumner identifies the white, male bourgeoisie as the framers of the dominant values and ideas of capitalist societies. Secondly, for Sumner censures are practical, emerging from and having their existence within, historically specific social practices. Finally, censures legitimate and guide interventions directed at the deviant.

Foucault suggests another approach with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Introduction: The Violence of Censure and the Censure of Violence
• Chapter 2. On the Violence of Censure
• Chapter 3. Psychoanalytic Sociology and the Holocaust
• Chapter 4. The Nazi Censure of Art: Aesthetics and the Process of Annihilation
• Chapter 5. Populism as Social Control in Latin America
• Chapter 6. The American Prison Problem, Hegemonic Crisis, and the Censure of Inner-City Blacks
• Chapter 7. Natural Born Killers: Violence, Film and Anxiety
• Chapter 8. Nihilism and the Philosophy of Violence
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index