Civilized Violence

Subjectivity, Gender and Popular Cinema

David Hansen-Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317165422
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Civilized Violence provides a social and historical explanation for the popular appeal of cinema violence. There is a significant amount of research on the effects of media violence, but less work on what attracts audiences to representations of violence in the first place. Drawing on historical-sociology, cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, masculinity studies and textual analysis, David Hansen-Miller explains how the exercise of violence has been concealed and denied by modern society at the same time that it retains considerable power over how we live our lives. He demonstrates how discourses of sexuality and gender, even romantic love, are freighted with the micropolitics of violence. Confronted with such contradictions, audiences are drawn to the cinema where they can see violence graphically restored to everyday life. Popular cinema holds the power to narrate and interpret social forces that have become too opaque, diffuse and dynamic to otherwise comprehend. Through detailed engagement with specific narratives from the last century of popular film - The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Sheik, Once Upon a Time in the West, Deliverance - and the pervasive violence of contemporary cinema, Hansen-Miller investigates the manner in which representations can transform our understanding of how violence works.

Chapter 1
From Scaffold to Cinema: Violence as a Force of Subjection and Subjectivation

This chapter offers a social and historical framework for understanding the consumption of violent cinema. It is not concerned with film as such, but with the composition of subjectivity as it is drawn to cinema violence. While the following chapters engage directly with the confrontation between spectator and text, here I wish to explain the subjective need for cinema violence, which gives this confrontation power and resonance. Such an explanation requires a dissection of the intimate relationship between violence and modern subjectivity. By uncovering our investments in the civilized violence of bio-political contexts, I think we can better understand what is taking place in popular cinema.

For those concerned with theories of the subject, some of the ground covered in this chapter is no doubt familiar. However, I think the general constellation of theoretical engagements with the question of subjectivity is marked by neglect of the everyday violence operating at the heart of bio-political modernity. Rightly, increasing critical attention has been given to violence committed against the periphery, and to the psychic relations implicated in the hypocrisy of contemporary neoliberal foreign policy and in the economic world system.1 This book contends with the constitutive violence operating at the level of the mass or population within the so-called civilized spheres. The goal is not to make equivalences between here and there by asserting that concealed violence within civilized spheres means everyone lives under the same general brutality, but to elaborate the manner in which violence subtends the subjectivity of the civilized. Hence, the violence of the political interior is not an abstraction. It is not the ghostly presence or threat of something that has been disavowed: it is a living material force that defines us in our everyday life.

This state of affairs explains the fundamental need to understand violence. Our best chance of escaping or resisting the micro-political exercise of violence derives from understanding its mechanics. The difficulty is that such understanding is intricately tied up with agency and power. The field is so constituted that our efforts to avoid becoming the object of violence, to resist subjection, mean becoming an agent of violence: subjectivation. I shall explain that the experience of subjectivity is an oscillation between resistance to, and agency through, violence. Our divided interest in something that is also intricate and complex motivates our spectatorship of violent narratives.

Popular cinema has the potential to represent the field of civilized violence in a manner that can be understood and managed by spectators. It inherits the social role of the scaffold and plays to both divisions of our interest. It offers its audience a coherent interpretation of the state of play that can assist the spectator’s effective resistance to violence at the same time as it facilitates the spectator’s ability to exercise control over violence. The spectator-subject brings the whole history of violence with them into the theatre. In the same sense that Walter Benjamin imagined the wreckage of history piled on top of itself, we can imagine that spectator, seated on the wreckage watching the screen.2

Revisiting the Spectacle of the Scaffold

As a starting point for the development of such an analysis, it will be helpful to return to earlier spectacles of violence and draw out the continuity as well as the disjuncture. The dramatic punishments on the scaffold have deservedly taken up a canonical role in our understanding of violence and modernity, and can accordingly serve as a starting point. As is well known, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish begins with the gruelling 1757 torture and execution of Damiens the regicide.3 That example illustrates the dominant techniques of power under the old regime, as well as their instability before they were superseded by the disciplinary regimes of modern justice. Additional emphasis should be given to the instability that accrued to the scaffold, which can be understood as an effect of a growing disjuncture between a mode of representation and the regime it was intended to exemplify. Within the execution of Damiens one can see the need for alternative modes of punishment, at the same time that the need for alternative representations of violence become evident. Each technology will evolve, but they will also remain in tension with each other.

If we remember, the execution was to be enacted through a series of excruciating punishments.4 The torturous spectacle performed the rite and right of the Sovereign’s power through the exercise of violence upon the body of the subject: ‘in the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical inverted figure of the king’.5 Accordingly, the punishment prescribed for Damiens leave the reader with the impression that the amende honorable seeks to deliver the most excruciating trauma possible. As Foucault wrote, ‘the very excess of the violence employed is one of the elements of its glory’. The logic of torture required the guilty to ‘moan and cry out’ and thus manifest what Elaine Scarry helpfully identifies as linguistic de-subjectivization.6 This was not ‘a shameful side effect’ but the ‘very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force’.7 The spectacle and the regime that it performs appear to meld perfectly.

Yet when Damiens’s body did not come apart as cleanly as intended, the series of punishments became more horrific. The reports on Damiens call attention to the technical complications of the execution: the horses at first fail to quarter the body, sinews fail to break and require additional hacking, flesh-tearing requires repeated assistance from the executioner.8 (These graphic passages can still affect the reader.) Such accounts indicate that a kind of failure occurred or was at least perceived to occur. Insofar as the intent of the punishment was to cause excruciating pain, to extract from the criminal body the price of the violation and to reiterate the symbolic relation of ‘the power of certain individuals over others’, we cannot say that the punishment itself failed.9 Instead, a distinction emerges between discourses performed in the spectacle of public torture: the punishment succeeds as a display of violent authority, but fails as a similarly important demonstration of technical skill.

That the mechanical shortcomings of the execution should be so notable suggests the emerging significance of technical skill in the state’s enactment of its own authority – the Sovereign’s violence was increasingly circumscribed by method. We could say that the object of the amende honorable was not just to cause pain and thus extract a price, but also to do it spectacularly well. The public execution, Foucault writes, was ‘a ritual of armed law in which the prince showed himself indissociably as head of justice and head of war’. The spectacle of the scaffold was not simply that of executioner and the condemned, but a performance of the Sovereign’s integrated capacity for violence. The ‘whole military machine surrounded the scaffold’ to prevent escape or resistance from the assembled mass, but also to remind the crowd that ‘every crime constituted as it were a rebellion against the law and the criminal was an enemy of the prince’.10

The theatre of the scaffold represented the entire apparatus of force that defined and protected the kingdom’s external boundaries as well as its internal order. The technical skill required on the battlefield finds its domestic representation in techniques of punishment. As Foucault makes clear, torture was subject to a regime of criteria: the pain it produced should be measurable, ‘calculated, compared and hierarchized’.11 The torturer should have the capacity to survey the body and calculate its limits, such that the process should not go wrong and become something hideous. While Foucault emphasizes that such practices represent a detailed legal code, the context also implies that when the execution of that code is seen to fail, and fail in the act of rectifying a previous failure, the machinery of rule is also seen to fail.

The foundational relationship between the Sovereign’s violence and the power structures of the domain itself means that errors of violence could signify deep instability in the regime and the general order of subjects and subjectivity it guaranteed. Foucault argues that spectators were effectively asked to perform a sort of ‘scaffold service’, where they would act as witnesses and ratify the authority of the Sovereign; at the same time, they were made subject to its challenge.12 The scaffold required its spectators to operate simultaneously on both sides of the law, to be both the king’s agent and his object.

It is consequently understandable that a technical fault could sway the affect of the assembled crowd, as it demonstrated the precariousness of a representative apparatus with profound responsibilities. Foucault writes that a ‘confused horror’ could spread from the scaffold, enveloping ‘both executioner and condemned; and, although it was always ready to invert the shame inflicted on the victim into pity or glory, it often turned the legal violence of the executioner into shame’.13 In the case of Damiens the crowd was reportedly placated by the ‘solicitude of the parish priest’.14 A kind of power vacuum was filled by a more ultimate authority that offered solace to Damiens, and so to the crowd as well. The scene suggests that the distress we ascribe to human empathy for a body in pain may actually arise from the mutual insecurity and peril glimpsed in a public display of technological incompetence.

The spectacle of punishment carried more than simply punishment. It sought to represent the fundamental principle of Sovereign power built on the direct application of violence. As the administration of Sovereign power becomes more complex, it follows that the scaffold’s incapacity for nuance should have increasingly unpredictable effects on the assembled spectators. We could even say that the scaffold became increasingly unpopular as it failed to represent modern relationships of violence and power. Under these terms, the mere presence of the scaffold could eventually evidence the regime’s administrative incompetence, as if it were an inept magician, offering tricks too simple for the audience.

If the scaffold eventually failed to fulfil its public role, then what specific realignments occurred such that cinema could eventually take that role up? As mentioned in the introduction, part of what needs to be explained is the manner through which violence becomes opaque. One central myth in the history of violence, seemingly supported by the gradual disappearance of the scaffold, is the dissipation of violence as a dominant technology of power. While I do not discount a historical movement from more to less brutish forms of violence, that differs from a dissipation of violence. In the transition from Sovereign power to modern discursive regimes, more people come under the threat of more minute forms of violence. Foucault’s account of an eighteenth-century reduction in violence and the intensity of punishment, ‘a gradual lowering of the level’, offers more insight into such a transmutation.

He situated the lowering of the level within a general increase in the standard of living, including, but not limited to, increases in wealth and property, and also ‘demographic expansion’ which spurred the demand for security. An alleviation of scarcity meant less of the malnourishment and overwork which could bring about violent interactions. In addition, more efficient policing broke up ‘the great gangs of malefactors’, and crime became more concerned with ‘the direct seizure of goods’ than with assaults on the person.15 For Foucault, these changes coincide with the volatility of the crowd gathered before the scaffold; and this conjuncture produced the need for a more ‘gentle way’ in punishment.16

By contrast, in The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias offered another relevant perspective.17 The expansion of state agencies, charged with the management of increased wealth, as well what Foucault would understand as the care and protection of the population, necessarily authorized larger and larger numbers of people to act in the name of the Sovereign. The increasing stability of an increasingly absolute state was produced, in part, by the power invested in the ministries and their functionaries. Such administrative regimes carried out their tasks in the name of the Sovereign, thus referencing, in real and symbolic ways, the regime’s capacity for violent coercion.

The prototypical attenuation of Sovereign power, represented by the military nobility or the executioner, was carried over into any number of administrative offices and their functionaries. This progressive dispersal of Sovereign power across object bodies fortified the state, but it also displaced the singular authority in whose name it functioned. Remembering such a realignment of forces,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From Scaffold to Cinema: Violence as a Force of Subjection and Subjectivation
• 2 Violence and Clinical Authority in ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• 3 Violence and the Passage from Responsibility to Desire in The Sheik
• 4 The Death of Popular Sovereignty in Once Upon A Time In The West
• 5 Deliverance and its Uses: Subjectivity, Violence and Nervous Laughter
• Conclusion: Gender and Pervasive Violence
• Bibliography
• Index