The Intellectual Life of Violence
This is the 11th installment in a series of dialogues with philosophers on the question of violence. This conversation is with Richard J. Bernstein, Vera List professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. His latest book is “Violence: Thinking Without Bannisters.”
Brad Evans: A considerable part of your work has attended in detail to the intellectual, rather than physical, dimensions to violence, including structures of violence like those the Black Lives Matter and anti-Dakota Access Pipeline movements are meant to address. Why?
Richard J. Bernstein: These groups are important because they are challenging the difficulties faced when attempting to critique structural violence, which is often hidden in plain sight.
Let me first address an issue that is implicit in your question. I think we need to be alert to the historical context in which we speak about violence, including structural violence. Too frequently we take physical harm and/or killing as the only paradigm of violence. But this can blind us to other forms of violence that involve humiliation and suffering.
But what is even more important is that there are forms of behavior that are not considered to be violent at one stage of history that need to be exposed as violent in another. Let me give a classic example. Many people read Franz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” as a glorification of revolutionary violence. I think this is a serious misreading. The primary point of the book is to expose the sheer brutality of the colonial violence that these struggles resisted. For long periods of history colonialism was viewed as a “legitimate” way to civilize native populations. To the extent that violence was even recognized by colonial empires, it was “justified” as an instrument of law and order.
Today as a result of works like Fanon’s and other works of post-colonial studies, the full horror of colonial violence has been exposed. We can also tell an analogous story about how what were once considered acceptable ways of abusing women are now recognized as forms of violence. There is always political struggle required to make people aware of hidden and new forms of violence, and then in opposing that violence.
What is most important about the Black Lives Matter and the anti-Dakota Access Pipeline movements is precisely that they politicize issues that involve violence. In the United States, there has been a prevailing myth that the civil rights movement and the election of a black president show significant progress in addressing and solving “the problem of race.” But the truth is that African-Americans have been (and continue to be) subject to all sorts of manifest and hidden violence, while structural violence against Native American populations has long been characteristic of American policy.
One can never predict when new political movements will arise that will expose and challenge new forms of violence, but I reiterate, political struggle (even when it fails) is necessary to expose and challenge violence.
B.E.: You knew Hannah Arendt, whom we still undoubtedly owe a considerable intellectual debt, especially in terms of thinking about oppression and violence. How do you think she might see the world today?
R.B.: Yes, I did meet Hannah Arendt in 1972, and we had many intellectual exchanges before her death three years later. I have been engaged with her thinking ever since. I have no doubt that if she were alive she would be horrified about what is happening in the United States and throughout the world today. It would confirm her worst fears about the disastrous and politically debasing social tendencies of the modern age.
When Arendt spoke of dark times, she was not exclusively referring to the horrors of totalitarianism. In her book “Men in Dark Times,” she writes: “If it is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do, then darkness has come when this light is extinguished by ‘credibility gaps’ and ‘invisible government,’ by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality.” She wrote this statement in 1968 — but I think it is even more relevant today.
But there is another side of Arendt. She rejected all appeals to doom and historical necessity. She stresses the possibility of new political beginnings, what she calls “natality.” She had a deep conviction that people can come together, create a public space in which they deliberate and act, and change the course of history.
This is why having a conceptual approach to violence is so important. Arendt draws a sharp distinction between power and violence as well as between liberty and necessity.
What does this mean? In her lexicon, power and violence are antithetical. Initially this seems paradoxical — and it is paradoxical if we think of power in a traditional way where what we mean is who has power over whom or who rules and who are the ruled.
Max Weber defined the state as the rule of men over men based on allegedly legitimate violence. If this is the way in which we think about power, then Arendt says that C. Wright Mills was dead right when he declares, “All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.”
Against this deeply entrenched understanding of power, Arendt opposes a concept of power that is closely linked to the way in which we think of empowerment. Power comes into being only if and when human beings join together for the purpose of deliberative action. This kind of power disappears when for whatever reason they abandon one another.
This type of power was exemplified in the early civil rights movement in the United States and it was exemplified in those movements in Eastern Europe that helped bring about the fall of certain Communist regimes without resorting to violence. Violence can always destroy power, but it can never create this type of power.
Arendt’s distinction between power and violence is also closely related to her distinction between liberty and freedom. Liberty in her understanding is liberty from — whether it is liberty from the misery of poverty, or liberty from tyranny. And liberty from tyrants and totalitarian rulers may require armed struggle. But this type of liberty is to be sharply distinguished from public freedom, which for Arendt means a worldly reality that comes into being when people actively participate in public affairs and act together in concert.
So what does all this have to do with the “real” world? Plenty! A painful illustration is the way in which the Bush administration “justified” the military intervention in Iraq in 2003. The American people were told that once Saddam Hussein was overthrown with violence, then democracy and freedom would flourish, not only in Iraq but in the wider Middle East. This was and remains sheer nonsense.
Unfortunately, we have to learn over and over again that liberty from oppressors is never sufficient to bring about the public spaces in which public freedom flourishes. Achieving public freedom means cultivating practices where people are willing meet one another as peers, form and test opinions in public and act in a responsible manner.
B.E.: I’d like us to now turn to the work of Walter Benjamin, another thinker whose work has been important in considering violence. How might we use his work to develop our own critique of violence, adequate to our own times?
R.B.: Walter Benjamin is a very complex thinker. His early essay “Critique of Violence” has been one of the most discussed essays on the topic. I believe that Benjamin’s intervention is important because he poignantly raises the fundamental questions, and not answers, that need to be confronted in dealing with violence. For example: What is the relation between law and violence, and when does the law further violence? What is the role of the police in violence, and how do states tend to resort to violence at times of perceived crisis?
Rather than posit easy answers to these and other queries, his questioning shows us challenging truths, including how difficult it is to draw a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence, or to break the systemic cycles of violence.
Hannah Arendt, who was a very close friend of Walter Benjamin, once said that the only way to teach people to think is to infect them with the perplexities that one is confronting. What I find so valuable about Benjamin is that he infects us (his readers) with the perplexities concerning violence that so deeply concerned him.
B.E.: You have talked about the difficulties of breaking cycles of violence. What can we learn from the history of violence in order to develop more peaceful relations among people both in the United States and across the world?
R.B.: I don’t think that violence will ever completely disappear from the world. In the future we will become aware of new forms of violence that we can’t anticipate now. But I am certainly not pessimistic. What we learn from the history of violence is that we need to be specific and concrete when we speak about violence. I don’t believe in Progress with a capital “P,” but I do believe in progress with a small “p.”
Earlier I mentioned the work of Fanon and others who critiqued “traditional” forms of colonial violence and participated in social and political movements to oppose and overcome this colonial violence. Of course, there can always be regression, and some will argue that we now have new, more subtle varieties of colonial violence. I am not contesting this. But the breakup of the old colonial system was progress in overcoming a dehumanizing form of violence. In the United States, the lynching of blacks was once a common practice. It took decades to combat this form of violence. That is progress with a small “p” even though there are now new, invidious forms of violence against black populations.
And throughout the 20th century, we have many instances of the power of nonviolent movements to overcoming state violence, from Gandhi in India to Solidarity in Poland. We discover similar progress in overcoming violence in the feminist, gay and lesbian movements. There will always be those who say that such progress is insignificant because it doesn’t eliminate violence but only displaces it with new forms of violence. This can lead to what my colleague (and Stone series moderator) Simon Critchley calls “passive nihilism.” I do not accept the nihilist or cynical response.
So I believe that we must constantly be alert to new (and old) forms of invidious violence, oppose and resist them when we can with full knowledge that many of our efforts will fail. We should never underestimate the importance of overcoming the suffering, pain and humiliation of those who are victims of violence. Let me conclude by citing Christopher Lasch’s characterization of hope. I think it is especially relevant to the issue of identifying, opposing, and resisting violence:
“Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it … The worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for. Their trust in life would not be worth much if it had not survived disappointments in the past, while knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrates the continuing need for hope … Improvidence, a blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best, furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t.”
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