for the importance of rethinking violence that, in September 2015, we began the project leading to this book. Following an initial meeting in New York City, Natasha proposed an interview with Brad for the New York Times philosophy forum “The Stone.” The resulting conversation, “Thinking Against Violence, ran in the Times in mid-December 2015 and appears as chapter 1 in this collection.
The interview’s success in the Times made the public appetite for a broader discussion about violence urgently clear. We were also acutely aware that there was no point in discussing violence unless something could be done about it. If violence undoes any idea of humanity we might want to sustain and develop, we need to learn how to undo violence—even if that means interrogating what we mean by “humanity.” But such undoing is not going to come about from the voice of a single individual. Violence demands a conversation with somber and honest reflection.
And it was with this conversational ethos in mind that we envisaged a series of conversations as a truly trans-disciplinary mediation with artists, writers, and cultural producers that would bring critical thought to bear on violence. Violence cannot be countered by retreating back into academic enclaves that privilege certain vantage points. Nor can the idea of the so-called “aesthetic turn” in politics be undertaken if the work of artists is merely appropriated to make a theoretical point. A conversation on violence demands creating an ethical platform based upon reciprocity, where the voice of the contributor is recognized as being a genuine and viable form of political intervention. Just as we don’t think that politics can be reduced to electoral procedures, so the call for more compassion, dignity, and love in the sphere of the political demands seeing art itself as integral to the political field. Hence, while the New York Times series (which successfully ran throughout 2016) largely featured renowned critical scholars, the ongoing Los Angeles Review of Books series continues to develop the conversation in more artistic but no less important directions.
“Humanity is in crisis,” Zygmunt Bauman told us in one of his last interviews before passing away, “and there is no exit from that crisis other than the solidarity of humans.” We hope this collection offers the critique—and the solidarity—adequate to our dark times.
—Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard
ONE
THINKING AGAINST VIOLENCE
We are immersed in a relentless stream of real and virtual violence. How can we break the cycle?
Natasha Lennard interviews Brad Evans
December 16, 2015
Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer whose work specializes on the problem of violence. The author of ten books and edited volumes, and over fifty articles, he serves as a Reader in Political Violence at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, the University of Bristol, UK. He is the founder and director of the Histories of Violence Project.
Natasha Lennard: The premise of your book Disposable Futures is that “violence is ubiquitous” in the media today. There seems to be plenty of evidence to support this claim—just look at the home page of this news site for a start. But the media has always been interested in violence—“if it bleeds, it leads” isn’t exactly new. And the notion that there is just more violence in the world today—more violent material for the media to cover—doesn’t seem tenable. So what do you think is specific about the ubiquity of violence today, and the way it is mediated?
Brad Evans: It is certainly right to suggest the connections between violence and media communications have been a recurring feature of human relations. We only need to open the first pages of Aeschylus’s Oresteia to witness tales of victory in battle and its communicative strategies—on this occasion the medium of communication was the burning beacon. But there are a number of ways in which violence is different today, in terms of its logics intended, forced witnessing, and ubiquitous nature.
We certainly seem to be entering into a new moment, where the encounter with violence (real or imagined) is becoming more ubiquitous and its presence ever felt. Certainly this has something to do with our awareness of global tragedies as technologies redefine our exposure to such catastrophic events. But it also has to do with the raw realities of violence and people’s genuine sense of insecurity, which, even if it is manufactured or illusionary, feels no less real.
One of the key arguments I make throughout my work is that violence has now become the defining organizational principle for contemporary societies. It mediates all social relations. It matters less if we are actual victims of violence. It is the possibility that we could face some form of violent encounter that shapes the logics of power in liberal societies today. Our political imagination as such has become dominated by multiple potential catastrophes that appear on the horizon. The closing of the entire Los Angeles city school system after a reported terrorist threat yesterday is an unsettling reminder of this. From terror to weather and everything in between, insecurity has become the new normal. We see this played out at global and local levels, as the effective blurring between older notions of homeland/battlefields, friends/enemies, and peace/war has led to the widespread militarization of many everyday behaviors—especially in communities of color.
None of this can be divorced from the age of new media technologies, which quite literally puts a catastrophic world in our hands. Indeed, not only have we become forced witnesses to many tragic events that seem to be beyond our control (the source of our shared anxieties), but also accessible smart technologies are now redefining the producer and audience relationships in ways that challenge the dominance of older medias.
A notable outcome of this has been the shift toward humanized violence. I am not only talking about the ways in which wars have been aligned with humanitarian principles. If forms of dehumanization hallmarked the previous Century of Violence, in which the victim was often removed from the scene of the crime, groups such as ISIS foreground the human as a disposable category. Whether it is the progressive liberal, the journalist, the aid worker, or the homosexual, ISIS put the human qualities of the victims on full broadcast.
One could argue that by focusing on “humanity” when considering acts of violence—the human face of victims—we assert that the human is in fact indispensable (we might think of, say, newspaper paeans to victims after massacres). But you argue that this does the reverse and that violence-as-humanized and human disposability go together. Can you explain this a little further?
What we are engaging with here are two distinct types of violence, which, although appearing separate, often link and connect in subtle yet complex ways. On the one hand, we can point to the widespread disposability of human populations, those countless, nameless, and faceless victims, who experience violence often. Such populations live out a wide range of human insecurities, indignities, oppressions, and hardships. Yet these “disposable” populations, which are often contained, at times overspill their confinement to reveal the violence of the hidden order of politics. This is true whether we are talking about the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been galvanized by the spectacle of police brutality, or the bodies of refugee children like Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed up on the shores of a Turkish beach.
On the other hand, we have more orchestrated spectacles of violence, from real events to cultural and entertainment productions, which prove to be deeply significant in the normalization of violence and in producing the conditions for violence to come. We can explain this in terms of the interplay between disposable lives and sacrificial violence, onto claims for militaristic forms of justice. A number of philosophers have attended to the relationship between violence and the sacred. What concerns me are the ways in which sacrificial victims become loaded with symbolic meaning to sanction further violence and destruction. That is to say, how the spectacle of a truly intolerable moment is politically
