The Ethics of Violence and Order

[ebola?]

Yes, see social contract theory. To me the main point is in which situation will violence likely be used more justly.

Mmmm...I think nearly all applications of social contract theory are misleading. They rely on a mythical story about how people are able to interrelate and abstract away from the reality of the state's role in conditioning and constraining social relations (instead assuming it an arbiter guarantor of social contract).

But, think about it. If you split a large number of humans into a handful of smaller tribes, and pit them against each other with war-like instincts, only the most intelligent will survive, because they can develop the best weapons, and the best war strategies. They are the progenitors of the next generation - their DNA lives on, and voila, evolution.

Isn't it conceivable that maybe this holds true today?

I don't think that this ever held true. I see this selects for socio-cultural systems that effect efficient, expansionary conquest via battle (or alternately, more voluntary cultural expansion). Humanity has never split into particular sub-groups that differ genetically; humans from disparate groups have always interbred pervasively enough, and cultures have changed too rapidly for socio-cultural structures to cause the formation of according genetic groups.

The question is does society have an obligation to keep order even through violent means if necessary, or does society have an obligation to maximize freedom even if it means enduring massive amounts of violence. It certainly matters which one imposes the violence

I would again jump to the (maybe Foucauldian) question of what conditions structure the discursive regimes that produce society and the cultural and organizational effects produced by society? Or maybe more simply, what produces the situation where the relationship between society and the use of violence to regulate order poses itself as a question to us in the first place?

(Per Elias and Foucault) This was not always the type of question that society posted. In prototypical Feudal society, the question was instead how the sovereign would exercise violence over a chaotic mass or subjects to secure the sovereign's autonomy; we have a centralized political figure that produces the visibility of its dominance through intervening upon an unintelligible mass that doesn't matter(Foucault). This 'fit' with the feudal class-system, where the the sovereign and nobility wielding sovereign power claimed their livelihood by simply placing demands over this mass of serfs (or serf-like classes) (Elias). With the transition to modernity, a different type of centralized political power was necessary to coordinate urban-dwellers in dense, frequent, nonviolent cooperation over numerous lines of difference (Elias); fine-grained intelligibility of the previous undifferentiated mass became necessary for ruling powers to dominate. Accordingly, the there is was a discursive shift, toward disciplinary power, which structured a diffuse set of political institutions that elicit self-regulation that creates an order built on the excision of violence, and and a set of political institutions that surveil, asses, and correct individuals.

ebola

 

[P A]

I think that we may need to first define what we mean by violence...Maybe for Bourdieu, the way in which the state demarcates violence and non-violence reflects the outcome of a struggle between classes for possession of symbolic capital in the political field, the dominant group holding reign over how violence is defined through deployment of this capital, imposing this definition on other groups in a way that reduces their autonomy in class-competition.

This is certainly an interesting idea, though I wonder how significant a role the state truly plays in this conceptual demarcation. In a strictly legalistic sense, the state preserves an obvious monopoly on the matter, but what of the comparatively informal social/ethical attitudes of the populace (which attitudes are arguably more relevant here)? Surely an intuitive conception of such an elemental social phenomenon as violence precedes (without necessarily superseding) any consideration of institutional power or class struggle; more precise definitions would necessarily include certain embellishments that would reflect the interests of the discursive regime, but how would the average Joe go about casually discussing inter-citizen violence without having a 'pre-class' intuition of what the word 'violence' means in everyday social contexts? It sounds naive to a Foucauldian, I'm sure, but consider a definition of violence as the direct and physical imposition of force, typically acting to immobilize, destabilize, or destroy the object(s) to which said force is applied. I think most would consider this operational definition satisfactory (not to mention largely historically invariant - after all, how could this idea of violence as direct physical force have changed all that much in the past few millenia?), but I'm hard-pressed to see how it could win the dominant class any discursive advantages over and above a more selective and/or restrictive delimitation. Perhaps in this case, an equal share of discursive power lies in the hands of the populace...or simply elsewhere than the state and its representative ruling class? If we restrict ourselves solely to ethical considerations, the ruling class loses out here, and with interest - socially and environmentally devastating wars waged largely over the control of terrestrial surface area and natural resources, police oppression, and all manner of disciplinary institutions undergirded by the implicit threat of state violence no longer appear socially acceptable (though they may indeed be legal) despite being in the best interests of state.

At any rate, I think that rather than agonizing over what is meant (precisely) by the word 'violence' in the abstract, it would be far more helpful and germane to consider what discursive preconditions enable us to consider the ethical implications of state violence from the getgo, with particular attention to the state-as-accountable-public-servant paradigm, which I understand to be relatively newfangled in comparison to the hoary old state-as-unquestionable-tyrant-arbiter model, both of which seem to be (rather bizarrely) coexistent at present, which fraught coexistence likely gives rise to interesting questions such as these.

EDIT: After glancing over your previous posts, I see that I probably missed the boat entirely on this one, and only ended up reiterating points that had already been made. I should probably hit the books - it's been far too long since last I read Foucault. Never mind .

 

[TheAppleCore]

Lately, I've started to better understand the dynamics of positivity and negativity (wtf, Google Chrome spellcheck recognizes "negativity" but not "positivity"?). And I feel like positive action, or passivity, as opposed to negative or forceful action, almost always seems to solve problems more effectively.

Negativity begets negativity.

 

[ebola?]

EDIT: After glancing over your previous posts, I see that I probably missed the boat entirely on this one, and only ended up reiterating points that had already been made. I should probably hit the books - it's been far too long since last I read Foucault. Never mind .

Heh...I think that you made some good points though, and I was mulling things over to respond to later when I was interrupted by an out of town trip.

ebola