The Politics of Violence: Law and Violence
Many philosophers have believed that violence is at the heart of the law or more precisely that law is based on violence. Without at least the possibility of violence, it is commonly believed, law would not be effective because it is presumed that the threat of violence stabilizes the legal system and makes people and institutions comply generally. Han disagrees. If this were the case then the law would only be a tool of those with the possibility to discharge violence. “Violence makes an appearance at the moment when ‘stabilizing’ factors disappear completely from the legal system.” Rather it is parliament and its virtues of speech and compromise that are at the heart of the legal system. “[Parliament] is a place for speaking with each other (parler). The parliament shifts the task of legislation from violence to speech. Compromise is free of brute violence as long as it is an outcome of speaking with each other….Democracy has a communicative essence. Minorities can also definitely influence the decision-making process by speaking. Dictatorship prohibits speaking; it dictates. [and] Like a compromise, a contract is an effect of speech. Its communicative essence cannot be reduced to the economy of power and violence.”
Han, develops a subtle distinction between violence and power. Violence is a negative it destroys, kills, harms; it works on a “no”. Power organizes, regulates, and builds; it works on a “yes”. Violence can spring when a “no” is met; but power just is when a “yes” is uttered. Power or “Regulation is always accomplished as spatialization and localization. Sheer violence alone is not capable of forming spaces or creating locations. It lacks the space-building force of mediation. Thus it cannot produce a legal space. Only power, not violence, is capable of space building.” Violence may happen in a location but the location is accidental – a street fight, for example, can occur anywhere and there is no repeating need to commit violence at that location – the location of the crime was accidental. Once violence is discharged it likely will not come back to that space; likely the agent of violence will run away. Power, on the other hand, creates specialized spaces for the exercise of power: for example parliaments, council chambers or court rooms or even the principal’s office. The executer of power will return to execute power in that location – often only in that location. “Bare violence is not capable of making law. It is ineffectual in the face of an absolute no. Even forcible subjugation contains a yes. It is always possible to counter violence with a fearless no….The law attains stability only by dint of an assenting yes.”
This distinction heralds a paradigm shift in thinking. In the past, in the society of discipline with the negativity of violence, the friend/enemy paradigm could be thought of along the lines of the medical model of immunization: setting up defenses; fighting fire (a virus) with fire (a virus); of temporary states of exception (like a fever). Today, in our achievement society the new purely positive violence is disastrous and confounding to an immunological paradigm; today we live in a postimmunological society. “In the midst of the society of achievement…the violence of positivity, which expresses itself as exhaustion and inclusion and which….Contemporary violence is based more on the conformity of consensus than on the antagonism of dissent….the crisis is that no state of exception is possible anymore because everything is absorbed by the immanence of the same. The ‘hell of the same’ produces particular forms of violence beyond the violence of negativity.” Today it is an excess of positivity that has created new more effective forms of violence and the old immunological paradigm cannot cope any more than our immune system can cope with excess calories. In the sense that our bodies are designed to accept food – they are not designed to block it out when it comes in in excess.
“Today, politics itself is positivizing itself into work without any possibility of sovereign action. It is positive work in that it never calls into question the forces and compulsions it is subject to, nor can it raise itself above them.” Work is good – but doing too much work is like eating too much food: debilitating and distracting from what is at stake. “Because of the positivization of politics, political parties and ideologies are also increasingly losing meaning. Political emptiness is filled with the spectacle of media theatrics. Politicians also establish themselves in this depoliticized space of spectacle. It is not their political acts but rather their personality that is staged in the media.”
The Macro-Logic of Violence
“Power is a relationship that connects the self and the other. Power functions symbolically, relating and consolidating….But power can also take on diabolic forms. Diabolic power expresses itself repressively, destructively, divisively, and exclusively. If only the diabolic side of power is taken into consideration, its highly productive symbolism disappears. Violence, on the other hand, is not a symbolic medium. Its essence is diabolic, that is divisive….As a result of its symbolic dimension, power can generate the many symbols that lend it its eloquence. As a result of its diabolic nature, violence is poor in symbolism and language….Spaces of power are spaces of language. They are saturated with symbols, signs, and meanings. To destroy a space or body of power, it must be divested of its language.”
While postmodern philosophers tend to shy away from the notion of “essence” Han, revives it in the case of human created notions such as power and violence to help clarify in thought what is understandable about these concepts. In other words the essence of a thing is still just a simplification for thinking it through – not an actual existing thing that could be extracted from a thing.
“In the process of positivization of society, power [as well as violence] is also increasingly losing significance as a socio-immunological medium. Today political as well as economic organizations are dismantling hierarchical structures. Power is no longer a key medium of politics. Political practice increasingly rids itself of theory, drama, and ideology, dividing itself into a number of domains, which are overseen by experts and commissions.” So while power and violence may appear to be on the decline in the negative, the violence of positivity is on the rise. “The violence of positivity doesn’t deprive, it saturates; it doesn’t execute, it exhausts. It is based not on exclusion but on exurbanization. It expresses itself not as repression but as depression.” “Infiltration, invasion, and infection are the modus operandi of macro-physical violence. They all assume a clear, immunologically effective separation of the self and the foreign.”
In contrast to macro-physical violence micro-physical violence “…displays an entirely different topology and pathological form. Infarction takes the place of infection. Macro-physical violence manifests expressively, explosively, explicitly, impulsively and invasively. Micro-physical violence manifests implicitly and implosively.”
Next time we will look more closely at the concepts of exhaustion, inclusion, infarction, abreaction, implicity, implosion, and dissipation as they relate to micro-physical violence.