In Slavoj Žižek’s 2008 book “Violence” he “Instead of confronting violence directly, [he] casts six sideways glances.” The problem with confronting direct violence intellectually is that there are so many ways to lose credibility. Immediately after a traumatic event coherence is not really credible - what makes reporting a violence attack credible is an inconsistency and lack of coherence in reporting. But then later when “cooler heads” prevail this inconsistency is easily used to take away credibility. Žižek, a philosopher who has not being the victim of serious violence, is in a quandary: he can’t be incoherent since he has not experienced it and yet that lack diminishes any direct intellectual dissertation as not being grounded in reality and therefore not credible.
So what is a philosopher to do? The first half short answer is: to evoke the way violence affects subjectivity. We do not need a realistic description – they are not credible. More useful is a “‘description without place,’ which is what is proper to art….a description which creates, as the background of the phenomena it describes, an inexistent (virtual) space of its own, so that what appears in it is not an appearance sustained by the depth of reality behind it, but a decontextualised appearance, an appearance which fully coincides with real being.” Examples of this technique are humanitarian campaigns that depict a malnourished child and ask for donations or contributions to help. These kinds of posters or brochures are real in that they depict real situations and real people; they are virtual in that they have been decontextualized by the narrative created by the medium. These humanitarian campaigns are very successful in what they do which is to change the subjectivity of the viewer (they are very rarely successful in alleviating let alone solving the described problem). Changing subjectivity is the first step to changing the world and these kinds of campaigns are useful case studies.
However this technique is not enough. If we stop there we are only creating a false sense of urgency that is anti-intellectual and therefore resists better solutions. “There is a fundamental anti-theoretical edge to these urgent injunctions. There is no time to reflect: we have to act now. Through this fake sense of urgency, the post-industrial rich, living in their secluded virtual world, not only do not deny or ignore the harsh reality outside their area – they actively refer to it all the time.” It is in the ability to refer to it all the time that the anti-intellectual drama unfolds. We know the campaign won’t solve the problem (it would be horrible if it did since then we could not refer to it anymore) so we support it instead of thinking harder on the subject.
However, in this virtual space that coincides with reality but is not, one can be credibly intellectual. This is how to study and learn about violence without being a victim. We must not look directly or experience violence because then our credibility or our neutrality is easily doubted. Additionally by learning about this virtual space that animates us to action but that misdirects the action in a direction that will not work, we can start to see how to better direct that motivation and action.
Žižek then looks at some of the theory of this virtual space. First he distinguishes the directly visible subjective violence of real unwanted force applications such as in crime, terror and war. This is real violence which we do not have access to unless we are the direct victims of it. Direct victims that survive contact with subjective violence are tainted and not credible. If you are not a victim then you do not know that form of subjective violence. You only have access to the virtual world of violence. And this virtual world of violence sustains the real world of violence. “We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such [real or subjective violence] outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance….Subjective violence is just the most visible portion of a triumvirate that also includes two objective kinds of violence. First there is a ‘symbolic’ violence embodied in our language and its forms…[and] to its imposition of a certain universe of meaning. Second, there is what I call ‘systemic’ violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.” Subjective violence is ‘subjective’ because only the victims of violence experience it. Whereas, symbolic and systemic violence are ‘objective’ because they are accessible to anyone who has language and eyes in the same way.
However there is a complication. While it is true that anyone can see and experience objective violence, it is for most people invisible and not seen or comprehended. “The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”
The First Sideways Glance: SOS Violence
Žižek begins by describing the all too common bewilderment of the well to do when they discover a potential or actual catastrophe to their way of life. The most bewildered are often gentle souls without a violent bone in their body who care about the world, and worry about poverty, racism, sexism and all the other evils in the world. One example was the people who asked “why do they hate us so much?” immediately after the events of 9/11, “don’t we help them so much with aid; we trade with them and we are the global policeman to protect them – why are they mad at us?” these people, in asking these questions, are revealing their complete blindness to objective violence. These poor blind devils in the world are labeled by Žižek as “liberal communists” and likely most nice upstanding people in the developed world are, to some degree, the problem. However, “[t]he exemplary figures of evil today are not ordinary consumers who pollute the environment and live in a violent world of disintegrating social links, but those who, while fully engaged in creating conditions for such universal devastation and pollution, buy their way out of their own activity, living in gated communities, eating organic food, taking holidays in wild life preserves, and so on.”
Žižek mentions George Soros and Bill Gates as quintessential examples men who used every hurtful tool possible to amass great wealth and then become philanthropists. “[T]he delicate liberal communist – frightened, caring, fighting violence – and the blind fundamentalist exploding in rage are two sides of the same coin. While they fight subjective violence, liberal communists are the very agents of the structural violence which creates the conditions for the explosion of subjective violence. The same philanthropists who gave millions for AIDS or education in tolerance have ruined the lives of thousands through financial speculation and thus created the conditions for the rise of the very intolerance that is being fought.”
In this sense subjective violence is the seen side of the unseen other side of the coin of objective violence. The symbolic and systemic violence that keeps subjective violence in check oftentimes fails. It is during these failures that we witness the violence on the news or in our lives and wonder how is this all possible. The violence in our lives has moved above the zero level. The news kindly gives us the perpetrator of subjective violence and it makes us feel better that we know we are not like the perpetrators. And then most people stop thinking; they do not look further to the instigator of the perpetrator. Most people do not want to look because it is uncomfortable and gets closer to home. Most people sense that we, and our way of life, are the instigators of subjective violence with our objective violence (which we do not wish to see).
“We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every progressive struggle today. All other enemies—religious fundamentalists and terrorists, corrupted and inefficient state bureaucracies—are particular figures whose rise and fall depends on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all the secondary malfunction of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system as such.”
Visible violence or subjective violence is not the problem; it is the symptom. Fighting the symptom does not alleviate the problem. The problem is objective violence: the violence that keeps the zero level of subjective violence as the ideal norm. However the problem is invisible. “This needs to be borne in mind in the midst of the various tactical alliances and compromises one has to make with liberal communists when fighting racism, sexism, and religious obscurantism.”