File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/96-10-27.132, message 83


Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 00:07:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: Tom Blancato <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com>
Subject: Re: violent nonviolence/du sang impur 





Sorry if this is a repost, my mailer (pine) is acting up again...

Tom B.


On Fri, 18 Oct 1996, John Morss wrote:

>  Come on folks. The only genuine nonviolence is JC's "turning the other
> cheek", which is at the same time an incitement/invitation/entrapment to
> violence (the turning of the cheek is a provocative act)
> the only strategic use of nonviolence is to attract some violence to
> oneself as object in the (often *vain*)

The joke here is that violent resistance is also often in vain. In fact,
it is often *more* fruitless/hopeless than nonviolence. *But to understand
this requires that one be able to push foward the projection of
nonviolence with a similar freedom as one pushes forward the projection of
violence*. Otherwise what happens is that one typically has a very low
criterion for *dropping* nonviolence if it doesn't work and if it isn't
understood better, wherease one sets a very high criterion for violence
(working/being understood/developed, etc.) One then turns around and says,
"see, nonviolence is in vain", when in fact it is neither understood nor
adequately projected. When it *is* adequately projected (and I can't do it
here for want of space), generally, it is more effective than people
realize. But to see this requires that one think more, since the stellar
"natural indexes" (read: dead bodies, for example) of violence are
*absent*. Absence.  But it takes something like weaving a whole world in
order to see how this is so. Any invitation to nonviolence is an
invitation to the other to enter into a certain weave of the world, a 
weave that is "there" already.


 hope that it will reduce the
> amount/intensity of violence  imposed on some others .

I take Christian nonviolence to be totalist/totalitarian, and of course as
a result it often spawns greater violence, psychical violence, distantial
violence (i.e., Iraq bombings and embargo), radical and violent reversals
("antichristianity"), etc. Further, it can't be divorced from its
philosophical underpinnings (which in Christianity are theological,
monarchical, totalistic, generalizing to an enormous degree, retributive,
etc.) and viewed simply as a strategy of "turning the other cheek."
Indeed, nonviolence, where there is serious nonviolence, happens precisely
when the simple arena of the *hit*, the hand-to-cheek in *focal contact*,
or any simple *arena-within-which* is itself *problematized*. The setting
of the arena in certain ways is part of what is *essentially violent*,
while nonviolence as *action* is *more essentially
philosophical*/thoughtful. That's why I say "thoughtaction". And grasping
thoughtaction is not the same as reciting "turn the other cheek" and the
whole dreary but resplendent parade of icons one most offens finds
"speaking" "for" nonviolence. If you want to say that a contestational
problematization is "violent", you have to bear in mind, I think, that it
is contesting a more original violence. 


Still, there is this gesture of "turning the other cheek", of saying,
"ok, go ahead, hit me...I won't fight back." Again, there is a first
violence there already: that of the attacker/state/agency, etc. Even if
one announces a nonviolent resistance, this must be adequately understood
in the *overall context of violence*, not whether at t1 (and what arena
must be installed to restrict our vision this way?) there was no actual
attack by the oppressor. Anyhow, of course, even if there were no attack,
if it is to ensue simply due to nonviolent demonstration, what then? And
you, John, likely feel the possibility is there to assemble at your
University were something to go down which was not tolerable for you
there. Will you say, "this is not really nonviolent? at a demo? And would 
such a demo's violence/disruption be on the order of killing the children 
of your opponent, torturing someone, shooting someone? Do you refrain (I 
assume you do) from doing such things simply because it's not feasible? 
If you say yes, I will say "get real (2)!" :)

Are you still looking for the absolute absence of violence? I'm not. Part
of nonviolence, perhaps the major part, is working, even in the midst of
*contestation*, to create the conditions of possibility of nonviolence. 
This work is possible and is done all the time. Nonviolence "proper" 
denotes something like extra-diplomatic contest. But
a first and foremost stipulation about this granting of violence within 
nonviolence, and a burden for *thought*, is that adjudicated or 
unavoidable violence within a general orientation of nonviolence does not 
mean a falling of nonviolence into violence or using this recognition, 
this non-naivete as an excuse for violence. There is world of difference 
between adjudicated violence within nonviolence and straight-out violence.

For example, I cultivate within myself a capacity for revenge *because* in
cases where one must attack, one *can not do so* without a retributive
force of desire for revenge, even a pleasure in "the kill". This does not
mean that I simply let myself take revenge on anyone who has angered or
wronged me, that I satisfy myself with revenge's illusion freely, but in
some instances, I must be free to *attack* (i.e., I see a man raping a
girl), provided, of course, that I am up to the task and take it to be an
authentic event. Everyone knows this kind of revenge. It is in movies in
which the "simple Amish person is driven finally to attack" (the audience
cheers). When the movie does this, it does so in the manner of basically
affirming an ethos of revenge, crucifying the ideal and its violent
totalizations, and establishing the metacorrupt ethos we have come to know
and capitalize on. When I grant this violence within nonviolence I do so
*explicitly, substantively, thoughtfully (I hope), and in a ground of
dialogue-possible speech*. That is part of the becoming-substantive of
nonviolence. Anyhow, that is what I mean by "non-naive nonviolence". But
this is founded on, or occurs within, an *ethos of nonviolence* which
(ideally) is freely capable of sustained *nonviolent contestation* where
this is appropriate. That's an *ethos*, not a strategy or tactic. 

 But this still
> collaborates in violence. 

How *much* does it collaborate? It sounds as if you are looking for 
something that is absolute without violence. But, nonviolence as such is 
not simply a path of less violence (i.e., cut off just your opponent's 
finger, not his head). This is where one can sort of sort the thinkers 
>from the non-thinkers, I guess. There is a genuine and *reasonably clean 
and independent moment* in which there is a practiced eschewing of 
violence on a *number* of levels. 

If you want to say "violent nonviolence", this is a poor designation, I
think. I would say non-naive nonviolence. "Violent nonviolence" might
rather be likened to, say, a community's silencing or excommunicating an
individual, thereby driving them insane and passing it off as "nonviolent"
because they simply didn't physically touch that person, perhaps within a 
philosophy/religion that proclaims itself to be "nonviolent".

Somehow, one has to grasp a sense of *rupture, killing, tearing* 
associated with violence.

The only nonviolent nonviolence is death (being
> dead... not dying or causing to die .. however/whyever ... Deleuze's death
> was violent ... who [concierge?] had to clean up the broken (?), bloody (?)
> mess on the pavement ... not deleuze .. not the army of
> translators..................
> Tom B, if you respond to this (& I hope you will), please do so concisely?
> multipage posts can be violent..........
> 

John, what makes you think that I would respond to this? Heh. Well, only
if you promise not to overlook the various distinctions I'm making here
and not to reframe this back in totalist terms... :)

Tom B.


> 
> John R Morss PhD
> Senior Lecturer, Education Department
> University of Otago, Box 56, Dunedin
> NZ
> tel (0)3-4798809
> fax (0)3-4798349
> john.morss-AT-stonebow.otago.ac.nz
>  
> 
> 
> 

__________________________________________________________________________

"The sanctions are not spectacular, and operate slowly, but they kill and
maim as remorselessly as bullets and bombs, and are destroying a
generation of Iraqi children." Brad Lyttle, delegation to Iraq member. 

"The characteristics of the treatment that caused people to be outraged
and shocked are now kind of masked so that the procedure looks rather
benign," said New York psychiatrist Hugh L. Polk.

As many permutations of molecules used in making psychiatric drugs can be 
developed today in 2 hours as used to take a lifetime for a researcher.
__________________________________________________________________________





   

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