Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 10:42:44 -0800 (PST)
From: Paul Bryant <levi_bryant-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Provisional Remarks on the Question of Violence


It is indeed the case that there's a violence involved in thought,
language, action and intercommunicative interaction that cannot be
avoided.  Moreover, I think that violence is necessary.  The question,
then, would be one of determining which violence we can live with, and
which we would strive to avoid at all costs.

For me, this quasi-Levinasian ethics against violence seems to do too
much work because it fails to give a differentiator between what
counts as violent and unviolent.  In failing to make this crucial
distinction-- a distinction which would itself be a form of violence
--such an ethic becomes an abritrary knee jerk reaction such that any
negative feeling or thought one senses gets deemed "violent" and is
summarily dismissed as a form of colonial imperialism. Thus, this
ethic becomes a sort of selective algorithm that allows one to do
their own violence by positioning anything that comes their way making
them uncomfortable as the violent.  This practice is a way of
mastering and totalizing discourse that is highly disingenious and
critically blind to its own functioning.  One would have to be dead
not to be guilty of the sort of violence this definition implies, and
even then they would still be suspect.

For me, the necessity of violence appears in the imperitive to provide
a form and a content (Hjelmslev) in the process of posing a question
and dealing with a problem.  Having an Idea-- and it's not really "I"
that has Ideas, but Being itself --is already a violent moment because
it makes a "cut" in the virtual space of the chao-strata and initiates
the process of actualization through the spatio-temporal dynamisms of
the question and the problem.  These dynamisms form limits and
thresholds that individuate the cut from other flows and which limit
the space of the question and the problem being dealt with.  At that
point, negation, as the shadow of an affirmation, becomes possible
because a selective mechanism is now in place that allows the relavant
and the irrelavant to be marked...  Some elements fall inside of the
space of the problem-question complex, others do not.  Which is not to
say that the problem-question complex cannot be transformed through
introducing new singularities and relations.  This marking is indeed
violent, but I don't see how we can avoid it without falling into the
trap of making no "cut" at all...  Which is to say, without being dead
or silent.  

As I see it, this list is composed of a number of problem-question
complexes moving off in various directions, cutting in terms of
distinctive questions that will certain actualizations.  Deleuze makes
the claim that the question-problem complex always persists in the
solution or actualization insofar as a real question can never be
definitively answered.  Simply put, each problem-question complex
admits of a number of different answers that are well formed or poorly
formed.  A well formed answer would be one that can continuously
mutate in terms of shifts in the environment of the question-problem
complex, while a poorly formed answer would be one that gets locked
into a particular mode without any hope of change or adaptation.

If we treat the different interactions on this list as actualizations
of virtual question-problem complexes, then it becomes possible to
read the various replies as diverse solutions to the question-problem
complex being explored.  I think it's here that the value of argument,
questioning, polemic and critique comes in.  Far from being an attempt
to lock everything into a particular mode of discourse, argument,
questioning and polemic would represent one way, among others, of
trying to refine actualizations to determine whether they are well
formed or not.  Insofar as these practices try to deepen the cut, to
determine how the cut works, they are indeed violent...  But violent
only in the sense that they will the actualization to take place and
try to determine the scope of the particular actualization.

For me, the question to ask would be "under what conditions is
questioning and argument merely a negative activity of trying to
humiliate ones interlocutor, and halt their creative work of
actualization?"  I think the answer would be found in those moments
where one has read the other poorly, refusing to trace the cuttings
they are attempting to make, and attempting to subsume them under
their own categories.  That would be the sort of violence that I would
deplore, and which seems to lead nowhere.  However, I'm also a little
shocked by the replies or actualizations that seem to treat every
question posed to them as an act of aggression and a personal affront. 
When someone reacts in this way, I'm led to wonder what
question-problem complex this reaction is a solution to, and whether
or not it's a good solution.  Such a reaction doesn't strike me as
very creative or productive insofar as it marks a refusal to explore
the dimensions of the problem that have been put before it. 

Of the two forms of violence crudely outlined here, subsumption and
refusal, the latter strikes me as much more dangerous because it's a
subtle form of mastery, totalization, and dogmatism parading under the
illusion that it's too free to be bothered with technicalities and
nuances.  Such an attitude seems inevitably to lead to the worst sort
of fanaticism and intolerance in reaction to the breakdown of the
edifice that it has poorly constructed from the outset.  It
externalizes any deficiency in its own actualization in the form of
spectral ghosts like "the institution"-- that are everywhere and
nowhere like Heidegger's das Man --and never takes the time to
critically evaluate the structurations that it, itself, has sought to
construct.  The first form of violence is easy enough to spot, while
the second is a micro-fascism that embeds itself within us where we
least expect it.




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