Society and Violence

SOCIETY AND VIOLENCE

by Horst Kurnitzky

I.

Throughout the history of civilization, the domestication and control of violence have beendecisive elements in the formation of society - this is valid for the violence emanating from natureas well as that emanating from the nature of human beings. The domestication of violence like itslimited acceptance in rituals, and its sublimation in culture and civilization, were the point ofdeparture for the coming together of human beings in society. The sacrificial feasts were thesensory expression of a system of gifts and countergifts, of economics. Transformed into acts ofexchange, sacrifices constitute the basis of social reproduction, which is sustained by a fragilerelationship to violence. The relations between the sexes, the relations within communities andamong communities, within a society itself and in its relations to other societies--all aredetermined by their relationship to violence. The containment and domination of violence were anessential impulse in the formation of society; and inversely, violence comes forth again withinsociety itself if the latter fails to balance out antagonistic interests. Violence is a social privilege,and the relation to violence is inscribed in the process of civilization. In the domestication ofviolence we recognize civilized society.

Violence determines the relationships among human beings; there too, where it doesn't appear asphysical violence or where it is translated into culture as sublimated violence. The history ofcivilization can also be read as the history of the treatment of violence. Cults, religions, the state,and finally civil society, are all forms of the social management of violence. They make tangiblethe cohesive forces which unite human beings - love, sympathy, solidarity -, as well as thosewhich tendetially break up society. Every attempt to neutralize this ambivalence to the advantageof one side necessarily leads to acts of violence.

II:

With the secularization of theological world-views during the Enlightenment, nature advanced tobecome the basis for the comprehension of the world. What before was a gift of God, wasthereafter a gift of Nature. In the 19th century, economic as well as social theoretical constructsfounded on Nature's Law.

Indeed, the stylization of society as a natural formation driven by competition, progressing alongthe road of evolution, denies human beings the right to take their destiny into their own handswithin a society of self-aware individuals. In their struggle for survival they pursue only one law ofnature. Self-reflection and the balancing of ambivalent interests are locked out, as is theconception of life-projects as well, because the struggle doubtlessly accepts survival strategies butno life-planning. The fight is geared to the extermination of the opponent. Society as an organicbeing, like the philosopher Herbert Spencer described it, becomes nature again. The struggle forsurvival is adopted as the natural law of society; it levels out the difference between nature andsociety, and breaks with the idea of a truly human society. Open competition and the lifting of

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legal obstacles for the "fittest" is the success formula for a Darwinist creed of progress.

It can only be conjectured to what extent Darwin carried over and ascribed to nature theprinciples of economic competition prevalent in his days. His comments about society indicate thathe wanted the fight for survival in nature extended to society. Open competition among all mencorresponded to the ethos of an age in which economic development let all attempts at a civilsociety go under in the competitive struggle. The struggle to prevail in economic life by theelimination of the opponent influenced thought; it found expression in literature, philosophy andworld-views, and constitutes to this day the concious and unconscious foundation social Darwinistconcepts. Healthy is that, which makes strong. Whenenver vitalist or biologistic models areapplied to society, civil society shall be put into question and the social contract revoked. Hidingbehind this are group interests pursuing other goals: racist goals, nationalist goals, imperial goalsand, above all, unrestrained expansion of economic power.

The underlying premise of neoliberalism, that human freedom lies foremost in the protection ofproperty an its unrestrained utilization in association with the equally unhindered exchange ofproduced goods, is not new. In the U.S. Bill of Rights and in the human rights codex of the FrenchRevolution each of those fundamental rights were already set down in writing, and are a part, tothis day, of the inalienable goods of every constitutional state: the guaranteed protection byindependent courts of freedom, equality and property. The declared aim of liberal economists wasthe abolition of any artificial restrictions to trade and industry, so that human beings could freelypursue unhindered their personal interests, that is, their non-civilized nature, where instinct iseverything, and social-reflection and social responsibility are suppressed.

To call for total competition under the motto of "laissez-faire" transforms society into a battle-fieldof partial economic interests. That has wide reaching consequences. To the extent that humanbeings and life-projects vanish from economic concepts, that economic theory and practice don't -or no longer - proceed from the real necessities of human beings, that, in other words, politicsloses its primacy over economics, vanishes likewise any reflection about society, not to mentionabout concepts which conceive economics and society as a whole, and the constitution of societyas the result of a general will. Social disintegration, misery, migrations, wars and the unrestrainedoutbreak of violence are the consequences; "unleash nature", goes the saying. The freecompetition of partial economic interests ultimately replace all social forms of coexistence by arationality determined exclusively on economic grounds; or as Francis Fukuyama wrote,"Economic rationality ... will erode many traditional features of sovereignty as it unifies markets

and production"1 . In other words: sovereign state forms and democratic societies will fall prey tothe concentration of economic power.

Where only the principle of competition counts, that is, where the fight of all against all rages,democracy and the constitutional state disintegrate. For Friedrich Hayek, the father ofneoliberalism, democracy was never an issue. The U.S. economist Lester Thurow has been evenmore explicit: "Should it not be possible in a democracy to impose the neoliberal economic form,

there will be another form of government"2 . In the social jungle, "might is right" is law. With thesurrender of the "contrat social" vanishes the difference between legitimacy and illegitimacy, andthe institutions which regulate social coexistence fall prey to the arbitrariness of economic power.Thus, all violence is justified, as well as all sense of law annulled.

III:

Everywhere we encounter attributes of violence which appear to have propagated themselves withseeming naturalness in everyday life - manifest in the forms of interaction among individuals aswell as in their ways of self-representation. Where each reciprocal commitment dissolves in thestruggle for survival, the want of solidarity is compensated by subordination and uniformity.Although serious, the issues are no more than symptoms of something which has not yet at allpenetrated social awareness to a new worldwide phenomenon, although the many ethnic,religious or territorially motivated local wars in the last decades should be considered clearindications of a fundamental transformation of societies worldwide. They are still but isolated newsitems: the genocide in the former Yugoslavia, Ruanda or in the Congo, the opium war inAfghanistan and the cocaine war in Colombia. Likewise, the recurrent flare-ups of riots andlootings like in Los Angeles, or the gang-wars among youths in the metroplises of the Third andFirst Worlds reveal - at least statistically - that violence in society is in general on the rise, and

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that the victims are always more numerous and younger.

The growing aggressiveness and propensity to violence appears to be one phenomenon whichescapes every attempt to contain it by means of a democratically legitimated state authority.Hold-ups, thefts, plunderings due to social misery, and the permanently sinking threshold ofinhibition to commit abuses, as well as xenophobically motivated attacks appear as completelyrational violent acts, compared to the vandalism and hate which can break out spontaneously andstrike at anyone --turning outwardly as well as inwardly. The escalation of violence is alarmingbecause it reveals the internal decomposition of social cohesiveness in the face of which societyand its institutions are powerless.

Mark Rosenberg3 , Californian researcher on violence, points out that most deaths of people underage 45, and 38 percent of all deaths are the result of acts of violence. The statistics prove that thenumber of victims of violence proportionate to the total of deaths is going up. Particularly youngAfroamericans and Latinos from decaying neighborhoods in the big cities are among the victims.There, violence is endemic; homicide and second degree murder have been for long part ofeveryday life and culture, leading as a post-traumatic syndrome, to increased alertness, defensereadiness and hostility. Violence is not only targeted at strangers but also at friends and kin;perpetrators and victims know each other, belong to the same family, gang or clique. By aimingthe aggression against themselves, the subject and object of aggression fall together. Violenceemanates in the society and the individuals, and it directets itself back against them again, thusfollowing a tendency to social self-destruction. Psycoanalysis has shown us that every violent actof an individual, that every aggression is always in part self-aggression. The desire of annihilatethe other ist simultanously the desire to annihilate the other in oneself; to suppress the individualas a subject. The self-mutilating street gang warriors - tatoo, wounds, shaven scalps - have thus,in their own understanding, the right to mutilate any one else too.

In "Prospects of Civil War"4 , Hans Magnus Enzensberger pointed out a couple of years ago thepropagating readiness for violence. Armed mobs and gangs dominate the scene in the city and inthe countryside. Free market social Darwinism has swept away all social cohesiveness. Theconsequences are manifestations of dissolution; an atomization of society. Until a few decadesago, society presumed that its members were bound to a welfare state by a "contrat social".Today, society casts out more and more people. At the the root lies a change in direction,

described by Niklas Luhmann5 as the shift from a society of inclusion to a society of exclusion.But also the individuals and groups remaining within society isolate themselves from each other,and their lack of perspective discharges itself in violence readiness. If in the past people tried tobreak out of the slums and settlements of the marginalized, today they react also against afurther series of exclusion mechanisms, visible as well as invisible, which have appeared. It is not,as might seem, the representation of violence on television which provokes violence in society. Itis television itself; its lack of context, its ever faster changing images and fragments. It is thesubcutane aggressiveness of the medium itself which evokes reactions of violence. Thecommunicationlessness of the media tallies with the communicationlessness in the city, which inturn falls apart in remnants, barrios, villages, vecindades, neighbourhoods, which barricadethemselves against their neighbours.

IV.

Exemplary for the spheres in which violence propagates more and more are the megacities in thedeveloping countries, like Mexico City. In the past still a part of the Third World on the thresholdof the First, the Mexican capital has become today (now that the entire country is integrated - asan experimental field - in the "Northamerican Free Trade Zone" and globalization dissolves allhistorical and social differences) the place where new forms of violence develop. They originate inold social structures - brotherhoods, secret societies, mafia - or resort back to them. The societydisintegrates while gangs, mafias and cartels become increasingly stronger.

According to official figures6 , 1996 was the most violent year in Mexico City's history: a quarterof a million registered criminal assaults; 75 percent of the robberies directed against banks,supermarkets, businesses, houses, flats, loaded lorries, taxis and automobiles; kidnappings ofpoliticians and businessmen(a new industry), eight kidnappings of children per month(traffic withorgans), three murders daily. The tendency is rising, so that in the future every inhabitant cancount on being assaulted at least once.

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Parallel to the radical privatization of state owned enterprises and state property, a freeorganization of gangs has developed, which last year led to the arrest of over 600 gangs in thecity. They perpetrated hold-ups, break-ins, robberies of supermarkets and banks, and car thefts -organized in collaboration with the police and insurance companies. Including contract killings,they execute nearly everything that falls in the trade. Facing them there is a similarly largenumber of private security services, which often recruit former members of the police, who in turnoften build gangs themselves. They are hired by the citizenry to keep watch over businesses,houses and housing complexes. Five locks in the door, a heavy garden gate, the neighbourhoodsealed off by road barriers, guard houses, and identity paper controls of passers-by andautomobiles. Thus the city transforms itself into an accumulation of fortresses, which have alreadytaken possession of over 20 percent of the city surface.

The streets and housing developments, whose dwellers rightly call themselves colonos again, likethe Spaniards who 400 years ago occupied the country, are fortress-like dormitory developments,sealed off by guard houses and roadblocks. They don't have any public facilities at their disposal,such as assembly rooms and restaurants, and are under surveillance by private police, whocontrol all in-coming and out-going motor vehicles. In reality, these colonos are voluntaryprisoners, whose social communication oscillates between office, shopping centre or mall, and thetelevision screens at home. "On an international scale", wrote Enzensberger, "everywhere, thefortification of the boundary wall of demarcation - like the Roman limes - is being worked on,which shall protect from the barbarians. But also within the metropolis, archipelagos of securitytake shape, which are defended. In the great American, African and Asian cities, there are longsince bunkers of the blissful, surrounded by high, barbed wire reinforced walls. Sometimes it isentire quarters, which can only be entered with special identification cards. Barriers, electroniccameras and watchdogs control access. Sentinels in watch-towers armed with machine guns

secure the surroundings"7 .

Already in 1972, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas had designed, along with some colleagues, the

postmodern city of the future8 . High fortress walls, which delimit state borders rather than citylimits, protect the walled-in security zone. The city is equipped with all logistic installations,because, anyhow, the prisoners don't abandon their fortress anymore, unless to visit similarlywalled-in friends, travelling in convoys of armoured vehicles through hostile territory. Mexico Cityis not too far away from that. It is long a fact that its streets cannot be trod upon in the day or atnight without fear, independently of the fact that these were practically never planned or built forpedestrians. The social jungle of gangs, families, mafias and cartels contributes now to wash awaythe deceptive veneer of big city life. What emerges is the opposite of a humane society: nakedviolence. Television spots against violence and advertisements for armoured cars along thespeedways illustrate how far the violence readiness of society has gone. There have already beensome cases of lynch law in the countryside. The bloody battle of particular power groups whospare no sacrifice is the characteristic feature of the rule of violence. But it is not that theneoliberal opinion makers released a formula to which the world dances. Neoliberalism too, likeviolence, is a symptom of a society in crisis.

1) Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History and the last Man, The Free Press, New York, 1992.2) Thurow, Lester C.: "Wir testen das System", Der Spiegel, 40/1996.3) Gerteis, Margaret: "Violence, public health, and the Media", based on the conference: "MassCommunication and Social Agenda Setting", The Anneberg Washington Program, Washington,D.C., 1993.4) Enzensberger, Hans Magnus: Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M.,1993.5) Luhmann, Niklas: Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Bd.2, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M., 1997.6) La Jornada, México, D.F., 31 de diciembre de 1996.7) Enzensberger, op. cit.8) Rem Kolhaas & Elia Zenghelis with Mandelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis: Exodo "TheVoluntary Prisoners", fotomontage, 1972, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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