Violence: Six Sideways Reflections by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Poetry of Dominance

Violence is a necessary if regrettable condition of civilisation. A few of us who enjoy the comforts of civilisation are uncomfortable with that reality. Such violence appears overtly from time to time but it exists continuously in subtle forms of coercion that sustain relationships of domination and exploitation which are what constitute civilisation. It is the threat of violence which keeps us secure, at least when we are not the recipient of the threat.

It is this that constitutes “the invisible background of systemic violence” which is the subject of Žižek’s analysis. It is an awkward subject precisely because it is invisible to most of us. We can only see it askance, as it were, out of the corner of the eye. This kind of violence he calls “the dark matter” of society (I should have preferred ‘dark energy’). It must be present for society to exist at all. But we must infer its properties because it can’t be observed directly. We are therefore forced into a poetical mode of discourse: “poetry is always, by definition, ‘about’ something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to.”

Liberal sympathies, says Žižek, are with those subjected to overt, visible violence, never with those oppressed by the invisible violence which assures the comforts of liberality. Yet it is the invisible violence that most often generates the visible. The invisible is systemic violence and by definition it is directed toward those who are perceived merely as potential, not actual, threats. Whatever might disrupt liberal security must be prevented. Liberals fail to connect the dots. Social conservatives at least recognise the reality of the use of violence against specific parts of a polity.

As I write, London as well as other cities around the world are experiencing the protests organised by the so-called Extinction Rebellion. This seems to be a coalition of the somewhat young and the somewhat old to exert pressure for the political awareness of climate change. Yesterday, after a week of disruption, several protestors were beaten when they interrupted train services in London Docklands. Liberal commentators have been outraged that ‘honest’ protest has met with such a violent response.

But the Extinction Rebellion actions have accomplished something important. They have made visible first the objective systemic violence that they themselves have created (there is no doubt that closing down London Transport is a violent act). And, second, several of their members have suffered the subjective violence perpetrated by the responding systemic violence of a London mob. Whether the protestors will also be prosecuted with the implicit systemic violence of the state is not yet determined. Žižek, I think, would appreciate the concrete example of his theory in all its intricacies.

Žižek, being Žižek, that is to say, a Marxist of the old school, names the ultimate source of systemic violence as Capitalism. Many in Extinction Rebellion appear to agree with him. And indeed there is good reason to associate the economic inequalities and environmental destruction around the world with what is blithely called global capitalism. But this structure of violent control is as unlike what Marx thought of as Capitalism as what Stalin thought of as Democracy. Marxist theory was obsolete almost as soon as it was formulated. Marx knew about the factory and the factory owner not the corporation and corporate members. Using Marxist theory today to formulate a theory of systemic violence is futile.

The world as it exists is neither capitalist in the sense that Marx used the term, nor freely competitive in the sense that liberal economists use to defend ‘efficient’ economic arrangements. The world is corporate. That is, it is ruled by very large institutions whose primary function is to internalise competitive economics and make them personal under rules dictated by the corporation. These institutions dominate not only the individuals whom they employ but the governments which depend upon corporate employees health and well-being to fund their democratic elections and to fulfil their political promises of prosperity and security.

It is the corporate world, not the political or judicial world which has systemic power and controls systemic violence. It maintains this power in a way never contemplated by Marx, nor by liberal economic theorists, by enrolling individuals into the safety and security of the corporate structure. Having a place in the independent corporate hierarchy insulates its members from personal attack, at least regarding the consequences of their professional or economic actions. As a society, we enthusiastically want this kind of security even if it implies far less security in society in all its other aspects.

To summarise the situation: the dominant modern institution of the corporation has popularised avarice. Avarice is not greed in the sense of desiring the acquisition of an excess of certain things - food, shelter, warmth, physical care - but the accumulation of nothing in particular, merely more of whatever it is that others have. Capital is now corporate capital, which is not owned by anyone. What others do have is position, reputation, status, and reward within the corporation. This is what really counts as the key to all other parts of life, particularly to the physical, legal and other social aspects of security one might naturally desire. All modern life is corporate life; the corporation, we implicitly presume, will protect us as the rest of the world goes to hell in a basket.

Hence Žižek is often blowing stale hot air. He knows that old fashioned communism is a dead letter in the archives of history. Among other things, communism involves at least as much systemic violence as capitalism. He also knows that we are in the position of “G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, in which the highest police authority is the same person as the super-criminal, staging a battle with himself.” We bring systemic violence on ourselves and simultaneously distract ourselves with concerns for the victims of that same violence. But the cause is not the inherent conflict of those who possess capital and those who do not. It is between those who have corporate protection and those who do not.*

Žižek’s implicit message is that we need to read more, especially more poetry, and more critically. I can’t deny that this is probably a good idea. But despite his erudition and numerous literary, sociological, and philosophical insights, I think he still doesn’t understand today’s world for what it is: namely, governed everywhere by corporate interests which are impervious to any equivalent countervailing power, including poetry.

*This seems to me a rather good theory for explaining the rise of Trumpism. Trumpists would be horrified to find themselves associated with Marx. It is their alienation from the corporate world not from capitalism that is most apparent from both their geographic locations and their gripes about being effectively ejected from their secure corporate existence.

Postscript: My wife has reminded me that in fact poetry may indeed be just the thing needed and quoted this from memory:

I Am the Only Being Whose Doom
by EMILY BRONTË

I am the only being whose doom
No tongue would ask, no eye would mourn;
I never caused a thought of gloom,
A smile of joy, since I was born.

In secret pleasure, secret tears,
This changeful life has slipped away,
As friendless after eighteen years,
As lone as on my natal day.

There have been times I cannot hide,
There have been times when this was drear,
When my sad soul forgot its pride
And longed for one to love me here.

But those were in the early glow
Of feelings since subdued by care;
And they have died so long ago,
I hardly now believe they were.

First melted off the hope of youth,
Then fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew;
And then experience told me truth
In mortal bosoms never grew.

’Twas grief enough to think mankind
All hollow, servile, insincere;
But worse to trust to my own mind
And find the same corruption there.

Post-postscript: For more 0n the literary theory of the corporate world see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
And on the institution of the corporation itself, see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Post-post-postscript: there are a number of fictional accounts of corporate violence; but one of the most moving is this: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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