Experiments
Links
Experiments
Links
on the interior of violence
| And he is whispering |
And I find Hitler in my heart...”
What would actually happen if we understood violence? If we finally traced anger and every other corrosive tension back to its root? Would the world of unhappiness and pain simply end, and some collective world of pleasure and joy begin? Would the gates of utopia — of paradise, of whatever miracle we imagine life could be — swing open?
Maybe the answer is yes.
Maybe it's all a matter of changing violence's form. Social change, personal wellbeing (call it existence, or peace, or whatever you like), spiritual liberation — maybe all of these, at bottom, come down to violence and to transforming the shape it takes. Violence, after all, isn't some fixed, self-contained thing, the way we tend to imagine most physical phenomena. It behaves more like certain forces or energies in space that have simply broken down and changed form.
Or maybe violence is just joy gone badly moldy.
The Topology of Violence
Byung-Chul Han doesn't take the tired, easy route of looking for the sources of violence "out there." In fact, in this wonderfully fluid, relentlessly sharp book, he barely mentions the "outside" at all. He refuses the shortcut of saying violence comes from authority, from upbringing, from transmission — the comforting move of locating both the problem and its solution safely outside ourselves. He turns the arrows inward instead.
So can we stop arguing about whether it's possible and actually learn — as a real discipline — how to change things without conflict? Can we change the world without seizing power over it?
So how do we get free of violence? A world free of violence needs movements and subjects that are themselves free of violence. And that's not just a matter of political phrasing. We could prove, endlessly and with all the rigor of social science, that some people — and increasingly some social movements — freeing themselves of violence is the one thing that could genuinely change the world, could even lead somewhere like an ecological, heterogeneous utopia, a fairy tale for everyone. And still, almost no one in practice seems to want that particular kind of freedom. Why?
People love wanting big changes for themselves and for the world. What they don't love nearly as much is the sustained concentration it takes to actually get there. "Normal life" keeps rolling along just fine despite millions of dissatisfied people living inside it.
Aside from well-meaning activists and a handful of social-work professionals — pacing in circles with old methods that don't resolve anything — does almost no one else even get this far? Why do we choose complaining over acting, even on the things we clearly have the power to change?
And beyond that: most people on earth spend their entire lives in homes they don't love, doing jobs they don't love, with people they don't love, doing things they don't love. And they try to find happiness through the things that are quietly destroying them — drink, cigarettes, drugs, chocolate, coffee. Why does everyone seem to carry around an alternate self — the one who always wants to leave and never does, always wants to act and never does, always wants to be something and never becomes it?
Why?
Or maybe violence has simply evolved along with everything else in our time — gone digital, changed its clothes, its vocabulary — sliding "from the overt to the private, from frontal confrontation to viral contagion, from brute force to the mediatic, from the physical to the psychic, from the negative to the positive," withdrawing under the skin, into the space between the lines, into the capillaries and nerve endings.
T
urning on Oneself: Positive Violence and the Will to Be a Victim
Couldn't violence — that same moldy libidinal current — simply be adapting to the times, so it can express itself more effectively? Shedding every enemy, every seat of power, and disguising itself in relatively "positive" forms until it becomes invisible? We all sense, on some level, that the wildly high suicide rates in countries with the highest economic prosperity and democratic stability aren't just about the weather being oppressive.
External violence — the violence of an earlier zeitgeist — used to lighten its own load by aiming the weight of pain outward, at an enemy, solving the problem of existing the easy way. Han's question is where our era's violence, the kind that turns inward and positive, finally lands once that outward channel is gone — what kind of internal collapse it ends in.
Does the idea — the possibility — of humanity's total inward collapse surprise anyone alive today? I doubt it. Just today I watched a video of a three-year-old crying over the state of the world, saying she couldn't wait to grow up so she could punish humanity and change it.
So why are we trying to collapse?
Why does everyone struggle, on one hand, to hold onto life, to exist, to chase their dreams — while spending roughly the same amount of energy trying to stop themselves, rein themselves in, even quietly destroy themselves? And this despite the fact that recognizing our own self-destructive patterns has never been easier — it's accepting and treating them that remains as hard as ever, bound up as it is with the much harder task of a madman admitting his own madness.
As Han puts it: "Beyond a certain level of production, a person exploiting himself is far more efficient and successful than being exploited by someone else, because it goes hand in hand with a feeling of freedom. The achievement-and-performance society is a society that exploits itself."
Run that dialectic in reverse, and doesn't it also describe the "victim psychology" that therapists, personal-development coaches, and spiritual life coaches spend so much of their time trying to "rescue" their clients from?
Turning on oneself, then: the active violence inside us, when it finds no easy enemy to aim at outward, gets redirected inward — or it's the spontaneous, "positive" answer that a collective urge to be a victim gives to the anxiety of needing to seem absolutely good.
And really, watching how much people sacrifice themselves in daily life — at work, in family, in love, even in activism — how readily they surrender to the demands of others, of the system, of the revolution, of the parasitic unconscious subjects living inside their own selves, we might be startled to realize that violence, even as we consciously reject and resist it, is at the same time something we're unconsciously demanding.
The Archaeology of Violence and the Fear of Death
In our known history, and across what we might provisionally call — as a working assumption, "Western thought," fully aware no single "universal" culture exists — most of what we do seems governed less by mimetic or malleable desires and more by a deep-seated fear of death. The plain fact that life is finite got pushed further and further aside once the Enlightenment rose up against medieval idealism, buried deeper and deeper in a kind of archaeological flight from itself. The archaic root of violence — the fear of death — first turned into killing the other (animals, enemies), and in industrial society turned into killing the other within ourselves, in an effort to manufacture a false sovereignty over death. As Han puts it, somewhere underneath it all, "the archaic belief survives that death can be staved off by accumulating the power to kill," and "the more violence a person inflicts, the stronger his power grows. Violence against the other multiplies one's chances and capacity for survival. Death is overcome by killing."
Maybe capitalism and capital accumulation rest on this same archaic code — the belief that you grow stronger by piling up corpses behind you. Blood is simply replaced by money. Somewhere in the capitalist unconscious lives the belief that the more money you have, the more killing-power you hold — a way of trying to defeat death itself. Even the killing, the appetite for "sacrifice," that appears where there's no actual enemy or threat in sight, probably comes from exactly this place.
Capitalism, on a deep psychological level, may really be about death and the fear of it. "The hysteria of accumulation and growth and the fear of death produce each other," Han writes. "The capitalist economy makes survival absolute. Its concern isn't living well. It feeds instead on the illusion that more capital will generate more life, will increase our capacity to live." And here he hands the floor to Freud:
"The rigid, all-or-nothing distinction between life and death condemns life itself to an uncanny numbness."
Which is worth underlining: real vitality and real pleasure sit on the opposite side of the ledger from capital and accumulation. It's no accident that the most genuine smiles on earth keep turning up on the faces of the most propertyless people — nomads, Roma, hippies, Indian fakirs.
Worth a glance, too, at lifestyle and personal-development movements, and especially the Buddhism-leaning currents in Western societies. It makes more sense, seen this way, why an anti-capitalism that scatters itself across joyful autonomous zones and creative everyday practice — one that goes as deep as the search for inner peace — has become such a load-bearing part of the resistance culture of our time.
"Which means: for life not to freeze into a shape that's merely not-dead-yet, we need to make more room for death," Han writes.
The Spirit of Today's Inward Violence: The Hamster in the Wheel
In Freud, the psyche becomes a battlefield. Violence — whether it comes from outside or inside — "is a violence of negativity, because it originates from an other. It expresses itself as oppression within a context of power." The self splits against itself and its parts go to war. The self takes its revenge on the real object by tormenting itself. A person's relationship to himself is damaged to the point of illness.
Han sets Freud against Sennett, and files this whole negative schema away as belonging to industrial society. For the violence-schema of today's post-industrial society, he borrows Sennett's much simpler equation: the self drowns in itself.
And yet, in Han's account, what defines today's psychiatric condition isn't Freud's "melancholy," or Sennett's "narcissistic disorder," or even depression. Today's real illness is burnout — the thing people arrive at by relentlessly directing themselves toward achievement and performance:
"The exhausted, depressive subject, fixated on achievement and performance, is sick of himself. Worn out from himself, spent from the war with himself. Unable to step outside himself, to be out in the world, to let go and open toward the Other — he fixates on himself obsessively, and this, paradoxically, is exactly what hollows the self out and empties it. Like a hamster running its wheel, the subject spinning endlessly around itself will eventually burn out."
And meanwhile, a person's relationship to the world around him keeps getting more virtual, absorbed into social networks that become the support system for a self that's already lost inside itself. As Han puts it: "the primary function friends now serve is to focus their attention, as consumers, on an ego displayed like a commodity — inflating the person's own narcissistic sense of self."
In the end, the obedient subject of "the society before this one" submitted itself to a superego; the achievement-driven subject of "today's society" — the post-industrial performance society — redesigns itself around an ideal self instead, and turns violently against itself in a steady current of inadequacy, guilt, and loss.
In Han's closing words: "A person inflicts violence on himself and exploits himself. External violence has been replaced by a violence that breeds internally — and this is far more lethal than the first kind, because the victim of this violence believes himself to be free."