Postscript on Violence
Rent from DeepDyve- Postscript on Violence
Violence is everywhere.
It could be argued that we are in one of the most violent eras in human history. The scope of violence today is global and its magnitude immense. It is seen in the death counts from perpetual wars and the injury reports from fierce protests; it is found in the oil-soaked waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the radiation-contaminated earth of Japan; it is heard in the screams of women subject to sexual violence and the children who are the victims of predators. It is in the blood we are served by televised news and the brutal visions of an increasing violence-driven entertainment industry.
Though our various critical and cultural studies relate features of it, and our social and physical sciences capture aspects of it, the violence in our world is far too overwhelming to contain. No study can capture it in its entirety and no report can present us with a complete set of data on it. For many, the violence that surrounds and engulfs us is an abomination and a threat, something to be fought and eliminated; though for many more, violence serves a social and economic end—and is as American as apple pie. "Rooted in everyday institutional structures," writes Henry Giroux, "violence has become the toxic glue that bonds Americans together while simultaneously preventing them from expanding and building a multiracial and multicultural democracy" (2002, 231).
The "toxic glue" of violence is a threat to individual and social well-being as well as to democracy itself. One of the imperatives of critical pedagogy must be to reveal its manifestations—another must be to work toward its elimination. And progressive intellectuals must continue to utilize the public sphere through print and social media to bring about a better understanding of the dangers of an increasingly violent world and to work toward eliminating the toxic glue of violence. [End Page 241]
Violence is nowhere.
While violence is everywhere more apparent, it is also everywhere ignored and hidden. The violence that is unseen and unknown must be engaged just as much as the violence that is seen and known. While violent video games and movies premised on the spectacle of violence are not difficult to discern, they often have the unintended consequence of closing off consideration and understanding of other forms of violence, in particular the myriad types of violence that cannot be staged.
Much of the violence that is unseen and unheard happens on a temporal scale that is beyond the capacities of our senses. Termed by Rob Nixon, "slow violence," it has been described by him as "a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all" (Nixon 2). The slow violence of "mass droughts in China, flooding in Australia, food crises, super twisters, earthquakes linked to geo-engineering, arctic melt-off and so on" (Cohen 2012, i); "[C]limate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnifications, deforestation, the radioactive aftermath of war, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes" (Nixon 2).
This was not the violence addressed by the theorists and critics of the twentieth-century. Much of this violence unfolds over spans of time better described as geological rather than human. Or, better yet, over spans of time from which "the human" is viewed as but a passing moment. The theoretical work here that is just beginning to take shape promises to reframe the very ways we think about history, time, and change.1
However, if the exanthropic violence of climate change is the future of theory, what of the anthropic violence that has been the focus of much attention, particularly since the rise of women's studies, gender studies, and ethnic studies in the sixties and seventies? How are we doing here with forms of violence that are visible and seen and felt by women, children, and the disenfranchised across the globe? Unfortunately, not well.
