Violence

related musical compositions, understood that in his “silent piece,” Cage was using the frame to make his audience aware of the natural sounds in their environment and was forcing people to reconsider the whole nature of a concert piece, a performance, a structure, and so on. 4 '33 "has since become a modern classic; it has been widely written about and continues to be “performed”long after Cage’ s death. Not every­ one, of course, will develop a taste for it—many so-called sophisticated concert audiences continue to make fun of it—and it is hard to take the piece as a class marker or indeed a work of art that obeys Kant’ s injunctions regarding the relationship of the one to the many. Yet the taste for Cage’s conceptual music and writing continues to grow; and it continues to be subject to explanation and education. Taste, in any case remains central to discussions of the aesthetic, provided we recognize that its nature is not amenable to proof, quantification, or theoretical formulation. Marjorie Perloff Stanford University Violence Raymond Williams reminds us that violence has both a straightforward meaning and a latent complexity. The former is associated with the use of open and direct physical force, as in the phrase “robbery with violence.” The latter involves a political inflection and distinction such that violence is associated only with the illegitimate use of force. When it is carried out legitimately, other terms are deployed to describe what would otherwise be seen as the same kind activity. Whereas criminals or “men of violence” use violence, the police or the “security forces” restore law and order. The underlying structure of thought on which this conceptually loose but sig­ nificant distinction is made is the subject of this comment. It is useful to begin with the historical context identified by Williams in his original comment. Violence is associated at the individual level with “force,” “vehemence,” “impetuosity,” and through “violation,” with ideas of morally wrong breach of a custom or interference with a sense of dignity. It is also used at a wider level as part of a general description of a state into which a society might fall: one “Of filthe and of corrupción / Of violence and oppression”(quote from Williams 330). It is in relation to this last usage that modernity introduces the latent complexity mentioned above, for it Retro Keywords | 55 Alan Norrie teaches criminal law and legal theory at King’ s College London. His work includes Law, Ideology and Punishment (Kluwer, 1991)1 Punishment, Responsibility and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Crime, Reason and History (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2001). He has recently published a set of collected essays called Law and the Beautiful Soul (Glass House Press, 2005). He is a co-editor of Critical Realism: Essential Readings (Routledge, 1998), and is working on a book comparing the dialectical critical realism of Roy Bhaskar with the negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno. declares that modern society is defined against and founded in response to such a state of ill-being. The transition from the state of nature to the civil state is a move from a “state of violence”to a state of peace, order and security. From that moment, the opposition state of violence/state of soci­ ety places a distance between how things were and how they are such that even recognizably violent acts in the civil state may carry the qualification that they are not “really”violent in an original sense. Violence deployed to avoid violence is no longer unqualifiedly violent. This way of thinking is carried forward in Enlightenment philosophy and into practice via law. For Kant, even the use of wrongful violence is abstracted from its intrinsic qualities in the civil state. It becomes a generic “hindrance of freedom” while the violence of the state against it is the “hindrance of a hindrance of freedom”that is compatible with reason (Kant, 1965: 35-36). Hegel only developed this philosophical extrapola­ tion of violence the more when he described punishment as “the negation of the negation” (Hegel, 1952: 246). In law, categories of violence are also drained of their moral substance in favour...