Violence and the materiality of power

ABSTRACT

The issue of political violence is mostly absent from current debates about power. Many conceptions of power treat violence as wholly distinct from or even antithetical to power, or see it as a mere instrument whose effects are obvious and not in need of political analysis. In this paper, I explore what kind of ontology of power is necessary to properly take account of the various roles that violence can play in creating and maintaining power structures. I pursue this question by contrasting the views of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. For Arendt, power is generated and maintained by communicative practices. She argues that power and violence are ‘opposites’ because violence can only destroy but not create these practices. In contrast, Foucault’s conception explicitly allows violence to play a constitutive role in generating power. I argue that while Arendt is right to insist that power and violence are not identical, it does not follow that violence cannot play any role in constituting power. Guided by Foucault’s approach, I formulate a non-dualist account of the relationship between power and violence that takes seriously the role that bodies, material things, and built infrastructures play in making social relations ‘more durable’ and constituting power.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• violence
• social ontology
• Hannah Arendt
• Michel Foucault

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, David Luban, Terry Pinkard, Joseph Rouse, and this journal’s anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and constructive feedback on previous drafts. Versions of this paper were presented at the 2016 meeting of the Arendt Circle, the 2015 Political Violence Workshop at the University of Connecticut, and the 2015 Re-engaging Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain conference at the University of Brighton; I am grateful for the helpful feedback from the audiences at those conferences. The publication of this article was funded by the Qatar National Library.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Two important exceptions are the work of Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings and Johanna Oksala’s (2012) Foucault-inspired discussion of violence (2012). Gendered violence has been a central topic in feminist theory and philosophy, but this work has not found the uptake in political theory that it deserves (see Oksala, 2012, pp. 66–79).

2. Forst’s (2015) account, which emphasizes that power is based on the recognition of reasons, acknowledges that the use of force can sometimes be reason-giving (pp. 8, 16, fn. 47). Nonetheless, it treats violence as a limit case (p. 5) and provides few resources for a political analysis.

3. While I focus on physical violence and its effects here, I am not taking a position on how the term ‘violence’ is or ought to be used more generally (see Bufacchi, 2005).

4. I would like to thank David Luban for prompting me to distinguish more clearly between the exercise and generation of power.

5. In her own analysis, Oksala (2012) does not follow Arendt’s oppositional view. She rejects views that take violence to be essential to politics but also argues that violence plays important, albeit historically contingent, political roles. Given the main targets of her criticism, it makes sense for Oksala to foreground the fact that Arendt and Foucault both reject views that conflate power and violence. In contrast, I engage with views like Arendt’s that take violence to be external to power. Both kinds of views arguably share the assumption that violence is instrumental and coercive in nature and thus see no need to analyze the specific political effects or rationalities of different forms of violence (see Winter, 2018, pp. 2–7, Oksala, 2012, p. 13), .

6. This includes but is broader than the capacity to get another agent to do something they would not have otherwise done. I assume that Arendt thinks that collective deliberations and actions make a difference to the potential actions of those participating in them. Consequently, I would suggest that the difference between Foucault’s power-over and Arendt’s power-with is a difference of emphasis, not a substantive disagreement about the nature of power (pace Allen, 1999).

7. Amy Allen argues that these similarities are ‘ultimately rooted in a critique of one and the same understanding of power’ (2002, p. 132).

8. This formulation is supposed to distinguish the view from the stronger view that violence is essential to any form of power. I take it that the latter position is the target of Johanna Oksala’s (2012) argument.

9. The notion of a social alignment is adapted from Wartenberg (1990, chapter 7). As will become clearer in the following discussion, we need to look at ‘social-material alignments’ that involve not just agents and their actions but also the material things and structures with which social agents interact (see also Rouse, 2002, pp. 177f.).

10. Many of Arendt’s commentators do not carefully distinguish these two points and consequently cannot resolve the resulting ambiguity. Frazer and Hutchings, for example, suggest that Arendt aims her criticism at theories that ‘treat violence as integral to politics’ (2008, p. 99). But 'integral’ is ambiguous here: It could mean that violence is necessary for politics. But it could also mean that violence often plays an important role, without being essential. Similarly, Frazer and Hutchings suggest that Arendt’s ‘crucial point is that [violence] should never be conflated with politics itself’ (2008, p. 102). But we can avoid conflating politics with violence while holding that violence can play a role in politics. Conversely, they argue against Arendt that ‘a clear conceptual distinction between [violence and power] is problematic’ (2008, p. 103). In my view, it is not the distinction itself that is problematic, but Arendt’s dualist account of it. See also Allen (2002, p. 137), Ayyash (2013, p. 351), Hanssen (2000, p. 25), Herzog (2017, p. 167).

11. Latour and Foucault both have pursued concrete investigations of this kind (see Foucault, 1978, pp. 92–95 for the notion of ‘heterogeneous force relations’; see Latour, 2005, pp. 247–263 for the notion of ‘assembling a common world’). Another example is the work of political theorist Timothy Mitchell (2011), which explores how the material properties of coal, oil, and the infrastructures required for their extraction, transport, and use have shaped capacities for political action.

12. See Luban (2014) for a similar, communicative analysis of torture. Like Scarry, Luban focuses on the communicative relationship between torturer and victim and pays less attention to the effects that torture has on the audience.

13. Similarly, George Sorel (whom Arendt criticizes for conflating power and violence) argues that violence can be ‘acted out and dramatized theatrically’ and thereby shape a political consciousness that can help generate a new political order (see Finlay, 2009, pp. 30–38). Ayyash (2013, p. 345) also recognizes a ‘productive’ role of violence.

14. Of course, this space may not always be as egalitarian and inclusive as Arendt seems to suggest (1990, pp. 33–31, 1958, p. 175; see also Bernstein, 2012, pp. 8–9). Even if power is a form of togetherness, this togetherness is usually partial, a matter of determinate groups of actors with specific interests interacting, and the power emerging from these interactions need not be fully inclusive or non-hierarchical (Breen, 2007, p. 364; see also zabermas, 1977; Allen, 1999, p. 103).

15. Marquez’s own proposal, in particular his distinction between spaces of appearance and ‘spaces of surveillance’ and his analysis of power in terms of visibility, deserves more discussion than I can provide here. Whatever its merits, it deviates significantly from Arendt’s account.

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Torsten Menge

Torsten Menge is Assistant Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. His research areas include social and political philosophy, social ontology, and social theory, with a focus on theories of power. He is currently working on a project about the nature and boundaries of political communities in the context of the ongoing surge of large-scale foreign land acquisitions. He recently published articles in European Journal of Social Theory, Southwest Philosophy Review, and Land.