Violence in the Age of Empire

An Indian Consideration
Rajesh Kumar Sharma

Violence as a Matter of Discourse

1. A discourse about violence must begin with a consideration of discourse as

violence. When we speak of violence, we are constrained by the terms of a given
discourse. The discourse may not allow the articulation of certain forms and instances of
violence because within its terms those forms and instances may not constitute violence.
A discourse imposes limitations even as it offers opportunities; it disallows, even as it
allows, certain understandings of violence. Discourse is, in other words, in itself a field of
violence.

But a discourse of violence may not be of much use if it is not equipped to

address differences and encourage possible new understandings. It needs openness and
dynamism to address the specificity of situations within which particular forms and
instances of violence get constituted.

2. The sign of the “global” is marked with ambivalence. One face of this sign is
ideological-hegemonic. From this derive those “global accounts” that are ostensibly
coherent and claim to offer comprehensive understandings of general, universal
applicability. But in the face of concrete, specific phenomena irreducible in their
singularity, these accounts very often, expectedly, fail.

Do we then have no use for the sign of the “global”? Ye, we do. And that use is
imposed on us by the reality in which we happen to live today. This is the reality of
globalization.

The other face of the sign of the “global” points to this reality and exhorts us to
remember the history of the present as also to reread the present as history (not as only
past).

The sign of the “global” has to be recuperated by critical engagement with both its
faces. A global account of globalization may be a contradiction in terms, yet it is an
inescapable necessity. The question is how to reconstruct a global account of
globalization. Can we conceptualize globalization as multitudinous, as globalizations?
 3. The need to conceptualize the post-global. To simultaneously comprehend and
critique the global. Simultaneously, not after. And reflecting on the global from a position
within globality. For the global is the defining condition of both the present as history and
the present as erasure of history.

The post-global, then, requires a new kind of metanarrative.

Perhaps we can rethink the metanarrative as the narrative of narratives. Not as the
yet-to-be-unpacked history inscribed as akash-lipi (transcendental script) in kaal-yoni
(the matrix of time), but as the tale of the telling of tales. The (hi)story of the making of
(hi)stories. Obviously, this would be the ‘meta’ of deep materiality, not of the denial of
materiality. And that means revisioning the metanarrative not as the junk of
postmodernism but as the recovery of forgotten and being-forgotten originary global
ecologies.

We have an obligation to remember the deep materiality of global ecologies. We

have to understand ecologies as home sciences, as the sciences of home. And also as
stories of homelessness. Of violated homes. Of disinheritance, dispossession,
disenfranchisement.

In fact, a postglobal metanarrative may be the best way to comprehend the non-
linear, rhizomatic structures of violence in our times. Indeed, it may even be the only way
to strategic pattern-recognition.

The Question of Definition

Dictionaries are notoriously status-quoist when it comes to registering change. They

continue to explain violence principally as the unlawful exercise of physical force
causing physical injury or damage to a person or property. Decades after the exposure of
previously unrecognized forms of violence permeating modern societies in the shape of
disciplinary technologies, ideological apparatuses and discourses, violence continues to
be officially defined in extremely restrictive terms. The reason probably lies in the
enduring nexus between the state, law and sovereignty.

The conception of violence as the unlawful exercise of physical force is implicitly

based on a certain notion of sovereignty. According to this notion, the state is the
exclusive locus of sovereignty. The notion of sovereignty thus grants to the state the
absolute authority to determine what constitutes, in the law instituted by it, violence and
what does not. Obviously, the exercise of this authority would effectively exclude from
the legal-definitional ambit of the term ‘violence’ those acts of violence that emanate
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 from the state or from its accomplices. The first requirement therefore is to mount a
sustained discursive challenge to the statist discourse of violence. The second is to look
beyond the state and the law and to grasp the ubiquity of violence in its myriad forms,
such as economic, cultural and social, in the age of Empire (Hardt and Negri).

The World Health Organization, in its first “World Report on Violence and
Health”, extends the parameters of the definition of violence when it redefines violence
as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself,
another person or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high
likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or
deprivation”. A positive consequence of such a readjustment of focus is the enhanced
awareness of the range of violence, exemplified by the WHO’s estimate that violence
swallows nearly as many as 1.6 million people every year in our world.

The WHO’s definition of violence firmly brings into the picture “oneself”, “a
group” and “community” on one hand and “psychological harm, maldevelopment or
deprivation” on the other. Both moves are of strategic import at a time when the
juggernaut of globalization rolls over and tramples unsuspecting selves (inflicting
psychological disorientation through their naïve self-understandings), results in cultural
genocide of varied scales and shapes visited on groups and communities that would either
join or not join the juggernaut, and spreads new kinds of misery in the name of
“development” while postponing infinitely the promise of distributive justice.

Development, as the world has learnt, is not an innocent word. In the interests of
justice, a crucial distinction has to be made today between development as a set of
economic activities specifically oriented towards people’s empowerment and
development as an obfuscating discourse which covers up the contemporary global
realpolitik of predominantly corporate economic management.

Implicated in the above illustration is the essential question of language, which

can be both the object and the instrument of violence. This is a question that has not been
sufficiently addressed outside philosophy and cultural studies. In fact, the WHO’s
redefinition of violence at once exemplifies and fails to acknowledge the centrality of
language to the question of violence in our times. It extends the definitional scope of

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 violence but does not extend it enough to include the symbolic violence that is ubiquitous
to globalization.

Symbolic violence is not unreal violence. It is a very real violence. It devastates

the symbolic structures of a community, the structures that organize its ethos in complex
ways embedded in history and locale. It is the violence done to a community’s ways of
being, to its peculiar production of meaning-making and meaningfulness. Language,
obviously, bears the brunt of symbolic violence.

But it is a peculiar paradox that language also catches, reflexively, the violence
being inflicted on it, and lays it bare.

In our time, the perpetrators of this violence are usually assumed to be anonymous
and faceless forces driven with the inevitability of what the Greeks probably meant by
fate. In reality however, they are very much identifiable. They happen to take the form of
institutions, groups and persons, characterized by a pathologically high sense of self-
worth and potent self-identities (brand names included) to protect and project. But they
weave such formidable illusions of complexity and inaccessibility that the aam aadmi
(the famous “common man” of political speech-writers) is left eternally bewildered and
awe-struck. Pure inaccessibility is the logo of this new racism, the racism of the
democratic elite in the globalizing world’s developing economies. Before this pure
inaccessibility the aam aadmi is expected to stand in dumb, mindless awe.

By a perverse logic of democratic representation a few persons and groups

arrogate to themselves the right to stand in for all people. The ground of their special
right to represent the aam aadmi is that that they are themselves not aam aadmi and
hence must be the better qualified to understand the aam aadmi’s wants and needs. The
farce of their hypocritical position is utterly lost on them because they would not heed the
murmur of language that often undercuts any manifest rhetoric. So they speak
solicitously of reforms “with a human face”, not seeing that their inept choice of
metaphor ironically suggests, down below, a demon’s torso: that of the demon of certain
putative “reforms” in unreserved and horrid nakedness. And these masters of
representation speak of the “trickle-down” effect of prosperity, smugly advertising their
ritual trust in the hierarchical distribution of wealth. And they also speak of “human
resources” without any sense of history and hence without any trace of irony, gleefully

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 disremembering the mass commodification of human beings, the mass dehumanization,
which has been deposited in the phrase by the Holocaust. Such history is strictly outside
the range of their post-historical, contemporary sensibilities.

The wonder is that their rape of language goes unreported. Rather, their
“malpronouncements” are received and disseminated like oracular utterances, to slowly
become the foundational terms of the discourse of the country’s new-found modernity.
The general deadness to language aborts the possibility of a collective critical
consciousness. In a country where most people still look up to the media for the highest
standards of language competence, the absence of a society-wide debate cutting across
classes gets conveniently identified as a trait of the national temperament, whereas a
better diagnosis would reveal the moral and intellectual failure of those entrusted with the
care of language. Between a systematic abuse of language on the one side and a general
deadness to it on the other, the ground is thus prepared for the burial of history.
Groundless language makes an easy playground for playing games with history.

There is a vital link between language evacuated of memory and history

engineered, managed and reconfigured for the sake of compatibility with certain
economic doctrines and regimes. Indeed, right under this link lurks the principal target of
symbolic violence. If language is the house of Being, as Heidegger said, you can
reasonably hope to bomb that house out of existence when you take aim and push the
button.

Towards Pattern Recognition

“India is a young country of sixty years.” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s

amazing discovery on the country’s Independence Day in 2007 left many editorialists and
columnists crooning a non-idea like a catchy Bollywood tune. So history begins afresh,
albeit with not much of historicity left. Avant-garde disaster economists moonlighting as
neo-liberal historiographers find sixty-odd years manageable to account for within the
ideological format of the new world order. (Thousands of years of civilization can
unnecessarily mess up things). And it makes great practical and political sense too: with
the threshold lowered (or raised?) to sixty years, history would now begin with our own
man, Jawaharlal Nehru, whose bona fide errors can be surely owned up with a good
conscience.

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 But the greater gains of the speculative move of neoliberal historiography are in
long-term investment: when you push the unwieldy inheritance of history beyond the
horizon of visibility, you are virtually clearing the slate of sedimented memories and
preparing to raise single-brand shopping malls in places cluttered up with bazaars of
civilization where countless cultures rub old and dusty shoulders. You are getting ready
to sell your heritage buildings to hotel wallahs to either recycle or demolish them. And
the mercenary inducement does not always wait to find a good enough disguise; it can
abruptly break out like a rash of chickenpox on the face of the neo-political. Hence the
Ram Setu affair is today a significant landmark not so much even in the epic of Rama’s
wanderings as it is in the short history of India’s affair with neo-liberalism. When
commerce becomes the pre-eminent criterion in all matters, you should not be surprised if
there is tomorrow a survey of all places and structures of cultural and historical
importance with the obviously rational aim of turning them into profitable enterprises
such as leisure resorts and shopping malls. Time was when invading armies are said to
have vandalized the world’s libraries. Now that most libraries have gone digital, let the
torches and hammers fall elsewhere. The sight of new invading hordes flashing their
Harvard and London School of Economics degrees may not seem very threatening, but it
is a very real sight. History repeats itself in many ways. And lest people should check it
out, let it begin in 1947 only.

Even the Greek fates could not have been that vicious. They challenged the
defiant man to discover and show his humanity at its best. The latter-day fates do not
only erase memory and reconfigure history, but also literally brutalize people, practices,
institutions and human relations. And all this in the name of a higher rationality
inaccessible to aam aadmi. Factories and shops are closed down with the force of a law
that has shed even the pretense of justice. Vendors of food and their hungry customers
(who reportedly earn as much as half a dollar a day) are supposed to just shut up and
disappear. When there is a hue and cry against judicial impropriety, a new propriety of
studied silence and stonewalling comes to prevail. When a Minister in the Government
does some loud thinking about the health hazards faced by the hard-earning young
women and men in the BPO industry, the profit-makers howl in protest in their self-
appointed role as defenders of lifestyle choices. What was considered to be immoral
living just five years ago before becomes a lifestyle choice today – because someone is
happily making a quick buck out of it.

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 Language, memory, history, law, morals. The symbolic violence of our times is
evidently not random and sporadic. There is a pattern to it. To begin to recognize that
pattern is to begin telling that tale of tales which awaits telling and which holds the
promise of redemption in, as against from, history. To tell the tale is to bear witness, to
suffer and to act – all gathered into one.

David Riches speaks of “the triangle of violence” which includes the perpetrator,
the victim and the witness (qtd. in Strathern and Stewart). Depending on persuasion or
threat, the witness, it is said, may incline toward the perpetrator or the victim. The
triangular division of violence is as neat as any academic division can ideally be, but in
reality there is also a zone of ambiguity in which the witness is also doomed to be both
the victim and the perpetrator. In these times, we need to see ourselves precisely as such
witnesses fortunately trapped in a zone of ambiguity. The least we can do perhaps is call
upon ourselves to bear witness to our witness-status in that zone. That may open the way
to a better understanding of our own victimization as well as our complicity in
victimization. The comforting delusion that we are only witnesses, and hence not
participants in the making of the history that is the present, is a rather fragile delusion, for
no witness box can be a protection against the onslaughts of reality.

Works Cited

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New
York: Penguin, 2004.

Strathern, Andrew, and Pamela J. Stewart. “ Violence: Conceptual Themes and the Evaluation of
Actions.” polylog: Forum for Intercultural Philosophy 5 (2004)
<http://them.polylog.org/5/fss-en.htm>.

World Health Organization. “World Report on Violence and Health.” 2002

<http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/world_report/en/full_en.pdf>.

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Written in 2007

Department of English

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 Punjabi University, Patiala

sharajesh@gmail.com

09316226890

0175-2281777

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