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On Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921).
What is violence? Walter Benjamin (pronounced “Ben-Ya-Meen”) breaks down the phenomenon into four types and then shows why these are not really distinct after all.
First, any state is always established, he says, through at least some violent acts, so this is law-making violence. Not only does one group subdue another, but then everyone signs a treaty or constitution or something to ratify that subdual.
Second, once you have a state, that state defends itself through retaining a monopoly on legitimate violence. The police, the courts, the military all practice law-preserving violence.
In practice, these can blur together. The police in particular, for the sake of “keeping the peace,” regularly exceed the mere enforcement of existing law, besides which, all laws are general and need to be interpreted to apply to particular, concrete situations. Benjamin says that they’re really practicing law-making violence of a sort as well.
The third type is mythical violence, such as when in Greek mythology, some haughty mortal brags about being superior to the gods in some respect (Benjamin mentions Niobe) and is then stricken. Benjamin analyzes this not as the gods trying to maintain some code of conduct, and so punishing those who contravene it, but as gods showing off their power. This, says Benjamin, actually provides the model for state power too. While a government might declare that it’s merely keeping its citizens’ behavior within certain bounds for their own good, the fact that this is backed by a threat of violence reveals the ultimate game: It’s about the state asserting its own power. Power backed by violence in fact has its own dynamic, its own force; there’s a self-perpetuating character intrinsic to violence that subsumes any leaders’ attempt to use violence as a “mere means” to its ends.
This attempt to use means-ends analysis to evaluate violence is for Benjamin the whole problem with traditional analyses. We think that if the end is good (e.g., this is a “just war”), then violence is a legitimate option to pursue that end. We might even think that an agreement without an (ultimately, eventually violent) enforcement mechanism is just a piece of paper not worth anything. But Benjamin is arguing (pretty obliquely) that this voluntary, unenforceable agreement is really the best we can get, that our salvation lies in verbal communication and social, non-violent sanctions. He had been reading a bunch of anarchists at this point (he’s chiefly reacting to Georges Sorel’s 1908 book Reflections on Violence), but does not tell us in this essay what kind of society he’s actually shooting for here. His critique is negative: There is something rotten at the core of all existing governments, and that something is the violence inherent in the system.
The fourth type of violence provides what Benjamin takes to be a limit case, and his explanation here has confounded commentators including us. He distinguishes from the mythological violence described above “divine violence,” which he describes as expiating (atoning for) sin: “pure power over all life for the sake of the living.” Benjamin’s philosopher’s God, which like that of Spinoza does not exhibit human-like qualities like the gods of mythology do, punishes to educate: Thou shalt not [whatever the prohibition is], and if you do, this is what happens to you. The punishment becomes so impersonal that it’s no longer punishment, but just cause and effect.
Benjamin sees this kind of violence as transcending means-end analysis because it’s not about cementing god’s power; it’s essentially an act of nature itself, but with a moral dimension. So why isn’t this just a bit of theology that we can ignore? Why is this relevant to serious political philosophy? Well, for the record, in Benjamin’s later work, he dismisses this whole notion as a mere limit case, disconnected from practical matters, so maybe we shouldn’t sweat too much over this, but let’s play along for the moment. He uses the idea of a strike to illustrate what this “limit” amounts to.
In an ordinary workers’ strike, the workers abrogate some of the state’s power. They stop working and make some demands, and while the state could just permit them all to be fired and replaced, on Benjamin’s analysis the state doesn’t do this out of fear of insurrection. The workers are essentially extorting benefits out of their employers, and the state permits this out of fear for its own survival. So a strike, even one where the workers are just nonviolently refraining from work, like a law, is ultimately backed by the threat of violence. When the workers get what they want, they go back to work. Some amount of power has passed from one elite group (the bosses/the state) to another elite group (the union).
The more widespread the strike, the more extortion is involved. A general workers strike makes it impossible for people (who would benefit from the workers’ service) to attain what’s necessary to live. But what if the explicit goal of the strike was not to attain some particular benefits, some particular transfer of power, but to unseat the state altogether, so that the result was not merely transfer of power from one (underlyingly) despotic state to another (as in the case of the French Revolution) but to a stateless future? This kind of strike, which would likely involve both implicit and explicit violence, Benjamin imagines could be seen as comparable to divine violence. It would redeem us. The problem (and again, this is Benjamin talking in later works about this idea) is that no would-be revolutionaries would actually know that this is the kind of revolution they’re actually engaged in. It’s only from a later, historical perspective that a particular revolution could be identified as having been violent in this divine (as opposed to merely mythological) manner.
We picked this essay because it’s discussed explicitly by Judith Butler in her book The Force of Nonviolence discussed on our previous episode. She advises that we just ignore the part about divine violence and focus on first, the fact that what counts as “violent” or not depends on a certain social frame, so that a state will call any act that threatens its power as violent even if there’s no physical fighting involved. Second, following Benjamin, Butler thinks we can always choose nonviolence, that any lasting accord is going to be one that’s truly voluntary, that we can’t preclude violent violation through a violence-backed agreement, but that instead it’s our word that provides the only—albeit very imperfect—tool we have for advancing productive cooperation and peaceful coexistence.
Buy the essay in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1: 1913–1926
or read it online.
We mention two secondary sources (beyond the Butler book) that help situate the essay within Benjamin’s body of work (this was early; he later became more explicitly Marxist) and provide some interpretation for the very difficult end of the essay: “Notes on the Thought of Walter Benjamin: Critique of Violence” by Signe Larsen and “Towards a Politics of ‘Pure Means’: Walter Benjamin and the Question of Violence” by Sami Khatib.
Continues on part two. Get the full ad-free Citizen Edition, which combines both parts. Please support PEL!
Transcript
0:00 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set out on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 237 is what is violence? And we'll be discussing Walter Benjamin's essay Critique of violence from 1920. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, neither lawmaking nor law preserving in Madison, Wisconsin.
0:21 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.
0:23 Wes: This is. This is Wes Alwan rebelling against mythical violence in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
0:29 Mark: All right, so this is a. I want to say continuation, but it was kind of up in the air whether this was going to go before. It was actually supposed to go before episode 236, where we talked about Judith Butler's current book, the Force of Non Violence. This Walter Benjamin essay spelled Benjamin, pronounced Benjamin was, I believe, the first thing that she cited in there. And there's a section later in the book that discusses it specifically. We'd gotten a lot of requests for Benjamin over the years. He's another early Frankfurt School fella, vaguely Marxist, although I guess at this point he hadn't actually read much Marx.
1:02 Wes: Well, he's more of an anarchist in this particular piece. Becomes more Marxist, I think, over time.
1:10 Mark: So I felt, you know, this is just one essay. It's only 24 pages. So let's. We're going to. We're going to take session here to go through this. It's pretty weird. It's difficult. So I think there's plenty for us to talk about. But then we could maybe in the second half of the discussion, since we had the interview with Judith Butler, and now we'll have this essay in front of us. Can we connect the dots? What do you guys think? What do you want to get out of today?
1:34 Wes: She has an interpretation of Benjamin. I don't know if it's her own. I've seen it elsewhere and maybe people have just borrowed it from her or she's borrowing it from somewhere else. So I think it's a sort of a. It's a thing. But to interpret Benjamin's critique of violence in a way that it is a good grounding for some forms of nonviolence and not just an argument for anarchism, for anarchy as it seems to be on its face. It seems to be a sort of anarchist manifesto. But Butler is going to do something else with it. So I think, yeah, I mean, Mark, your plan is good. We can see if we can figure out what Benjamin is saying and Then see what in the second part of the sea, how Butler makes use of him.
2:18 Mark: What'd you think of this, Seth?
2:20 Seth: It's a challenging read. There's something about the way the language and the way he writes that kind of put me off at first. But when I took a deep breath and I took time to get into it and settle down, I found it to be pretty straightforward, if a little bit repetitive. I didn't take away from it that it was an anarchist manifesto. I understand how that interpretation is warranted, but I felt like it was a little more open ended than that, that he was trying to provide literally, you know, this in the sense in which Butler talked about it at Critique, which is an introduction of a notion of violence that doesn't fit kind of the normal sense of violence as we understand it, that would call into question the way in which we think about it.
And for me, the end of it was a little more open ended. It wasn't a rallying cry for me at first. I was reading it and I was like. But I ended up liking it quite a bit. I think there's a lot there. It's not easy to get through if you don't slow down, though.
3:23 Mark: Yeah, I think one of the initial parts that makes it hard to figure out what the hell he's talking about is just this word critique, which there were a couple essays we'll link folks to that were saying what kind of the German Gewalt. So critique is more like the kind of critique that Kant was doing, that he read a lot of Kant. So it's not necessarily I hate violence. Here's my critique of violence. It's. Let's deconstruct the notion of violence. Let's figure out what its limits are, what, what its applicability is.
3:53 Wes: I mean, he tells us in the first sentence what he's doing, right? He's just trying to figure out the relationship between violence and law and justice. And I think our naive kind of view of that is laws and justice exist to facilitate peace and to punish violence and therefore deter it. And we might even do some social contract theory and think by contrast about a state of nature in which life is nasty, brutish and short. And Benjamin is going to try to get us to confront the fact that what establishes the entire system, a legal system or a system of justice or a state which goes along with it is itself necessarily some act of violence.
But there's a violent element and this. You interpret Gewalt broadly and I think it does have this broad meaning of being not just physical violence or what Butler calls the blow, but it can also be force. It can be structural or systemic violence, I might call it today, but power in general. So that stuff is implicated in law and justice.
5:10 Mark: Right. The translation of Gewalt, which in German carries the multiple meanings of public force, legitimate power, domination, authority, and violence. So this is from Notes on the Thought of Walter Benjamin Critique of Violence by Signe Larsen. It sounds a little less weird if you're saying, like, what is the relationship of violence to law and justice? Like, it might seem like there's no obvious connection, but if you think right in the term Gewalt itself is something that has to do with authority or power, then yeah, okay, that's an obvious
5:40 Seth: question then, okay, the sphere of these issues is defined by the concepts of law and justice. With regard to the first of these laws, it is clear that the most elementary relationship within any legal system is that of ends to means. And further, that violence can first be sought only in the realm of means, not ends.
5:59 Mark: Which does seem a little strange to say it can be sought only there. Why not just say nobody has violence as their ends. It's just that they think that violence is okay if your ends are good.
6:11 Wes: Right? I think that's what he's saying. It's just that if anyone's going to say that violence is necessary or desirable, it's only going to be because it's a means to some other urgent end.
6:23 Seth: I think we should probably be a little more careful about this, that he's saying that within a legal system, there's the only way to judge violence is as a means, not an ends. So he's saying that the legal system will determine whether violence perpetrated is just or unjust only through the end that it accomplishes.
6:47 Mark: Yeah, I mean, what if your end was the orientation of your state was such that you feel like you're constantly threatened by some other nation and genocide is the only option? So then, like a founding principle, your state becomes violence against some particular other. So that's just not even judgeable.
7:06 Wes: Well, that's kind of a interesting example because what occurs between states is in some ways extra legal. And the act of war externally is what establishes the state and the legal system that happens within it. But it's still a state of war outside. It is clear that the most elementary relationship within any legal system is that of ends to means. And further, that violence can first be sought only in the realm of means, not of ends. I mean, I think we take those two claims separately. And he's going to make something of combining them. But why is the elementary relationship with any legal system that of relationship, that of ends to means?
7:46 Seth: Maybe I just took it too much on face value. Let me step back and think about this.
7:50 Wes: I think it's because we ask about. So in the case of rights, for instance, we will say that because people have rights, there are certain actions that you cannot take, matter what your ends, and the state can't take them, and you can't take them personally. And it doesn't matter how urgent those ends are. There are certain means that are simply out of bounds.
8:11 Seth: Certain things that are out of bounds. I took him to be saying that. Well, and he does actually say this right there in that if violence is a means, a criterion for criticizing, it might seem immediately available. But if it's an end, there isn't. What he's saying on my reading is that the act of violence or the perpetration of violence, you cannot judge the act itself. You can only judge the outcome of the act. And if the outcome is judged as being just, then the violence is justified. If you judge the outcome of the act of violence as being unjust, then the violence is considered unjustified.
8:48 Wes: Well, that's not his position. Right. That's sort of a natural law sort of view.
8:53 Seth: I'm not saying it's his view. I'm saying that's what he's saying. The way the structure is set up.
8:57 Wes: Right. There are two different ways of looking at it. There's natural law and there's positive law. And what I said about rights is more of a positive law thing. There are certain things that are out of bounds because people have rights. In other words, there are certain means that are off limits. That's positive law that occurs within the legal system once it's established. Natural law, state of nature stuff. That's where you can conceive of certain ends, including self preservation, for instance, as so urgent that they would warrant violent behavior.
But they are for Benjamin, both. In both of these, you're thinking about violence according to the relationship between means and ends. And ultimately he's going to want to move us beyond that. This is what he will come to find that he calls mythical violence. Get to that. But I think right now he's setting up the way that violence is normally evaluated and its relationship to the law according to the relationship between means and ends. But ultimately he's going to want to move us beyond that.
9:59 Mark: Yeah. One of the things that makes it difficult to. Even the very first Sentence its relationship to law and justice. Are we talking about positive law? Are we talking, in other words, laws that are actually passed by a legislature. I had to look this up that that's what positive law means, as opposed to natural law, which is. Which is a philosophically thorny idea, but the idea that there is right and wrong written into nature. And so if you hold a positive law view, then that's a frame for evaluating. You're saying. And this is. I think Hobbes actually fits into both these categories from a positive view.
I believe it was. He didn't believe that there was any sense in talking about ethics, that he was sort of like Thrasymachus in the republic, that justice is determined by the strong. So that it's. When you have a state, then the leaders of that state, whatever the mechanism is, sets up what ethics is. And so of course then there is no way to evaluate the justice of the laws themselves, except perhaps by reference to other laws. Maybe you could want the state to be consistent, but that would be it. Whereas natural law at least gives the idea that there be some prior way of judging things.
Right. There's some laws maybe that God wrote into nature or that are teleological means of evaluation or something.
11:21 Wes: What he says about natural law at the bottom of the page, it perceives in the use of violent means to just ends no greater problem than a man sees in his right to move his body in the direction of a desired goal. So yeah, what I took from natural law was just the idea that you could justify violence given the right sort of end.
11:42 Mark: I guess I was still interpreting his take on natural law here as a purely Hobbesian one.
11:46 Wes: Yeah, that's what I'm saying though in the Hobbesian state of nature, you're in it for yourself. There's no external legal system. And your ends, including self preservation or really in its state of nature, whatever else you want will justify violence. But within a system of positive law, you don't get to justify what you do in terms of. Well, I had this very important end. You have to actually obey the law. Your means are directly regulated.
12:18 Mark: If I remember correctly, Hobbes actually still had an exception. That you have this personal right of self defense that even in a state, you know, when the government comes to kill you, it is within your right.
12:32 Seth: Yeah.
12:33 Mark: In kind of an ambiguous way. It's the same right that you had in the state of nature. You gave up most of your right, but your right to defend yourself if the government is about to kill you is Inalienable. You just can't give that up.
12:46 Seth: What relevance does that have to this natural right of self defense?
12:51 Wes: Well, we're trying to explain the difference between natural law and positive law.
12:55 Seth: Hmm. Okay.
12:57 Wes: So this thesis of natural law that regards violence as a natural datum is diametrically opposed to that of positive law, which sees violence as a product of history. If natural law can judge all existing law only in criticizing its ends, so positive law can judge all evolving law only in criticizing its means. If justice is the criterion of ends, legality is that of means.
13:22 Mark: So that's a pretty mysterious passage I found.
13:27 Wes: Yeah. And I mean, I think it really comes down to this whole means ends thing is about within the legal system. I think I'd just be restating what I'd said. But within a actual legal system, then where you have positive laws, then the means are the thing that are directly regulated. And you're not saying, oh, what I did was just because I had such and such ends and so on. You wouldn't justify things in that way. It's just what you were doing legal,
14:00 Mark: which in my question. Right. I mean, is that really how all law is enacted? Aren't there mitigating circumstances? It seems like motive matters quite a bit. I thought maybe in fact, besides just self defense there could be sort of exaggerated. You know, I thought I was in danger, like the stand your ground kind of thing.
14:22 Wes: Yeah. And I think that when you talk about legality, though, you're including all that stuff does get pulled into it. But I think we're ultimately, we're going to be thinking about larger issues. Right. Like revolution. So we're thinking about, well, what if there's such great injustice that I have to break a few eggs to make an omelet? Right. The people who are going to get hurt aren't necessarily someone who's directly trying to kill me or it's not self defense in some direct way, but there's an injustice that can only be rectified by violence.
And that means some innocent people are going to get hurt, there's going to be collateral damage. I think that's the kind of situation that's politically relevant here. And the conservative person within the legal system would judge, the revolutionary would just say, that's murder, that's going to destroy the state, that's unlawful. And if you're in the natural justice frame of mind, you're saying, no, we have the right to do this in order to fight injustice.
15:19 Mark: Yeah. Thinking of this in terms of Hobbes and even Locke, that They regard violence as a natural datum. Right? He also brings in Darwin here. Benjamin mentions Darwin.
15:28 Seth: Right.
15:29 Wes: State of nature.
15:30 Mark: And it says natural law can judge all existing law. Existing law there has to mean not natural law, but positive law, right? The law is passed by legislature because natural law is not judging itself.
15:42 Wes: I think you're right.
15:43 Mark: If natural law can judge all existing law only in criticizing its ends, that sounds like, you know, why am I bothering to obey the law? Well, because of this social contract. Because I have this natural right to defend myself. And it is in my interest to give up directly acting on that in all circumstances because I'm getting this longer term benefit of the protection of society. But it really comes down still to my asserting my self interest. So that again, as Hobbes says, if the government actually comes to me, well, that, that seems like despite what Socrates might say in the Crito, like, ah, I said yes to this society, I signed on, they're going to kill me, so I have to go along with it.
But Hobbes is going to say no, that's inalienable. You have to judge the law based on what end it is pursuing. Is its end in accord with the ultimate reason I'm in this in the first place. Whereas positive law can judge evolving law only in criticizing its means. We've all already said that, right? Positive law can't actually evaluate itself. It can only evaluate its means. That's different than evaluating people's intentions in obeying or not obeying the law. Right. Its means has to be internal legal deliberations.
17:06 Wes: Its meaning, violence is. Its is, I think, referring back to the ends of violence. So if natural law can judge all existing law only in criticizing, okay, yeah, it obviously refers to law, but isn't
17:22 Mark: part of the issue with law that it always requires phronesis? In other words, positive law, it always requires practical wisdom to interpret.
17:31 Seth: Right.
17:31 Mark: The laws on the books are not going to precisely describe the situation that every individual is in. And so even in the most obvious cases, there's some judgment. In other words, there's some means that one has to apply to get from individual action to accordance with the law.
17:52 Seth: Right.
17:52 Mark: And that might mean how the police play a pretty important role in this essay that we're going to say, you know, we want there to be quiet streets. What are the means that we can bring about that? And there might be internal deliberations within the state for how aggressive can the police be in beating people up so they'll be quiet? Or is it merely fines? Is that the kind of thing that we think that would be the law criticizing its means.
18:19 Wes: No, no, I just think it's criticizing means. Means regulating behaviors. So, for instance, so he says, if justice is the criterion of ends, legality is that of means. So I go into a bank and I rob it, and someone says, hey, what you're doing is illegal. And I say, no, I am fighting an unjust capitalist system. So from a state of nature standpoint, I could be right. It could be that I'm, hey, this is an unjust capitalist system and this is an act of rebellion against it. That justifies my means. The means that I'm using, the robbing of the bank. But from within the system itself, the criterion is just the means, which you did. You can't do that. That's against the law.
19:07 Seth: Yeah. The criterion is that stealing is defined as unjust, and so stealing is illegal. That's the point he's trying to make within the perspective of at least the natural law interpretation of the legal system, is that the end stealing is defined as unjust, therefore stealing is illegal. And I think what he's trying to say is positive law kind of comes at it from the other way, where they say stealing is not sanctified, it's not permitted because of the historical development of the law, blah, blah, blah. Therefore this act of theft is illegal.
19:44 Mark: Prohibited, yes.
19:46 Seth: Prohibited, yes. Not unjust. It's not a question of justice. It's a question of is the act of violence prohibited or not, sanctioned or not, based on the historical development of
19:57 Mark: the law, which maybe these are artificial extremes that that's how laws change within societies, is somebody says, you know, that law is not really just whether justice really is something pre discursive, something that existed before any law was ever passed. Like that's at least the rhetoric that we use. Right. So law thinks it can evaluate itself.
20:20 Seth: Yeah. I don't know that we should get too hung up on. I think the point he's trying to make, whether you go all the way with his characterization of natural law and positive law, is he's trying to say that the discourse around law, justice and violence is a discourse that revolves around ends and means. You're either trying to make a judgment about what already happened, the violence that was perpetrated in terms of the ends, or you're looking at it from the other direction and you're judging it against some kind of historical development that puts it into the framework. But he's trying to say that as long as you're interpreting violence from within the legal system, you're going to get caught up in one of these two dynamics and maybe both at the same time.
21:03 Wes: Yeah, I mean, ultimately this is going to be important. Right. Because he's going to be giving us a version of revolution which supposedly will transcend this means ends dynamic. We're not going to be on the side of the anti revolutionary, the reactionary, saying no, this is against the law and they simply have the right to suppress. Nor are we going to be taking the line that more specifically, hey, these workers conditions are terrible and therefore we have the right to be on strike. Until you fix that, this is going to be at the level of a kind of violence that will do away with the whole concept of law.
21:43 Mark: Exactly. That's what an anarchist revolution would be. Gets rid of the concept of law. And the way that one of the secondary sources put that in terms of Kant's free play. Right. Our Kant aesthetics episode that there's the idea of. Because it seems weird to say it's, you know, something is a pure means because like that.
22:03 Wes: Right.
22:04 Mark: It doesn't make any sense. Like a means is only a means with regard to an end. But we had that image that was restricted in Kant to just talking about aesthetic appreciation where you're playing with the logic of means and ends. It's weird.
22:21 Wes: Yeah.
22:22 Mark: Here's a point earlier on that this is on 280, I think so he talks about how a legal system tries to erect in all areas where individual ends could be usefully pursued by violence. Legal ends that can only be realized by. By legal power. In other words, like what do people actually want to do? You know, they want to eat, they want to have stuff. So if we didn't have a society, then you would just maybe go and take that stuff and eat it. But that would be chaos. You know, we need to have a well ordered, different people's interests regulated against each other.
And so we create the idea of private property. And so the society is creating, according to this account, I think, like the means, the economic system, you know, you can work, you can earn that through a wage. I don't know. What do you think of that? Just as a description of some way that a system of laws attempts to retain its monopoly on violence. Right. Because if you just made it so, well, the rich people have all the money. If you're poor, too bad, then there's going to be a revolution. You can't do that.
23:33 Seth: He makes this point a little bit later. But the monopoly of violence, the legal system must have a monopoly on violence for the sake of its own Preservation. So, you know, he says a little bit later on that the reason why it's not okay for individuals to take violence into their own hands and inside of a formal legal system is not because they might do something unjust, but rather because it's a threat to the monopolistic power of the legal system itself. Like, once you set up a legal system, then the things that the legal system defines as permitted or as just are just those things.
And anybody who perpetrates violence, violence is an assertion of a judgment about justice. If you're an individual or an anarchist or a revolutionary group, and you state a claim through a violent act, you're essentially threatening the legitimacy of the legal system itself. You're not appending some kind of additional legal judgment to the framework. You know, you're not extra legal. And you're saying, like, oh, okay, well, we should add this thing. I think you should take this into consideration. Just. I'm judging in this case, it's not covered by law, but I'm judging that this is the right thing to do.
The law cannot permit you to exercise that kind of judgment.
24:58 Wes: Maybe this gets us into the whole lawmaking law preserving distinction and the ways in which the police action can kind of incorporate both of those.
25:07 Seth: So the transition there to what you just said, Wes, is that the upshot of the monopoly over violence that law has is that there can't be any extra legal force. That's not considered violence against the state. That's the transition that he needs to make right here. So he talks about. Take, for example, the worker strike. If you conceive of it by itself, right. Then you could think of it as an omission. So instead of working, I'm just not working. It's not violent. It's just an abstention or an omission. But what Benjamin is saying is that from the perspective of the state, from the perspective of law, it's necessarily violent. There's no interpretation that takes it as a nonviolent omission. Anything that contravenes the legal order will necessarily be defined as violent. And the wrong kind of violent, unjust violence against the legal system or against the system, it's extortion.
26:12 Mark: He mentions a doctor strike in particular. That you can see how even though they're not doing anything violent, but by their omission, by their forcing you to do something to pay them more or whatever their demands are, then bad things are directly going to happen to a lot of patients, presumably innocent people. And so it's just if you've got A worker strike with buses or especially if it's like it's not just one office that is wanting to improve their wages. And so they are. Yeah. What'd you guys make of all this strike talk? Because it seemed like, are they gonna be violent against scabs or not?
Like, it seemed to come down for me to something like that. Like if they really are just stopping work and there are other ways, like we're depriving you of our expertise, but you could at least get by by getting somebody else in. You might still want to go along with our demands by recognizing our value as opposed to, you know, we're going to physically make a barrier here. And if you come against this barrier, you know, if scabs try to get in the factory, we're going to beat the hell out of them. Like, that's obviously violent.
27:16 Seth: So what I took away from it, Mark, was that he's talking about a. It's a power dynamic, but it's a rhetorical structure as well. So I'm the state and I say you're a doctor and you think the working conditions or the regulations or the way that we treat doctors in our nationalized, socialized system of medicine is unjust as the state. What I say is, okay, well, we have mechanisms for you to place complaints, you know, go through your superior and write a letter. And we study that. We have mechanisms for juridical law abiding methods for complaint and protest, and you should avail yourself of those.
And you say those aren't working, or they're insufficient, or, you know, you're making some kind of a call about why those mechanisms, maybe you've tried them and they just haven't worked. So you're going to take this action of, of a strike, not a general strike or a general revolutionary strike. I got a little confused about those things. But you're saying basically what we can't accomplish, what we want to accomplish through the means that you provide us that you think are acceptable, so we're going to adopt some means that are not acceptable to you.
And what he's saying is, from the perspective of the law of the state, there's no way to interpret that other than as violent. And because the state's position is there is a mechanism and you're not using it, and your perspective is that mechanism doesn't work for me, that you essentially threatening the legal order, you're threatening the establishment by virtue of doing this. And there's no other option for the state other than to recognize it as a violent act. Against the state and then respond accordingly by sending in the thugs or bringing in scabs or whatever the case may be.
29:14 Mark: I know the way that Butler interpreted this is that we are getting to the notion that there can be overtly nonviolent acts. Right. Standing in a row, you know, it does not involve a blow. But yet according to the frame of that society, as you were just saying, Seth, since it's sort of performing extortion on society, then it is exerting a power that is supposed to be monopolized by the government. So the government then will call it violent. Right. Whether any blows are being struck or not, even if no potential blows are being struck. And this is supposed to show that violence is relative to a frame, that it is socially constructed in some way.
Benjamin doesn't talk about. I don't think, you know, what I was just saying about what if the rich people just have all the resources and. And they provide no legal way for the poor people to get any of those resources. And so they, you know, that seems like the rich people are then committing, certainly, according to Butler's analysis, committing a violence, even if they never raise a blow, even if they're merely defending themselves, keeping to themselves or, you know, she's going to use the same thing for what's going on, like guarding borders.
There were some very intense protests at the walls around Israel. We need to have a perimeter around this wall. If you walk into this perimeter, we're going to shoot you. People were doing that. And so Israel was defending itself. You know, this is exactly the kind of thing, the reason that Butler is raising this by saying, obviously, even though according to Israel's definition, walking in that area that they said was off limits constitutes a violent act, it seems like that she was saying like, maybe we should use the common sense version of violence, that it involves a blow.
But certainly it's going to be more confusing than that because of the other example that I gave about keeping the poor from adequate support. So did you see any of this in Benjamin, is what I'm saying? Is this why he's talking about this?
31:20 Wes: That's kind of at the end, right?
31:22 Mark: Is it?
31:23 Wes: You talk about divine violence and all that.
31:26 Mark: No, but right here at the beginning, we're saying that by contrasting how violence would be judged according to a natural law view or a positive law view, then we're saying that violence is somehow relative to what view you take of it. Right. And presumably within different societies. Seth was just saying, you know, if anything that threatens the society itself is going to be deemed violent, then those are going to be different actions, right? It's going to be relative to what society you are. So that sense, the specificity of what counts as violent, since there's no objective, the blow that you could point to, it's going to be relative to society. It's going to be socially constructed.
32:07 Seth: That's, I think, implicit in the. The idea that you have to look to the means and the ends. You know, it's not just socially constructed, it's particular. He mentions this later in the essay. Each individual situation has its own justification for the violence or not. It's not even a general rule.
32:30 Mark: Law.
32:31 Seth: Law might be considered to be general or blanket, but the application of law is in every case an individual particular instance. So, yes, it's socially constructed, as you're saying. I would say not socially constructed so much as it's socially defined or it's contingent. I think he uses that word somewhere here in the essay, that the means can be contingent. What that's essentially what you're saying is that law is contingent because it's relative to the particular society itself and not some kind of absolute mandate. So he moves into this is, I guess, one of the famous distinctions that comes out of this papers.
He talks about a paradigmatic form of violence, military violence, the exercise of military power to. To take over land, for example, or establish rule in a particular place. And what he says, we can go into a little more detail, but essentially that military violence is sanctified after the fact through a pact or through. He says, ironically, that peace ceremony or peace agreement is kind of like a sanctification of violence in the sense that it creates a new law. And so violence in that particular instance, like you go to war and you win and you redraw the boundaries of your country and you say, okay, now Alsace Lorraine belongs to me instead of to you.
And that gets written down in an agreement. And what you've just witnessed is a validation of the previous act of violence by virtue of the establishment, by virtue of this agreement and the simultaneously founding of a new law. And so this is what he calls law making violence, that there's violence, that by virtue of what it accomplishes, or in virtue of what it accomplishes, establishes new laws. And that this is ultimately the threat that we talked about earlier of the individuals having committing violence, is that if the state doesn't have a monopoly on violence, then it's possible that somebody else can perpetrate violence and establish a new law.
And so it's kind of a little bit tautological but the idea is that the legal system has a monopoly on violence in order to preserve its monopoly on establishing law, since law is established through violence.
35:02 Wes: All right, I'm just trying to distinguish in my head the lawmaking from the law preserving part of what you were saying.
35:08 Seth: I was just focusing on lawmaking.
35:10 Wes: There's a paradox, which is that however much our laws are designed to prevent violence or to help us live peacefully with one another, the act of establishing the state, establishing a system of laws, is inherently violent. So that's the law making portion of that. And then the ways in which our institutions end up preserving the law through punishments and things like that. I guess let's start with the. To elaborate on what Seth was saying. I think it's important to dwell on the paradoxical fact that all these laws are a manifestation of their violent origin. Right. The state is imposed violently. Tell people, if you don't behave, bad things are going to happen to you. That's the way it all works.
36:03 Mark: So this distinction between the law making and the law preserving. So I guess Derrida wrote an essay about this essay, which we did not read the Derrida essay. It was longer than this essay and it was Derrida. So it seems like it'd be punishing. But at least one of the secondary sources that we looked at mentions Derrida. He says that Derrida sees that these oppositions that Benjamin sets out in this essay deconstruct themselves. And so this is the clearest case of that, that it seems like law making and law preserving are different things. Right.
The legislature is the one who makes the laws, and then the police are the one who preserves the laws. But because of that whole inapplicability thing that Seth, you just described, where the law is not going to be determinate on exactly how to resolve any given case, exactly what the police should do. So the police are always using their own judgment and in effect remaking the law. Right. At the very least, the reinforcing is a replay of that original founding action. Right. The founding action was not when the legislature came to an agreement.
It was through some military thing that's set up. Right. It's not the Constitutional Congress, it's the end of the Revolutionary War. It's when they beat somebody and establish themselves as a state. And thereby, if you are a British loving person living in the colonies, well, you better freaking go back to Britain or else you are going to. Now, whatever those laws are going to be, you're going to obey the local laws now and not the British laws. And so when the police then enforce that, they're replaying that same. It sort of de. Emphasizes the work of the legislature, I think.
Yeah, like is the work of the legislature, maybe you could interpret then as reinforcing. Right. Because they're actually working out that the end of the society is this society will survive.
38:04 Seth: Right.
38:04 Mark: The end of the society is always itself and it's driven, founded on violence, according to Benjamin. And how that actually gets enacted like the means, that seems to be what the legislature is working out, that, hey, if we allow murder, the state is going to collapse. Right. It's not that we just hate murder in itself because we're taking a positive law view that this might be too extreme. Again, that, you know, murder is only bad because we say it is. But the main reason I think that he might say that they determine what sorts of killings constitute murder, which ones are bad is which ones are going to undermine the state itself. So that in passing any law, even one that seems like it obviously reflects a natural moral prohibition, we just want to enshrine that natural sentiment that we all have, that divine commandment against murder. But no.
38:57 Wes: So each of these different layers can be reflected in the same law. Right. So a law against murder might reflect the idea that, hey, people ought not to be murdered and everyone has the right not to be murdered. Or it might reflect the idea that in the best society, so instead of a deontological perspective, you might get a utilitarian one. In the best society, we don't allow murder. Things would not work if we allowed murder. Beyond that, I think what Benjamin would say is that law against murder and the enforcement of it, above and beyond those sorts of focus on the ends and the means that Mark, as you put it, it's a recapitulation of the violent establishment of the state.
So the enforcement of that law is a way of signifying to everyone that, hey, the state exists and you are subordinate to it, and that the state has the monopoly on violence and that the state is the one with the power and you aren't. And all those things can also be signified by the enforcement of a law against murder. Does that make sense? Sure. So in one sense it's about murder is wrong. But it's also very thrasymachean. It's a display of power. And it says, we the state are the one with the power. And the laws and their enforcement are a way of expressing that primordial state making law, making violence.
So there's always the danger that that becomes the principal rationale. So you pretend that your good laws become pretexts for oppression, Right? So I want to prevent murder. So I institute some draconian system of monitoring a populace too closely or harassing them. And the point, really, in many situations, and you see it in interactions with police in a populace, it seems like the rationalization is that they're there to uphold the law in some sense to ensure order and that bad things don't happen, but it becomes merely an expression of power.
So the personal power of the policeman who happens to be doing whatever they're doing, and then their identification with the power of the state and their enforcement of the power of the state as such. So it can just be power. And we saw this in Orwell's 1984, where you get. At some point, it just becomes power for power's sake. And I think that the critique here says that in all cases that there's at least a little bit of power for power's sake going on in all of this.
41:40 Mark: And if you want to confirm that police have the power and you don't just go and give the finger to your nearest police officer and see how that works out for you, they will
41:49 Wes: say, I support your right to free speech.
Todd May would be an interesting guest along these lines
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/todd-may-the-political-philosophy-of-poststructuralist-anarchism
I was assigned this reading for a college class and it really stumped me. Thank you guys for your analysis.
I keep thinking of Simone Weil’s essay: Iliad or the Poem of Force. In your critique of Benjamin’s critique I keep thinking how elastic the definition of violence is. And wonder if force is not an illuminating substitute for violence when reifying ‘violence’ for examination.
The crux of her essay for all those that haven’t wikied it (like what I have done) is that force turns the victim into a thing and furthermore turns it’s possessor into a thing.
Do all forms of violence dehumanise, de animate?
Last thing about Walter Benjamin, who I got to know through Stuart Jeffries excellent book The Grand Hotel Abyss, about the Frankfurt school and the birth of critical (political) theory, is that WB carried a mono print of Paul Klee’s Angel of Time because it represents the present facing our past as we face our immediate future being blown forward into it by the force of our violent past. There is no Hegelian progress in society. To make that image clearer WB famously wrote “every monument to civilisation is a monument to barbarism” . I think he means Society doesn’t change, societies violence doesn’t change, it all just recycles.