Locating Violence within the Social Order

January 8th, 2008 Posted in Violence

I do not have a general theory of violence. I do not have a model of the social dynamic of violent action in its several settings. The unity is in the definition only–all actions with a probability of physical and/or psychological injury as outcome.

I am looking for ways to divide the subject (the incidents and moments of violence) that might lead to descriptions of patterned social orders.

1) We have to start by noting that the legal system of rules contains a practical sociology of violence which describes prohibited acts and defines their relative seriousness by punishment–imprisonment, probation, fine, public service, medical and psychological treatment and such. All violent acts take place within the context of a particular system of law and an associated probability of police and judicial response. Law is a practical sociology in place which any analytical sociology must acknowledge and consider. A lot of violence is formally prohibited. The operators of the legal system are required on occasion to use force in insuring the equitable application of the code.

2) Violence also has a cultural side that is partly reflected in law and in religious and ethical texts and preachings, and it is the inheritance of us all in the values of our civilization. In actual operation this cultural line is expressed as a tendency, a probability. Culture is both gross (vulgar) and subtle, but beside prohibition of certain violent acts against certain categories of others it may also encourage, demand, and direct violence against the other.

3) Technology plays a critical role in violence. It is the means to the destructive effect and the tactics used and the possibilities for defense adjust to instrumentation.

4) Violent actions and events might have a patterned form that leads to classes of similar cases. Or there might be a key that distinguishes particular events. For example we can speculate that the slap fits in with other minor acts like a light punch on the arm, a tap on the wrist, a pinch–suggestions of the possibility of greater violence, a playfulness with a dark tinge. We could aggregate cases with this key and attempt to describe its various permutations and outcomes. This way encourages us to seek out and bring together patterns from different settings. Another example the relationship of the hunter and his prey or victim. Here we would bring together the Eskimo stalking his seal, the big game hunting tourist on African safari (Teddy Roosevelt’s experience is a good example and Hemingway’s short story of the hunter in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”), the deer hunter in season and the criminal hit man and the assassin oriented against a targeted person. It is a class based on form yielding comparisons of cases from wildly different contexts.

5) Another approach: start with context and examine the variety of violent actions that can occur within it. One type is essentially non-violent social settings and institutions where violence has no established place–family and kin, sports, commercial establishments, factories, social parties, restaurants and bars, legislative bodies, entertainments, schools and class rooms, etcetera. All of these settings work best without violence but violence (usually unexpected) can occur within any of them. As we proceed we find that these incidents can have well-known identifying names, can already be a recognized form of violence. They reside within our cultural understanding. The preferred analysis here is to find the connection between violence and its non-violent context. The meaning flows back and forth between the setting and the act.

6) There is another sector of social settings and institutions that have violence as an essential element either as a product or as built into the order itself. The violent form may have a history and we may have some access to its development. Where it may have started, the choices that were made in its construction, the forms that might have come out of the same root. If we can argue source and process we can have hope of insight, though as usual there is the possibility of error in fact or in implied connection. There may be possible linkages of different classes of events by identification of a shared evolutionary moment. For example there has been an historic movement against wanton cruelty that has driven such sports as cock fighting and bear baiting toward extinction in the Western World. It might be linked to greater emphasis on management of danger in industry and sport; to a rejection of state executions as an acceptable punishment. It spills over, I suspect, to animal rights, rejection of torturing of prisoners and such. Even rules of war fit here. A particular movement in cultural value has an anti-violence form or, over time, at least affects the amount and type of socially acceptable violent action in a variety of fields.

7) There are social sectors and institutions dedicated to the production of violence or that pose the constant threat of violence. This includes the preparation and readiness for violence. Violence is in itself the positive social value that is maintained and promulgated by the dominant social order or by isolated elements of order. This is critical to understanding for it leads us away from moral and aesthetic limits toward the ordinariness of violence. Think of this as the banality of violence.

The individual case. We can isolate, never fully but to an approximation, the concrete case and study it in detail. This is usually the province of the historian and the journalist. The description invokes conceptions current among the actors themselves. It usually implies the abstract class to which it might belong, based on the common experience. The sociologist’s contribution, besides calling attention to the category, is in finding the patterns not transparent in the ordinary way. The concrete requires the investigation of any and all possibilities or at least the openness to the entire realm of possibility. For example, a gun misfiring, a technical failure, will be at least as significant in understanding an incident as psychological and social patterns. Studies of concrete cases can not be limited to one subject or issue. The action may be a hoax or a fantasy of the supposed victim, the claimed violence might not even exist. In the concrete any and all sectors of knowledge might have a place. Sociology will usually have an active part and may sometime be decisive.

Not complete or rationalized but a series of ways into the topic. Another start.