Design Observer :: Join the Discussion http://places.designobserver.com/feature/los-angeles-after-the-1992-riots/33178/ en-us Design Observer Group 2012-05-10T22:52:11-05:00 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0
I would argue that in countries like Australia, the US and England, you have a situation where violence is so ingrained in the way societies are structured that many forms of it are naturalised and misrecognised (boss/employee, gentrification, prisons, patriarchy, colonisation). Within these societies you have a large and generally compliant middle-class who avoid the experience of force, while marginalised groups of people such as the long term unemployed, mentally ill, homeless etc experience a much higher level of explicit state control, surveillance, harassment and coercion. E.g. In 2008 Aboriginal people represent only 2.3% of the total population, yet over 14% of Australia's prison population are Aboriginal people.

Because there are different experiences of violence, and because I would argue that all violence is political, I would not automatically judge an act of non-state violence as morally or tactically wrong. In some cases it definitely is, but in others, such as the struggle for autonomy by the Zapatistas or in Exarcheia in Greece, I think the violence is arguably justified (if still horrific and tragic).

Benjamin's characterised divine violence as a violent event that ends mythic or systematic violence. I agree that replacing the actors in a position of power is insufficient to ending this kind of violence (eg Egypt), but that's not what something like a general strike, Benjamin's example of divine violence, would necessarily aim to do. Rather, a general strike as I understand it is about workers taking control of their work as workers, that is, not as a means to replace bosses, police, politicians etc. It is not the kind of movement that aims to replace individuals within chain of command but to forcefully flatten, thereby changing, the institution of work itself.

The value I see in thinking through something like a general strike is to recognise that our power to take action against violence is not limited to voting, or lobbying etc within a controlled system of representative democracy. We can be much more powerful, and much more democratic, when we organise ourselves to take collective action.]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/los-angeles-after-the-1992-riots/33178/#comments 2012-05-10T22:52:11-05:00 are you advocating the use of Divine Violence as a means of usurping (admittedly inefficient) institutions of authority, i.e., revolution? I think we have enough historical precedence to indicate that revamping the gameboard and replacing new actors simply creates a veneer over a system. This is because (political) institutions are inspired by culture/values, and evolve over time.

IMHO, The problem is not the Institution and its Values, it's the change in stakeholders or the inefficient application of values.

How about the notion of Pervasive Pacifism, the kind of civil "violence" that has its roots in civil disobedience in that it does not reject the system, but it rejects the inefficiencies, hypocrisy and contradictions. Typically, the reaction to Civil Disobedience is that the "establishment" attempts to integrate agents of Civil Disobedience into itself to keep the frog oblivious. Unfortunately, these "double agents" draw on their own values/perspective to function like an antidote and readapt the system over time....

I believe it's asking a lot of the general population to suspend inculcated beliefs and habits in support of Divine Violence against specific events. The jury is still out on the Occupy movement, but the criticism doesn't seem to be about its attempts at Divine Violence as much as the perceived inability to promote structural/sustainable change inspired by culture & values.]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/los-angeles-after-the-1992-riots/33178/#comments 2012-05-01T14:49:54-05:00
No not really. If establishment leaders survive 'unrest' what they generally learn is new ways to prevent, control, suppress and/or manage dissent, i.e. keeping the frog oblivious. To carry on with the distinction between subjective and objective violence, what leaders fail to do is address the objective (systemic) violence of a situation. In this sense the issue is not solved simply because one group of people in a region is pacified. The general violence of the system still exists, but the subjective manifestations may shift to a place outside of our (media controlled) perception.

This is why Walter Benjamin argued for value of 'divine' violence, an organised act of resistance such as a general strike that had the power to overthrow the system that perpetuated 'mythic' (~objective) violence.

Therefore I would argue that there is probably more value in having the general population learn how to use (divine) violence against the establishment rather than having leaders learn new ways of maintaining their control. ]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/los-angeles-after-the-1992-riots/33178/#comments 2012-04-26T07:18:38-05:00
Love these thoughts!

May I add that this crest of objective violence tracks a straight line from the Watts Unrest of 1965... Basically, a very simple question was being asked: "is your life better now?" "what has really changed?"

These questions are still being asked, as the essay above indicates, but I'm happily confident that civil unrest is less likely to erupt over a single incident.

I think the value of understanding the boiling pot/objective violence has not be lost on leaders in Paris and London; they've been taking notes! Sound like good news, doesn't it?

http://www.educationbusinessuk.net/features/133/2745-redefining-the-role-of-design]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/los-angeles-after-the-1992-riots/33178/#comments 2012-04-24T15:34:30-05:00
Objective violence on the other hand is the violence that exist within a social system itself, as a feature of its very founding and operation. Objective violence is the violence that produces our sense of what is normal, as this is conditioned by capitalism, unsustainability, the state etc.

The argument extents into a question of liberal bias vis a vis violence. It is easy to perceive and be offended by subjective violence. However, like a frog in water slowly coming to the boil, we find it impossible to perceive objective violence directly because this violence is the condition of our everyday experience. As such the forces of objective violence (police, prisons, economic policy) will often be called in to address instances of subjective violence, instances that may very well derive from the ordinary function of objective violence (unemployment, ghettoisation, forced migration etc).

In being referred to as a solution to the problems it creates, objective violence continues to refine its functioning. In this sense we get a more popularly tolerable form of 'democratic' policing rather than fascist beatings (the common denominator being social control), hardline crackdowns on criminals (feeding the prison industrial complex) and business or property investment opportunities (gentrification). In this way the subjective violence produced by the objective conditions is either redirected, hidden, shifted or translated into something more controllable (NB the function of design here in terms of visual and spatial politics) - the emphasis being on managing the movement of social antagonisms rather than resolving them. So while subjective violence needs to be managed so that objective violence can continue, objective violence can use subjective violence to refine its own functioning.

From this we can recognise that the riot was a terrible event but we should not lose sight of the conditions that created the event and the response to it, which, in the end, followed the same logic of managing antagonisms rather than resolving them. We can note here that the problem is not just one of black oppression specifically (i.e. we don't get out of this by pointing to a growing black middle class), but rather it is in the way conditions produce and make use of class and racial oppression generally.

Therefore, if there is a violence here to be outraged by, it is as much in the fetishisation of the riot, an effect that precludes the kind of systematic analysis that registers objective violence, than in the riot itself (granted of course that it was violent).]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/los-angeles-after-the-1992-riots/33178/#comments 2012-04-21T00:11:24-05:00
Words DO matter. One should recognize the outrageous violence associated with this event. It was unquestionably a riot, and the author of the piece is to be applauded for not trotting out the soft sell.

One also wonders if those who advocate terms such as "civil unrest or protests" in the light of such carnage also refer to, say, the equally despicable East St. Louis Riots of 1917 as a Civil Unrest? Perhaps the 40 - 200 victims of that rampage had fallen to a Civil Protest?
]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/los-angeles-after-the-1992-riots/33178/#comments 2012-04-20T09:36:15-05:00
Fyi, most residents of South LA prefer to refer to events as the 1992 Civil Unrest or Protests, since "riot" implies a pre-mediated attack by anarchists/anti-social elements. Sorry for the semantics lesson, but words/perception do matter...]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/los-angeles-after-the-1992-riots/33178/#comments 2012-04-19T14:07:29-05:00