Resituating "Aggression" and Deflating "Power"
While there remains with respect to violence a strong current of biological determinism in the scientific culture if not in society itself (e.g., Blumstein 2000, Shipman 2001), social science remains largely skeptical if not also critical (e.g., Grossman 1995; Montagu 1968, 1976, 1978; Sampson et al.
1997; Stone and Kelner 2000; Wrangham 1999; Wrangham and Peterson 1996). Even some biological scientists join the social scientists and humanists in distancing aggression or violence from any biological origins (e.g., Lewontin et al. 1984, Ridley 1997). It resolves nothing to attribute “aggression,” let alone “war,” to genes or instincts or biology, especially when we observe such a variety among cultures in the styles of violence, and of its mediation, if it can be detected at all (Levinson 1989). Also among related primate species, violence is not a given in their repertoires of social interaction. If anything, alloprimates appear eager to resolve incidents when they do occur—even “kissing to make up” (Waal 2000, Harcourt and Waal 1992), and the bonobo's peaceability has aroused almost as much attention as its sexuality (Waal 1997).So, at the direct and personal level of violence, if we dismiss any deterministic biological programming, we can proceed to scrutinize sociocultural conditioning, yet leaving room for the operation of uncommon but undeniable biochemical differences between individuals. Some biochemical differences may themselves stem from environmental toxins, such as lead, known to result in impaired attention span, impulsive aggressivity, or relentless violence without regard to outcomes and impervious to feedback. Aside from such unusual cases, humans respond to socialization and enculturation, becoming similar in behavior and belief to the patterns exhibited around them, whether these be deleterious or congenial, and go on to replicate those patterns, irrespective of societal scale (Scheper-Hughes 1987).
These processes of socialization and enculturation actually begin in utero, not long after conception, and do not wait for kindergarten, let alone college. Current attention to honoring cultural, racial, religious, sexual orientation, and individual differential-ablement diversity intends well, but will not suffice to modify deeper structures of difference, and indifference, harboring potential for the violence learned much earlier. First in, last out, seems to be the pattern.Nor is difference, or structures of the “other,” a necessary precondition or predictor of “aggressive” violence. Hardly, when in many if not all societies, direct personal violence is intimate if not actually residing within the home (e.g., infanticide, domestic abuse, child molestation and neglect, and rape; cf. Ronai 1995; Holtzman, chapter VII) or within supposedly nurturing institutions such as schools (cf. McDonald, chapter II). All too easily, structural violence filters down to the local, and cultural responses via regulation may not be effective. Nor can one distinguish the structural from the direct in a way that illuminates the violence at large.
Alongside aggression, another common assumption about the cause or precipitator of violence revolves around power—a term more than a concept, a universal solvent, a formula much used and abused in the social sciences and the media. Most often power has been brought into the discussion of structural violence, but sometimes it figures in theories of direct violence as well. Looking at policing in the U.S., hardly a nurturing institution nowadays, Lutes and Sullivan (chapter XIII) assert that aggression is not violence pure and simple. Perpetrators, victims, and mediating structures such as police all tap into cultural norms, deploying and sidestepping legalities in playing their roles.
It is refreshing to read Hannah Arendt's essays, On Violence (1969), because she takes no prisoners in her deconstruction of a bevy of loose relatives to violence; besides power, she brings up authority, force, strength, and might.
The latter notions tilt strongly toward direct behavioral violence rather than structural violence; they could even be sociocultural refinements of some imagined underlying biological determinants, such as the popular scapegoats of “aggression” and “dominance.” Power, though, is both more general and more interesting as an ingredient in discourse about violence.Arendt asserts that power and violence may overlap but essentially are in complementary distribution, at least in their pure forms (1969/1970/1999: 9-10). Power is tied to ends in dyadic interaction, and must be accepted as legitimate, as such needing no justification. In contrast, violence may be justifiable but will never be legitimate. Arendt understands violence as an instrumental means, often literally employing instruments to magnify human force. More importantly, violence appears where power is uncertain (cf. Hautzinger, chapter VI; Jimeno, chapter XI), meaning that impotence can breed violence—anticipating McLuhan's (1968) observation about vacuums, the absence of feedback. Violence never contributes to power, and in fact tends to destroy whatever power may inhere in the system. Instead, violence can breed further violence in positive feedback loops (Arendt 1969/1970/1999: 10). Arendt also addresses terror, which will enter this epilogue again at a later point.
Many formulations of power emphasize its hegemonic habits of subjugation, for when asymmetric relations are internalized, they become natural, indelible, opaque (Gramsci 1995, Wilden 1987), like culture itself. Given that culture exhibits patterns and continuities (Fox and King 2002), it's not surprising that culture—along with numerous other complex phenomena—falls into a class of anticipatory systems (Rosen 1985). It follows that violence itself, with its patterns and continuities, will likewise be constituted in anticipatory systems—virtually linking self-fulfilling prophecies with closed loops of entailment. Victims lock into self-destructive habits whenever horizons are blocked by the blinders of early enculturation and later addiction; if negative or positive feedback is interpreted as inconsistent or intermittent, addiction is further assured (Bateson 1977).
The roles of media cannot be over-emphasized in this regard. Addressing our collective denial, research regularly revisits the contention that media violence contributes to violent behavior, controlling for the possible attraction of the predisposed perpetrators for violent programming (Grossman and DeGaetano 1999). Once more, TV violence not only engenders violent behavior, but does so in the long term as well as in the short term, looking at eight-year-olds over three years, and again 15 years later (Huesmann et al. 2003).One condition fueling violence is fear (Berry 2001, Foucault 1995: 58; Suu Kyi 1991/1995), or, more pernicious, fear of fear itself. This was touched on in the introduction, as was the psychological phenomenon of intermittent reinforcement. These loops linking anticipatory self-fulfilling prophecy, fear, and intermittent reinforcement point toward an overdetermined system, and by and large overdetermined systems can be diagnosed as pathological (Salthe 1993, Salthe and Anderson 1989).
Another way of broaching such systems is to unpack the very notion of feedback in that intermittent reinforcement. Marshall McLuhan (1968) regarded “violence as a response born out of a ‘lust for compensatory feedback'” (quoted in Ryan 2001: 3). Given such a framework, Gregory Bateson (1972) might consider schizophrenia as an index as well as a type of violence, when it emerges out of inconsistent or absent feedback in social relations, whether or not there be some underlying genetic preconditions. Basically, with legitimate power coursing through the system of relations, based on openness, provisionality, habit, and respect, there will not be violence—or not unless or until there is some cataclysmic revolution contesting such power (Arendt 1969/1970/1999: 11).
Other philosophers of power also dwell on it residing in systems of relations (Foucault 1980, Wilden 1987) which subjugate individuals and collectivities through regularities, habit, self-induced repression, and insecurity via inconsistency. This medley of conditions invites comparison with the features contributing to addiction and domestication that characterized concentration camps (Kotek and Rigoulot 2001, Todorov 1996), as well as media and consumer culture today (Lasn 1999, Lutz and White 2002, Roy 1999).