Violence as Fetish: Geography, Marxism, and Dialectics

Progress in Human Geography http://phg.sagepub.com/ Violence as fetish: Geography, Marxism, and dialectics James Tyner and Joshua Inwood Prog Hum Geogr published online 28 January 2014 DOI: 10.1177/0309132513516177 The online version of this article can be found at: http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/01/27/0309132513516177 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Progress in Human Geography can be found at: Email Alerts: http://phg.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://phg.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> OnlineFirst Version of Record - Jan 28, 2014 What is This? Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 Article Violence as fetish: Geography, Marxism, and dialectics Progress in Human Geography 1–14 ª The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0309132513516177 phg.sagepub.com James Tyner Kent State University, USA Joshua Inwood University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA Abstract The study of violence has increasing academic purchase. However, the academic treatment of violence imparts an ontological status that masks violence from critical scrutiny. We argue for the social sciences to (re)theorize violence and to develop a dialectics of violence. Our purpose is to provide a space for dialogue, to open a broader debate within the social sciences on the theoretical determination of violence. We advocate for a new approach to violence that eschews the development of essentializing typologies or generalized explanations of violence as an epiphenomenon of society. Keywords dialectics, direct violence, Marxism, ontology, structural violence I Introduction Violence, as Blomley (2003: 123) writes, has a geography and for this reason, geography must lie at the center of any discussion of violence (Tyner, 2012: 14). To this end, various scholars have forwarded particular workings of the intersectionality of violence, space, and place – contributing to what may be considered a ‘spatial turn’ in the study of violence (cf. Loyd, 2012; Springer, 2011, 2012; Tyner, 2012; Woon, 2011, 2013; Wright, 2011). Largely missing from these discussions, however, has been a critical engagement with ‘violence’ itself. Although seemingly self-evident, violence is not as it appears. Indeed, we argue that geography – but the social sciences more broadly – have too often fetishized violence, thereby obfuscating the fundamental sociospatial relations and processes that give ‘violence’ its meaning (though see Loyd, 2012; Mitchell, 1996).1 As Harvey (2009: 209) writes, ‘concepts and categories cannot be viewed as having an independent existence, as being universal abstractions true for all time’. He continues: ‘concepts are produced under certain conditions . . . [and] they also have to be seen as producing agents in a social situation’ (p. 298). We contend that violence must be approached from this same vantage point; that violence must be theorized as not having a universal quality – but as being produced by, and producing, sociospatially contingent modes of production. In other words, violence has no material reality. Corresponding author: James Tyner, Department of Geography, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242, USA. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 2 Progress in Human Geography On the surface, such a statement seems either banal and/or counter-intuitive; violence, common sense holds, is self-evident. As Mitchell (1996: 156) writes, ‘violence appears to be a simple concept: it is the act of doing harm, injury, or desecration through physical force’. When a person is beaten, raped, or killed, we know that violence has occurred. We suggest otherwise. Not that these are not violent events but that our assertion of violence is at the level of the abstract. In other words, we all too often acknowledge that violence has occurred; but once established, we quickly move on to other fields to tend. We study the aftermath of violence (Hupy, 2006, 2008; Inwood, 2012; Tyner, 2010), the legal response to violence (Blomley, 2003), crime and the criminalization of violence (Garmany, 2011; Holloway and McNulty, 2003; LeBeau and Leitner, 2011), the fear of violence (Pain, 1991; Sandberg and Tollefsen, 2010; Valentine, 1992), the representation of violence (Gallaher, 2004), the landscapes of violence, and the memorialization of violence (Inwood, 2012; Tyner et al., 2012). However, the act of violence and the social conditions that produce and are produced by violence in the first place becomes a black box, assumed, acknowledged, but rarely theorized in such a way that affords a critical evaluation of its constitution. Such treatments of violence miss the ‘common generative processes and relations’ (Harvey, 1996: 58) that give rise to a multiplicity of violences, both through time and space, and thus fail to link violence in time and space. This is a serious lacuna because it gives the appearance of violence as being natural and aspatial to the human condition – and therefore hiding many other forms of ‘non-physical’ forms of violence. Indeed, in many accounts of violence, it is claimed that humans have always been violent, and that violence is a natural part of human relations (cf. Daly and Wilson, 1988; Smith, 2007; Wrangham and Peterson, 1996). Who among us, for example, has not run into colleagues, family, or friends that dismiss the pervasive and unrelenting violence of modernity as simply a natural fact of life, to be tolerated, ignored, or utilized for their own purposes? While we acknowledge that violence broadly conceived has played a large and direct role in the development of our contemporary societies, we also assert that what counts as violence is intimately associated with the modes of production that both constitute, and are constituted by, society. Likewise, we are concerned that the academic treatment of violence imparts an ontological status that masks our subsequent understanding of, say, the criminalization or memorialization of violence. As Oksala (2012: 4) finds, ‘violence is treated as an extremely wide-ranging term that covers everything from the use of physical force that damages bodies to the forms of semantic exclusion involved in issuing a meaningful sentence’. Consequently we argue that the time has come for the social sciences to (re)theorize violence and specifically to develop a dialectics of violence. Our immediate purpose therefore is to provide a space for dialogue; to open a broader and more sustained debate within geography on the theoretical determination of violence, thereby enriching our understanding of the ‘spatiality of violence’ and the ‘violence of space’. Building on the work of Galtung (1969) and the concepts of structural and direct violence, we advocate for new understandings – not definitions – of violence that eschew the development of trans-sociospatial, essentializing typologies or generalized explanation of violence as an epiphenomenon of society (cf. Cowling, 2008). We do so both to better understand the multifaceted ‘geographies’ of violence (Fluri, 2009; Loyd, 2009; Mitchell, 1996; Tyner, 2009; Wright, 1999, 2001, 2011), but also, we hope, to begin the process that will engender a more peaceful and meaningful human condition (e.g. Inwood and Tyner, 2011; Loyd, 2012; Megoran, 2010, 2011; Mitchell and Heynen, 2009; Ross, 2011). Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 3 Tyner and Inwood II Ontologies and de-naturalized discourses The idea that human aggression (and violence) has a biological and evolutionary basis is long-standing and is an increasingly popular explanation (Ray, 2011: 22). This holds particularly true for studies of murder (cf. Daly and Wilson, 1988; Smith, 2007; Wrangham and Peterson, 1996). Buss (2006), for example, maintains that: we must come to grips with the unpleasant reality that murder has been a remarkably effective solution to many of the challenges we’ve faced in the evolutionary trials of survival and reproductive competition: ascending social hierarchies, creating a reputation that deters encroachers, protecting and keeping our families, escaping from violently abusive relationships, gaining access to new lovers. (Buss, 2005: 230–231) Buss (p. 231) concludes that ‘our moral abhorrence of homicide should not cause us to reject the compelling evidence that a deep psychology of killing has been and is an essential component of human nature’. Such an argument that violence is ubiquitous, natural, and rooted in ‘human biology’ is especially problematic, for it renders geographic variability moot.2 As Ray (2011: 42) contends, ‘to see violence as the product of neural capacity inherited through evolutionary development ignores the social and cultural meanings and significance of violence that expresses complex forms of social organization, power and communication’. Indeed, evolutionary psychological models fail to consider that not all actions that we may now consider ‘violent’ have in fact been considered violent; nor do these models say much about the legal constitution of what counts as both ‘violence’ and ‘crime’. For it is not simply to determine that any action is or is not violent; it is rather a matter of understanding whether such acts are considered justified or legal. Following Knauft (1991) and Ray (2011), it is not possible to draw conclusions about an essential tendency for violence from early human evolution; it is necessary instead to situate our conceptualization of violence both historically and geographically. The argument that violence is ubiquitous is mirrored by another limiting position, namely that ‘violence’ has become an overburdened concept, one that risks being crushed by its own inclusivity and unspecificity. Our concern, and critique, is that scholars have for too long afforded violence an ontological status without critically engaging in the theorization of violence. And similar to ongoing efforts to de-naturalize other seemingly self-evident concepts (i.e. space, ‘race’, sex, and gender) it is necessary to critique our inherited ontology of violence (cf. McIlwaine, 1999, for an extensive overview of typologies of violence). Ontology has two distinct meanings. On the one hand, it refers to the fundamental ‘nature’ of reality – of what exists; and, on the other, it refers to the systematic study of this nature (Oksala, 2012: 34; cf. Castree, 2005). With regards to the first usage, ontology is understood as the sedimented and normally taken-forgranted background of everyday life. It is, in other words, the common world in which we live. Realists, for example, argue that societal conflict is unavoidable; that humans are by nature competitive and aggressive. While these arguments are most apparent in strands of evolutionary psychology – which premises that there is a strong biological component to violence – there are many other epistemological positions that presume that conflict and violence are simply part of human nature. Violence, in short, is given its own material reality: it simply exists. Here, we argue against the existence of a pregiven, pre-discursive reality. What we take as the everyday – including our understanding of the ‘reality’ of violence – is itself the outcome of the political. In other words, as Oksala (2012: 16) writes, the political ‘is not a distinct Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 4 Progress in Human Geography realm of social reality, but its precondition’. She explains that: to be able to argue that entities such as homosexual, delinquent, and pervert are not natural phenomena which human sciences could simply discover, describe, and refer to objectively, but effects of power relations and political struggles, requires a profound denaturalization of ontology: we have to sever any direct, natural, or necessary link between scientific concepts and their referents. (Oksala, 2012: 19) Hence, just as progressive scholars have deconstructed, for example, the ontological status of ‘race’ and ‘sex’ (cf. Kobayashi and Peake, 1994), it is necessary to do likewise for the concept of violence. Reality – or, rather, what we take as reality – is an assemblage of political practices; it is always and already the effect of power relations; or, as Foucault (1979: 194) asserts, ‘Power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals and truth’. Consequently, when we consider the ‘reality’ of violence, of what is counted, classified, and criminalized as violence, we must do so through an understanding of how power and difference are sedimented into society. We counter that violence is not pre-given; violence is neither transhistorical nor transgeographical; it has no pre-social existence but comes into being through political practice. This is not to deny the salience of violence within any given society; nor is this to suggest that violence is merely discursive. The shooting deaths of over 80 people per day in the United States are ample testimony to the materiality of ongoing violence (see also Tyner, 2012). However, we should not conceive of this violence as somehow determinate, as explained by racist ‘cultures of poverty’ theories or simple crime-mapping exercises. Rather, we suggest a dialectic approach to the theorization of violence, an approach that highlights the embedded subjectivities and sociospatial relations and processes that are systemic to any given mode of production. III Towards a dialectics of violence Within geography, our understanding of dialectics is uneven, with multiple and contradictory interpretations (Castree, 1996: 343; see also Doel, 2008). This is partially a result of the fact that Marx never outlined his principles in a systematic and concise way; instead, it has been left to scholars to decipher Marx’s method from his myriad and sometimes contradictory writings (Harvey, 1996). As a consequence, we turn to the work of Ollman (2003) to outline our understanding of dialectics.3 According to Ollman (2003: 12), ‘dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world’. This is counter to more conventional and pervasive epistemologies – of which empiricism is exemplary – that disaggregate the world into discrete and unrelated entities. So conceived, a disaggregated epistemology limits analysis to the surface appearance of objects. Dialectics, conversely, opens space for a deeper and more profound analysis. Reality, from a dialectical vantage point, consists not simply of disparate ‘things’ but rather processes and relations. In other words, reality is more than the epiphenomenon that can be counted, classified, and mapped; it is more than the ‘observation’ that strikes us immediately and directly, which masks the underlying structures and social relations. Dialectics restructures our thinking and our understanding of reality by replacing the commonsense notion of ‘thing’ with notions of ‘process’, ‘relation’, and ‘change’. This allows us to reconsider ‘how something works or happened while simultaneously developing [an] understanding of the system in which things could work or happen in just this way’ (Ollman, 2003: 15). As Harvey (1996: 51) writes, ‘dialectics forces us to ask the question of every ‘thing’ Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 5 Tyner and Inwood or ‘event’ that we encounter: by what process was it constituted and how is it sustained?’ So how might a dialectical approach to violence proceed? Consider the following situations:   Scenario 1: Person X raises a hand and strikes person Y in the chest. Person Y falls to the ground in pain. Scenario 2: Person A raises a hand and strikes person B in the chest. Person B falls to the ground in pain. On the surface the actions in both scenarios appear identical; and on a certain level both may be understood as acts of violence. Such a surface-level understanding appears to hold true, even if the first scenario occurred, for example, in France during the Middle Ages and the second scenario occurred in Cambodia last week. Indeed, it is the equivalence of these two actions – separated, in our example, by hundreds of years and thousands of miles – that gives weight to the argument that violence is ubiquitous, unproblematic, and contains a transgeographical and transhistorical essence. What is missing in this fetishization of violence, we contend, are those factors that actually constitute our conception of violence. If we were to abstract from these scenarios we would see that both cases are relational, that is the subjects in both scenarios are internally related: X strikes Y and A strikes B. These acts, moreover, are intended to be transformative. One might say that both X and A are attempting to impose their will on Y and B. If we return to the concrete, however, we would find that the scenarios are qualitatively different. For example, how is X related to Y? Are they partners, are they father and son, or strangers? Where does this act occur – in a bar, on a battlefield, or during a sporting event? We readily see that even though acts of violence may give the appearance of being identical, the underlying social and spatial relations and processes are masked. To simply label both events as violent is to fetishize violence and possibly to remove the underlying processes and relations for why this violence occurs from our analysis. In our attempt to move beyond a theorization of violence as an epiphenomenon and to provide a de-ontology of violence, we argue that it is first necessary to think through the concepts of abstract and concrete violence; and second to situate concepts of violence within the dominant mode of production. IV Abstract violence and concrete violence Dialectics, following Ollman (2003: 60), begins with the ‘real concrete’ (the world as it presents itself to us) and proceeds through ‘abstraction’ (the intellectual activity of breaking this whole down into the mental units with which we can think about it) to the ‘thought concrete’ (the reconstituted and now understood whole present in the mind). In other words, the ‘real concrete’ is the world in which we live, with all of its contradictions, and social, economic, and political processes and relations. By disaggregating the world into its constitutive parts through the process of abstraction and then by reconstituting the world back to a whole we are able to understand the underlying relations that give rise to phenomena in the first place. In Capital, Marx made a distinction between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ labor; he did so in order to focus attention on the valorization of capital: the generation of surplus-value. Here, Marx uses ‘abstraction’ to: refer to those units whose ties with reality are fully obscured, where the particular society in which they exist has been completely lost sight of. Thus labor – which, as labor in general, Marx takes to be a special product of capitalism – is spoken of as an ‘abstraction’ because most people consider that it existed in all social systems. (Ollman, 1976: 62) Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 6 Progress in Human Geography Labor, in other words, and outside of a Marxist perspective, is taken as given, as something that is ubiquitous to humanity and is natural. Within geography there is a tendency to focus on measurable, map-able, concrete acts: rapes, murder, famine, suicide. This is readily viewed in the various empirical studies of ‘crime’ and ‘violence’ that are, in actuality, indirect studies of how certain acts defined as ‘criminal’ or ‘violence’ are counted.4 Violence assumes the form of a static, independent variable (e.g. the likelihood of any given individual either perpetuating an act of ‘violence’ or of becoming a victim of an act of ‘violence’). In turn, other abstractions such as poverty, education, ‘race’, and so forth are held as dependent variables. The relationship among these surface appearances assumes the form of causality. However, such studies provide insufficient attention to the hidden totality that internally relates the supposed disarticulated variables. By falling into this analytic trap, scholars make the mistake of conflating ‘real’ concrete acts with specific abstractions, instead of seeing such acts for what they are, namely acts that are historically and geographically contingent and dialectically related to the society from which they emerge. For example, during the 18th century, certain actions we now classify as ‘domestic violence’ were, from a legal standpoint, considered neither violent nor criminal, but an accepted part of marital relations; likewise, rape during the 16th century was not only ‘not’ necessarily viewed as violent, but was encouraged as part of broader processes of primitive accumulation (Federici, 2004). We suggest, therefore, that in order to theorize the broader salience of violence in society one must abstract violence from dominant modes of production that give rise to particular acts; we encourage scholars, therefore, to use violence as a theoretical vantage point for a more comprehensive and sustained analysis of social and spatial relations. It is necessary, accordingly, to address the ‘thought concrete’ forms of violence that are systemic to particular modes of production: to acknowledge that ‘real concrete’ violence is neither transhistorical nor transgeographical, but the ‘appearance’ of different social relations vis-à-vis access to the means of production. V Marx’s second condition of capitalism By engaging in dialectics we begin from the premise that to understand society we need to grasp the character of its relations of production, or its particular ‘mode of production’ (Lebowitz, 2003: 2). Simply put, as Rees (1998: 99) explains, ‘theoretical concepts arise from and relate to the real world, but not in a direct and simplistic way’. We must therefore acknowledge that a direct reflection of reality – including our conception of violence – can only lead to the mental reproduction of the most misleading appearances of society (cf. Rees, 1998: 98). Lefebvre (1991: 46–47) postulated that every ‘society to which history gave rise within a framework of a particular mode of production, and which bore the stamp of that mode of production’s inherent characteristics, shaped its own space’. In other words, the mode of production is crucial to understanding not only how space is produced, but also how social relations – including those conceived as violent – are produced. We do not, however, suggest that human subjectivities or actions (i.e. violence) are determined by the dominant mode of production with no room for autonomy; instead we suggest that what constitutes violence, and our understanding of violence, is linked to and flows from the dominant modes of production in a given society. The term ‘mode of production’ is somewhat contested (Harvey, 2010). Here, we follow Fine and Saad-Filho (2010) who write that: patterns of life are determined by existing social conditions, in particular the places to be filled in Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 7 Tyner and Inwood the process of production. These relations exist independently of individual choice, even though they have been established in the course of the historical development of society. (Fine and Saad-Filho, 2010: 3) Capitalism, for example, is a specific historical form of the social process; its foundation is the separation of direct producers from the means of production, which is why workers – although formally free – are forced by material circumstance to sell their labor-power to the capitalist, who owns the means of production (Heinrich, 2012: 181). Capitalism, in this sense, appears as a system whereby a person’s capacity to work becomes a commodity that can be bought and sold on the market. This has a tremendous bearing on the theorization of violence. For just as each mode of production is structured according to its class relations, for which there are appropriate corresponding categories of analysis (Fine and Saad-Filho, 2010: 5), so too will each mode of production structure the abstraction of violence in particular concrete forms. For Marx, capitalism was predicated upon two key conditions. The first is that ‘laborpower can appear on the market as a commodity only if, and in so far as, its possessor . . . offers it for sale or sells it as a commodity’ (Marx, 1990 [1867]: 271). The condition, however, holds only if a second condition is met, namely that ‘the possessor of labor-power . . . [must] be compelled to offer for sale as a commodity that very labor-power which exists only in his living body’ (p. 272). It was through the satisfaction of these two conditions that workers appear free in a double sense: as legally ‘free’ individuals who are ‘free’ to enter into the waged-labor market. The worker, of course, is anything but free. As Peck (1996: 27) writes, ‘in capitalist societies, the preparedness of workers to offer their labor on the labor market is largely secured by the systematic erosion of possibilities of subsistence outside the wage system’. It is, consequently, Marx’s second condition that assumes prominence in our understanding of violence in capitalism. Consider the well-documented, if still debated, transformation from feudalism to mercantilism to capitalism. A Marxist perspective begins from the standpoint of ‘primitive accumulation’, a term also subject to much recent debate both within and beyond geography (Glassman, 2006; Harvey, 2003; Li, 2009; McIntyre, 2011). In general, however, this entails the historical process of separating workers from the means of production; this may be accomplished via the usurpation of common property, enclosures of ‘common’ land, and the destruction of domestic, artisanal production. In an oft-cited passage, Marx (1990 [1867]: 926) says of primitive accumulation: ‘capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt’. Marx’s point is not simply that capitalism is violent; rather, his critique lies in the assertion that as long as capitalism exists, systemic inequalities are both necessary and unavoidable. That these structural conditions are not necessarily considered criminal or necessarily violent is a reflection of how crime and violence are also ‘historically and morally determined’. For, as Marx recognizes, the standards of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are not transhistorical or transgeographical but rather conditioned by the dominant economic (and hence legal) relations of society. This, certainly, is the point raised by Engels, who, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, writes: When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call the deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 8 Progress in Human Geography such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of a single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. (Engels, 2005 [1845]: 127) What both Marx and Engels understood is not just that ‘violence’ assumes a central role in the accumulation of capital; rather, they understood that capitalism is a particular historical (and geographical) mode of production; and that social relations, such as the relationship to the means of production, must be described with categories that retain their validity only with regard to these modes of production (cf. Heinrich, 2012: 32). From Marx we recognize that ‘labor’ is not a transhistorical concept; likewise, we understand that ‘race,’ sex, and gender appear in different forms in different times and different places. This suggests, therefore, that any understanding of ‘violence’ as a relational process must take seriously the argument – put forth most prominently by feminist geographers – that violence is first and foremost experienced, embodied, and deeply personal (cf. England and Simon, 2010; Fluri, 2009; Kedir and Admasachew, 2010; Koopman, 2011; Pain, 1991, 2001, 2010; Woon, 2011; Wright, 2010). It is necessary therefore to refocus future analyses to that of, for example, violence in feudal Japan, or violence in neoliberal United States, rather than a search for universal, essentialist origins and explanations. VI The unity of structural and direct violence In 1969, Johan Galtung forwarded an especially powerful conceptual understanding of violence. He began by noting six dimensions to ‘violence’, provisionally defined as being ‘present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realization’ (Galtung, 1969: 168; see also Galtung, 1990; Galtung and Höivik, 1971). Galtung (1969: 170) argued that a key distinction among different forms of violence is ‘whether or not there is a subject (person) who acts’. Direct violence is said to occur when there is an identifiable actor who commits an act of violence – defined, again, by Galtung as any action that impinges on or reduces human potential; structural violence (also termed ‘social injustice’ by Galtung) occurs when no such actor is identifiable. Galtung elaborates that: whereas in the first case these consequences can be traced back to concrete persons or actors, in the second case this is no longer meaningful. There may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently unequal life chances. (Galtung, 1969: 170–171) Structural violence, in other words: occurs as inequalities structured into a society so that some have access to social resources that foster individual and community well-being – high quality education and health care, social status, wealth, comfortable and adequate housing, and efficient civic services – while others do not. (Opotow, 2001: 151; see also Gilmore, 2002) Consequently: to understand who is made most vulnerable where and how socially produced harms are naturalized discursively and materially, it is necessary to theorize specific economic, political, and social relations of oppression and domination and how they articulate (or intersect) in particular historical, geographic moments. (Loyd, 2009: 865–866) It is such an understanding, indeed, that typifies many so-called Marxist accounts of violence, Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 9 Tyner and Inwood for the historical transformation of social relations embedded in and stemming from practices of primitive accumulation are heralded as a transition from ‘direct’ to ‘structural’ violence. As Marx (1990 [1867]: 899) explains, ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force [i.e. direct violence] is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases’. Such a sentiment is found in a recent report published by the World Health Organization, albeit without an explicit critique of capitalism: ‘Poverty wields its destructive influence at every stage of human life, from the moment of conception to the grave. It conspires with the most deadly and painful diseases to bring a wretched existence to all those who suffer from it’ (WHO, 2005: 5). The theoretical separation of ‘direct’ and ‘structural’ violence is both pervasive and, we argue, misleading (cf. Farmer, 2004, 2009; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004). What appears as a clear dichotomy between ‘direct’ and ‘structural’ violence, like all such polar opposites in Marxism, is really not one (Ollman, 1976: 66). Instead of focusing on the uncritical distinction between structural and direct violence, as though each of these forms has its own a priori existence in and of itself, we need to unite these seemingly opposite abstract forms into their historical and geographical totalities. Critical for understanding a dialectical approach, as stated, is how one moves from real concrete events, to abstract concepts, and back to the thought concrete. Throughout each of these transformations it is necessary to abstract out particular ‘types’ and ‘relations’ of violence and to begin to think through how they are interconnected, and take particular form, at any given moment. For example, various state apparatuses (e.g. those institutions that constitute the criminal justice system) routinely collapse a litany of specific, real concrete acts into the concept of violence: killings, beatings, bullying, rape, and so on. However, we would ask: how is it possible to equate such seemingly disparate, qualitatively different acts? A starting point to equate these different (and selected) real concrete forms of violence is to abstract from them, to ask what relations are manifest among these acts. Thus, through a process of abstraction, violence becomes relational and transformative – a statement aligned with Galtung’s provisional definition. However, if we abstract violence as any action that affects the material conditions of another, thereby reducing one’s potentiality, the distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘structural’ collapses. For should not the continued inequalities as manifest in differences in life expectancy, for example, in the United States count as violence? Should not the elimination of welfare programs and health care constitute acts of violence – acts, it should be stressed, that are legislated by knowable, nameable members of the US Congress? The false dichotomy between direct and structural violence no longer holds purchase as we move from the level of the abstraction to that of the ‘thought concrete’. This has tremendous bearing, given that intentionality serves as an additional key distinction for Galtung. According to Galtung, this: distinction is important when guilt is to be decided, since the concept of guilt has been tied more to intention, both in Judeo-Christian ethics and in Roman jurisprudence, than to consequence (whereas the present definition of violence is entirely located on the consequence side). (Galtung, 1969: 171) More specifically, a focus on ‘intention’ as opposed to ‘guilt’ risks understating the level of violence within any given society. As Galtung (1969: 170) explains, ‘ethical systems directed against intended violence will easily fail to capture structural violence in their nets’. In other words, an artificial distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘structural’ violence serves to reproduce existent inequalities in society; formal and official accountings of violence fail to Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 10 Progress in Human Geography capture those actions that reduce one’s potentiality because the fundamental social relations remain hidden. Farmer (2004: 307), for example, forwards the idea that structural violence ‘is violence exerted systematically – that is, indirectly – by everyone who belongs to a certain social order’. However, the violence in capitalism – imminently visible in the form of primitive accumulation – becomes fetishized beneath the supposed free exchange of labor. Any given capitalist is no longer viewed as intentionally or personally inflicting violence upon his or her workers; and ‘direct’ violence magically appears as something ‘natural’ if not extraordinary, while ‘structural’ violence appears as an unfortunate and unforeseen consequence of individual and free decisions. There is a further complication to the false dichotomy between ‘structural’ and ‘direct’ violence as manifest in capitalism, one that exists because of what we term the social and spatial immediacy of violence. Consider, for example, acts of ‘real’ concrete violence, such as rape. In these acts, there is an immediacy that is clearly present: a man, for example, raping a woman. In structural violence, however, such as the social conditions that lead to famine, this immediacy is missing. Those individuals ‘responsible’ for the creation of such conditions are neither readily identifiable nor necessarily in the immediate vicinity; and indeed, many accounts do not, or cannot, attempt to ascertain those responsible. Consequently, ‘structural’ violence simply happens; it is part of the existing structure of society with no individual to hold accountable. Critical for us as geographers is the way these relations are often obscured through the production of space. It is necessary to move beyond treating violence as simply existing and instead to materially ground it within the mode of production of a particular society. This has the possibility to expand our geographic understanding of the interconnectivity of myriad social, economic, and political processes. In so doing it will be possible to help our colleagues and students to see, for example, how the unfettered capital accumulation that occurs in the West has life-altering possibilities for billions of untold peoples around the world and undergirds much of our contemporary understanding of violence. As a consequence we refuse to abide by the distinction between structural and direct violence. Concrete forms of structural violence (e.g. lack of adequate health care or housing) are manifest in capitalism not as ‘unfortunate’ by-products but because of the particular social relations that constitute the production, circulation, and exchange of capitalism. However, given our understanding of the sociospatial dialectic, these economic relations remain hidden; so too are associated forms of violence. Concrete forms of violence, such as rape and beatings, are individuated and thus counted; those concrete forms that perpetuate inequalities in society – inequalities that facilitate the valorization of capital – are discounted and remain veiled from critical scrutiny. It is incumbent therefore to conceive of ‘structural’ violence as just as ‘direct’ as other concrete actions; to dismiss inequalities in society as unintended consequences is to make disappear the systemic inequalities that are inherent in capitalist exchange. VII Conclusions In the wake of the US War on/of Terror, Butler asks: Are we not, strategically speaking, interested in ameliorating this violence? Are we not, ethically speaking, obligated to stop its further dissemination, to consider our role in instigating it, and to foment and cultivate another sense of a culturally and religiously diverse global political culture? (Butler, 2004: 8–9) We answer an unequivocal yes! Treating violence dialectically, in short, is about working towards a more just future in which those who Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 11 Tyner and Inwood defend their privileged position through the illconceived dichotomy of structural versus direct violence can no longer obscure the fact that their lives are possible because of, not in spite of, violence. Our argument is born out of a frustration that current concepts and understandings of violence do very little to transform the fundamental social relations that undergird society. We contend instead that considerations of violence must be grounded in a sociospatial dialectic that has its roots grounded in historical-materialist understandings. In short, we argue by treating violence dialectically we can begin to move beyond the geographically confined and threadbare narratives of ‘us versus them’ to the more important and potentially transformative questions that constitute the multiplicity of subjectivities that are dealt with violently. It is therefore diversionary to seek either a ‘naturalized’ reality or preciseness of violence. The attempt to decipher the ‘origins of violence’ is akin to searching for the ‘origins’ of space; such a quest presumes the existence of a material entity that, frankly, does not exist. While in recent years we have witnessed a flurry of academic activity directed toward the study of violence, a repeated fallacy of such studies is to begin with a provisional definition of violence, and then to proceed to study (and map) the causes of violence, the consequences of violence, or the fear of violence. As Harvey (2009: 144) notes, such an approach fails to fundamentally transform the very social and spatial relations that constitute violence. He goes on to note that: mapping even more evidence of man’s patent inhumanity to man is counter-revolutionary in the sense that it allows the bleeding-heart liberal in us to pretend that we are contributing to a solution when in fact we are not. This kind of empiricism is irrelevant. There is already enough information in congressional reports, newspapers, books, articles, and so on to provide us with all the evidence we need. Our task does not lie here . . . [Instead the] immediate task is nothing more nor less than the self-conscious and aware construction of a new paradigm for social geographic thought through a deep and profound critique of our existing analytical constructs. This [as academics] is what we are best equipped to do. (Harvey, 2009: 144) In other words, if we continue down the royal road of giving violence a naturalized existence it does not possess, or deserve, and if we continue to attempt to locate ‘violence’ outside of social – and spatial – relations, the progressive praxis of promoting non-violence will continue to elude our grasp. For if violence remains fetishized – promoted as something natural and normal – it will forever serve the interests of those who seek to profit through oppressive and exploitative practices. However, if we acknowledge that sociospatial relations transform with, as well as transform, the mode of production, and if we acknowledge that ‘violence’ is relational, it follows that ‘violence’ will likewise transform over time and space. To understand and address contemporary violence, therefore, we must concern ourselves with ‘real’ concrete forms of violence, and abstract these forms into constituent ‘thought concrete’ forms of violence. Acknowledgements The authors’ wish to thank the editors at Progress in Human Geography, Derek Alderman, Alex Colucci, Samuel Henkin, Dave Stasiuk, Rachel Will, and three anonymous reviewers for providing helpful and insightful critique of our original manuscript. Omissions and shortcomings are entirely our own. Funding Portions of this research were funded through the National Science Foundation (Grant 0961117 and Grant 1262736). Notes 1. Our purpose in this article is not to name and remark on specific authors or studies, but instead is intended to outline a way for social scientists to conceptualize violence more broadly and – we hope – to begin a process Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on January 31, 2014 12 Progress in Human Geography that will engender a more just and equitable world. Far from seeing this manuscript as a direct critique of these previous approaches, our intent is to outline a different way forward and to bring attention to the fact that as social scientists we must move beyond description to focus on processes that will ultimately be transformative to our institutions, communities, and world. 2. It is significant that many histories of violence utilize homicide rates as a proxy for violence. See, for example, Eisner (2003, 2008). 3. Among the various approaches to dialectics, we find in Ollman an approach that most effectively highlights the inner relations between the ‘abstract’ and the ‘concrete’. 4. Flint (2003), for example, details that geographic patterns of hate crimes reflect more the various strategies in which crime is defined and counted than the ‘actual’ number of incidents. References Blomley N (2003) Law, property, and the geography of violence: The frontier, the survey, and the grid. 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