269. On academics on violence

Duke University Press's Fall and Winter 2007 catalogue - yes, publishers are even worse than clothing companies about anticipating the change of seasons - includes On Violence: A Reader.  (Not to be confused with 2002's Violence: A Reader, or the same year's Violence and Society: A Reader.)

Duke's late entry in this competition, we're told, "proceeds from the editors' contention that violence is always historically contingent; it must be contextualized to be understood.  They argue that violence is a process rather than a discrete product." 

Now, it's never fair to criticize authors for the words of their publisher's publicity department.  As far as I know, Duke University Press uses a computer program to string together phrases with a track record of appealing to university librarians, the real customers for such books.  But, on the chance that those sentences were written by a person, it's interesting to wonder what is meant by "understanding" historically-contingent violence. 

Everyone can see that the puncture wound in your chest is historically contingent: if you hadn't been located in the physical space into which your killer thrust the knife, he wouldn't have been able to kill you.  But once you've contextualized the process producing your exsanguination, what next?

The book is part of a new series, The Cultures and Practice of Violence, intended (according to the  catalogue copy) to address "a need to better comprehend the role of those who actually do the work of violence - torturers, assassins, and terrorists - no less than their victims and witnesses." 

To show how unsophisticated I am, when I hear a word like "torturer" I actually think I understand the role of the person who meets that description - he's the guy who tortures.  (What is it about blogging that tempts people into making such unguarded confessions of intellectual inadequacy??)  (It must be the contextualized historical contingency - blogging, after all, is a process rather than a product.)  (Hence the gerund.)

Anyway, is there anybody missing from that short list of violence workers?  Here's a clue.  Duke University Press is located in a smallish city that had 35 murders in 2005, for a rate nearly double the national average.  In the Durham metro area, 127 rapes came to the attention of authorities in 2005, as did over 2,000 aggravated assaults and robberies.  The latter figures, it's safe to say, undercount the incidence of violence in the Press's hometown.

Yet the roll call of "those who actually do the work of violence" doesn't include violent criminals.  The editorial description of On Violence: A Reader doesn't include any reference to criminal violence, either.  The closest it comes is a reference to "institutional faces of violence: familial, legal, and religious".  It's apparently easier to contextualize the abstract family as a violent institution than real-life criminals as violent actors. 

Perhaps that's because "torturers, assassins, and terrorists" are political actors, while ordinary criminals aren't.  But the jargon spread like marmalade over every page of the catalogue makes it pretty clear that no one at the Press thinks that the personal is other than the political, anyway.   If the family is a violent institution, who staffs it?  More to the point, America is such an extremely violent place because our government follows the policy of tolerating it, which isn't so very different from actually encouraging it. 

I should add that by "government" I don't mean "the government."  On the contrary: I mean the part of government that isn't "the government."  (See post 267.) 

The Press's new series suggests an intriguing new line of inquiry.  Why do humanities professors find it so much easier to deplore South American torturers than the people who make them reluctant to go unescorted into their own campus library's basement stacks?  On Academics Who Understand Violence as an Academic Problem: A Reader - now that would be a contribution to the discourse.