Sociologia da Violência

Ramo do Mestrado de Sociologia ISCTE-IUL 

 




Summaries VERSÃO PORTUGUESA


Lesson 1. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 2. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 3. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 4. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 5. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 6. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 7. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 8. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 9. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 10. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021


Guide lines

You are not called to develop field research on violence. What we will do is to develop an idea about how to research about violence that can become a research project in the future, after the course.

First assignment: description of a case of violence (10%)

Second assignment: experimental application of the theories studied, as the definition of violence as a reduction to the body, to the case of violence described. Use zoom out (how the micro experience influences macro life) and zoom in (how the macro influences the micro). (20%)

Third assignment: doing science is not about giving answers. It is about producing good non solved and asking for data questions. Methodology for information collection to develop an analysis of violence more rigorous (reduction to the body as formative activity and reduction to the body in the limits or beyond the resilience of the people involved) at the micro-level (formation of more or less deteriorated identities), at the macro-level (empire, the global network of states, and dominant states of mind) and at the meso-level (social care organized to enhance good violence and minimize bad violence). (30%)

Final assignment: learning synthesis and a future study project. Final report delivery (25.000-70.000 characters): complete sociological analysis of violence involved in the case study, framed by social values in use.  (40%)

Schedule information

Scientific theory in the social sciences (2020) the secrets of the Empire

The social sciences method (2020) self centred zoom out and zoom in

Censorship of knowledge production: a demonstration (2020)


2021


Types of violence: fusional group panic violence; training educated violence; sacrificial violence; professional violence, such as military or police violence; Stockholm syndrome - kidnapping; abuse and rape; social integration (minorities, such as women or children); love-seduction: passion; conversion; condescendence, etc.

Theory of violence and Imperial rationality (2021) slide shows

Violent deaths, the redundant paradigmatic case of violent physical violence commonly used in modern societies as part of moralistic apparatus

 

Why we must avoid moral when doing science? Because accepting mainstream moral one is taking side: those in charge of victorious violence became right and those losing became wrong, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is the main result of violence: people learn how incorporate victorious strategies of action and mind (Stockholm syndrome). 

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (2021)

How to overcome social theory´s imbedded censorship (2021)

Sociological contradiction: centred on power and omitting violence (anti-history), surrender Imperial Húbris

Lesson 7 - Methodological plan

Violência à luz de Damásio - Violence under Damasio´s theory

Presentations´ schedule

To draw a methodological plan is not enough to choose a research technique or between a quantative versus qualitative approach.

What is the main exercise I ask the students to develop for the next and third assignment is a) to find what is there to be discovered b) how to manage the data production in a way it deliver evidence about what we want to discover.

Science is about discovering, uncovering what is hidden. Violence is hidden and those who engage on it, both as victims and as abusers, have especial interest on hiding violence. Social science theories also hide violence, for instance, declaring it rare (as Collins does) or anti-social (as Wieviorka does). Conceive violence as half part of life experience, compared to breathing in, alternating with estado de espírito production, compared to breathing out, violence as reduction to the body (as Reemptsma define it), one has a lot of violence to uncover.

To do the job one has to avoid moralism. Moralism presents violence as rare as the violent person, as anti-social as the enemies. This humanity divides between those few violent enemies and the rest of the non-violent humanitarian humans is moralistic and unrealistic. Orwell famously describe this in Animal Farm, stating that we are all equal but some between us are more equal than others.

Scientific approach to violence must break with moralism and with mainstream social theories that engage in hiding violence in human societies, as a way to discriminate between allegedly sacred human life (of part of humanity) and the rest of the world to be explored (nature and its human resources). Please, be critical to legal, social sciences, institutional definitions of violence.

One way to develop scientific social theory is to bridge to biology. You may read António Damásio´s books for inspiration. I wrote a short note on this you can link at the begging of this summary.

To develop a discovery methodology on human violence is hard. We need to engage in in-depth dialogue with those few interested in this uncover work. That is what we will do in class for the next three zoom schedules that will end our course. I need your initiative and cooperation to discover the difficulties we experiment, and we will try to overcome them together.
 

Lesson 6 - Caring and identity violence

Iceberg tip of society is what social sciences esteems to be society: it comes top down as imposition to individuals that are naturally obliged to sacrifice to comply with social roles regulated by social control 

Violence and enemy moralistic taboo incorporated by trauma

  

Time and space analysis of an event (zoom in: incorporated past, and zoom out: wishes for the future)

Bottom-up zoom-in: Boby&Soul - Wacquant, to whom violence os not a sociological subject For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood, Loïc Wacquant, 2015 (Daniel Mendes reports)

Top-down zoom-out: Terrorism - Wieviorka feared for his academic carreer: Violence and/or Non-Violence in the Success of the Civil Rights Movement: the Malcolm X – Martin Luther King Jr. Nexus”. New Political Science 38:1, 1-22, August H. Nimtz, 2016 (Guilherme Serôdio and David Branquinho report)

Science is not about a perfect description such as a map of the same size of reality it describes. One must choose the way to make a reduction of the description making sense of it. This sense must be higher than reality itself: science is making simple mindful sense out of empirical complexity. Moralism, religion, dogma, ideology are non-scientific ways to do the job. Social science must learn how to reconnect with real human flesh and blood emphatic experience, delivering short structural descriptions open to renewal.

Objective structure is not found in the specificity of events. Specificity hides what is going on, because humans look with their minds: we reduce in our minds what happens to make sense of it. Science oppose to other forms of knowledge to maximize empirical events influence in the process of knowing and open it to social collaboration of anyone who wants to contribute.
One finds objective structures of human social life in what each event has in common with all the events one can imagine. Describing structures is a productive cognitive way of descriptive reduction. Structure means what is common to humankind and not only to each culture. For science sake, one needs to overcome cultural biases. Looking for the social structures is having conscious of what unite humankind as opposed to over value what divide human beings. What unite humankind is also what divide us: the structures we build and pass through heritage to those that follow.

Violence is structural within life experience on Earth, let alone within humankind experience. The common sense and common social theory divide in good violence and bad violence is religious driven. It hides the heritage of incorporated violence that is transparent to us. The incorporated violence becomes habitual. So, violence structural consequences for the life chances of humanity and of each person is hidden by moralistic modernity ideologies. One can opposed to it zoom out and zoom in scientific analysis to deconstruct moralism. Time analysis and hope and endurance analysis of personal and social growing from experience (including violence and estado-de-espírito, looking to breathing in – reduction to the body; incorporating – and breathing out – expressing oneself; developing capabilities – alike dynamic).

Galvanizing people, as social movements, is not a rare event. What is rare is many people sharing the same “emerging as new” (estado-nascente, Francesco Alberoni´s Genesis).

Modern knowledge, including social sciences´ knowledge, is about avoiding fusional estados-de-espírito, big mobs united for a long time. Modernity worship revolution as much it fears it. Modern moralism on violence is about dealing with worshiping good violence and fearing bad violence. History shows that bad and good violence, violence and estado-de-espírito, are not distinct: they come together.

What science needs to understand is what makes violence glorious (as in sport) even when one loses, and what makes violence abusive even when one is dominant.
 

Lesson 5 - Making science

Science is about difficult questions production. Scientists work to give answers to these questions, rarely obtaining full answers. The same should happen with social sciences.
Most of the time, unhappily, social sciences provide moralistic answer to quite weak questions. For instance: violence is bad. This kind of approach to social phenomenon is so weak that one prefers not consider violence as a social phenomenon. One can say that violence is anti-social (as Wieviorka does) or say that violence is rare (as Collins does), to conclude that mainstream theory do not need any change because violence, one way or another, is marginal to society.

We do not need research or science to understand that violence is structural to society and life. Why social sciences contradict the evidence and get way with it?

Professional social sciences, since the 1930´s, established as scholar business, praise modern society, and avoid as much as possible to present the dark side of modernity (misogyny, racism, discrimination, institutional manipulation, etc.). Social sciences present violence and other negative modern characteristics as remains from the past to be overcome. Unhappily, war and violence, as well as other problems, stay and grow as social problems.

Let’s follow Merton suggestion of starting with middle range theories closed to empirical cases that will turn to a bigger picture when possible.

We need a case of violence (common violence, sequences of violence, incorporated violence, violence endured without complain by the people) and explore it as part of a holistic subject (society). That is the propose of sociology of violence. Zoom in (looking for the past of the case of violence as it may been incorporated in those people who are protagonists and by standers) zoom out (looking for the consequences of the case to those involved and to the bigger picture where many violent cases happen) are required analysis for the second assignment.

For those students that did not reached to an empirical case in the first assignment, the second assignment must describe first the case of study.

Science and learning (as teaching) are about organizing discussions. Not abstract and moralistic discussion around ideologies. Science needs experimental discussions about the use of concepts in social analysis. Zoom out zoom in exercise should show how the concept of violence value empirical data to a contribution to understand what society is about.
 

Lesson 4. Why to adopt the “reduction to the body” conceptualization of “violence”?

Scientific, political and health raisons:

1. Scientific raisons show that the Empire support/opposes the development of science. The New Deal supported the professionalization of social sciences and opposes the continuation of the path from social philosophy to sciences of society.

Holistic “universal subtract” is avoided. Local “elite power” is presented as the main structure of life and zenith of cosmos. This national or economic power conception hides both social and psychological aspects of Imperial power built by caring and identity activities.

Society (power) is conceived as separated from people (human resources cared and identified by people). Caring and identity building arising from bio-social bases and are neglected by social analysis that oppose discussing biological aspects of human beings.

Violence is presented as a divine like power. Only God or Lucifer, elite, state or cruel criminal, terrorists, poor people, use it. Instead of a natural practice that accept different intensities and end results, like sportive health, reproduction, or death, common to all animals, violence is wrongly represented as an extraordinary rare event for middle classes.

2. The scientific conceptualization of violence should deal with the social credits and the social malaises regarding the Empire strategies. Glory and shame regarding Imperial violence are the bases of social life, prior to capitalism and modernity.

Good and bad aspects of capitalism discussion should be included in discussion about good and bad aspects of the Empire project of exploiting the Earth. Capitalism is a modern instrument of the Empire, not the other way around. Pandemic showed one can stop capitalism to defend Empire. And capitalism can endure all the blame, hiding its victim-accomplices Empire and its supporters – modern populations, CEO, and professionals.

Structural violence is legitimated by Imperial “estado-de-espírito”: a holistic six thousand years old social event that evolve as global incorporated individualistic versions: each one of us, we all are the Empire and we denies it.

3. We represent ourselves as insecure potential victims of violence. The same violence we join playing Imperial “estado-de-espírito” in family, professional, gender, sport, political roles.

We accept to change liberties for security because we feel freedom as a menace and state violence as a life insurance.

Our main enemies are inside us and nearby, as family and friends that integrate us in the society.
 

Lesson 3 - Theory of violence in practice

Costa Caparica, 2.3.2021, COVID free preparation of the lesson

In the post-war, the beach, where the sea and the land separate and come together, became a symbol of leisure, marginality, luxury (surfing lifestyle) for those who visit it outside of vacation time. However, confinement and telework make it possible to work on the beach and prepare lessons while walking on the beach.

From a simple photograph, one can find violence (class violence, class status symbol, distinction) in the landscape, according to time (day, hour) and activity (is it work walking on the beach? Is it work to read a book? Must a teacher work?). One can find structural violence without any communication (aggressor-victim-bystanders) event: the full location of one person (time-space) does give the social analyst information to understand violence as a reduction to the body. This is especially true in the Big Data Era when databases know best who each person is than the people who give life to his/her persona. Each body in action continually builds each person as people/individual, both virtually, and physically, symbolically, and bodily, evolving as life do, together with all society, and all environment.

Using this holistic approach one can look for, discuss, and understand violence (including social-incorporated-violence, symbolic violence) where common sense does not find it.

The case of the David Christian conference on education for the future generation shows huge (incorporated, naturalized) violence operating through a zoom event. A very well-organized event presented to thousands of scholars from Frontiers platform (an open-source scientific and global publishing business corporation) a Christian´s project sponsored by Bill Gates charity work, for 10 years now.

The message was contradictory: the founder of Big History (as Big Tech or Big Farm) propose a holistic approach to science and culture – this means bringing together all sciences to draw an alternative to the religious story about the creation and meaning of the universe. Scientists know that it breaks with cartesian hyperspecialized common scientific work (because they work in science). Then, the proposal follows a contradictory path, regarding the revolutionary purpose: it would be enough to turn the Christian´s project a worldwide success to produce the social revolution that is needed to deal with the unknown challenges of climate change. When all children will be educated believing in Big History instead of creation myths, substituting religion with science at the basis of epistemology teaching, everything will change for the better. For that purpose, it would be enough for every school program to include one more discipline: Big History.

Asked for how it would help to deal with social and economic inequalities, Christian do not have an answer. Asked for merging his project with a similar project of a colleague that wishes to work together, the answer was: “This is another project!” You must look for a sponsor on your own.

It is not possible for one project to change the world except it is an imperial project that lasts for thousands of years. To add an item in the scholar curriculum does not change schools or people. No one does holistic science alone, within his own project serving advertisement to Bill Gates imperial project as a keynote speaker to a global conference of a growing scientific publishing platform.

It is common for corporate sponsors to support scientific conferences. It is not common to present Bill Gates as a partner, as an inspiration, not as a sponsor. It reminds me of the communist hero propaganda of the chief.

To drive through analysis such as this, regarding a case you have in mind, I propose to you to consider holistic approach to human nature. Violence, as “reduction to the body”, is like a breath-in that works together with breath-out estado-de-espírito (it merges mood, state of mind, zeitgeist: biological, individual, and social levels working together). Violence is incorporated as experience in each person. From experience, each person draws a set of estados-de-espírito. Each person uses each estado-de-espírito (family spirit, profissional spirit, sport spirit, corporate spirit, national spirit, disciplinar spirit, etc.) according to with the situation and his/her momentaneous decision making. Violence will feedback: the experience of the responses of the situation to the estado-de-espírito used incorporate on each one´s body related to the memory of the usefulness of the used estado-de-espírito.

Each cycle of experiencing estado-de-espírito by one person, as well as by many people, eventually all the people, reduce each type of estado-de-espírito in the flesh, in the body, in the bodies.

Half a dozen of thousands of years did produce experiments and diffuse Imperial estado-de-espírito. This is Big History´s violence imposed by imperial societies on everyone. Education and sciences are strong ways to diffuse this kind of estado-de-espírito. That is why family and school education imagine science a set of dogmas and science (the practices of the doubt) accept to be (violently) reduced to school dogma to serve the imperial elite that funds both schools and science.

That is why David Christian accepted to reduce his holistic approach to a Bill Gates sponsored project managed exclusively by him, as a scientific prophet, in contradiction of his holistic science project.

 

Lesson 2 - Break up with common sense

The course is not about doing research. It is about using available data about violence and think about it differently.

Violence conceived by common sense is moral. Aggressors (mostly bad people) make victims (mostly innocent people). Social sciences avoid referring violence. Most of disciplines take violence as anti-social, as a destructive and irrelevant kind of action. International relations, history, criminology, take violence as their main subject without any conceptual discussion on what violence is. They accept moralistic (nationalist and state centred) common sense understanding of violence.

Sociology of violence should not be a watertight specialization of sociology. Conceiving violence as a special extraordinary phenomenon that happens within borders of violent environment separated from social life is obviously wrong. Even common-sense separate nature and wildlife from human society and civilized life, in the real-world humankind and its societies are part of nature and cannot survive out of nature. Culture, civilization is very violent. Empire is very violent.

Wieviorka understanding of violence as caused by cruelty is a moral common-sense understanding of violence. The main types of violence he designs (the hyper-subject – or hero – and the anti-subject – the anti-hero) are moralistic and represents the war of civilization between Christianity and Muslims. Collins definition of micro violence is designed as a communication theory: the emission comes from the rare violent and the victims are those who endure the consequences of the violence out of any chance of resistance, protection, prevention, as a dummy.

The violence as reduction to the body (as a scientific conceptualization you may test) integrate a different kind of social sciences that avoids moral, avoids accepting as dogma the common-sense way to submit to status quo.

Violence is not what breaks with peaceful lives. Violence is part of peaceful life. Reduction to the body is a motion that play with the opposite motion of growing out of the body, as the breath means inspiration together with expiration. One can use “estado de espírito” – Portuguese phrase that merge the sense of mood, state of mind, zeitgeist, together at one single idea, regarding emotions, psychology, social ambience as one – to represent what plays with violence in the process of production of personal-social identity (Bourdieu´s social disposition and Elias´ social configurations).

To build family spirit, disciplinary spirit, professional spirit, sociological spirit, etc., both growing up from the living body and violence work together against and with each person, each group, at different social levels (face-to-face, institutional level, political level). This is the conceptual frame I propose to you to use to deal with your case in a scientific, amoral, and analytic way, conceiving human life as part of nature and violence as part of life.

This understanding of social life means that one need to develop knowledge bridges (not walls) between biology and social sciences. (For those who read Portuguese, you can use http://home.iscte-iul.pt/~apad/estesp/estesp.htm to look at the museum of my research lab on this conceptualization).

One example of estado-de-espírito is Imperial spirit, or Empire. Its is a very effective and old estado-de-espírito, used by Alexander the Great. He and his group proposed to every chief he meet to join him on becoming and elite. The elite will do what other people could not do: to link long distance business. The problem is that locally the people may not accept elite privileges. Since then, new essays of Empire developed and all of them break. And it raises again.

There is no violent problem when leaders take leadership. The problem is when elites want to remain leaders for life and in every situation, including through generations. People do not like that and fight back. Elite learned how to stay as elite, submitting the people.
How elites do that? Everybody knows how: people divided and fighting each other do not have a chance to break the elites. That is why elite (and its culture) developed may ways to divide and rule, such as social sciences do. Culture discriminate (as it uses words) and moralize discrimination (point out what is good and what is bad, like religions do). Doing so, culture can incorporate competing identities in people (starting with gender identities) as divisions tools, as cultural chips in each kid, for life. This exactly what moralistic concepts teaches at schools do. That is what science of societies must avoid.
 

Lesson 1 - Presentation

Violence is a very emotional word hidden by social secrecy. The most violent action, like sexual abuse, is part of patriarchal way of live without complains. We know that today because few years ago the women movements push to disclosure this secret. Still, it continues working and sexual abuse still is pandemic and do not stop the economy.

Violence against foreigner, such as refugees or immigrants, is not a big problem. Few people raise the human rights principles and the law, no consequences. Still dying crossing boarders or Mediterranean Sea. Police violence against Hong-Kong demonstrators is violent. Police violent at European ghettos are restoring the order. In the US, these days, big struggle to classify police violence as racist or “law and order”. The later still winning.

The same activity is named as violence or opposing violence depending on ideological and moral relativist grounds. Violence coming from friends is not violence, is self-defence, maybe heroic self-defence. Violence targeting us is cruel violence. “Us” being the state-patriarchal-imperial persona we all follow since Rome integrate Christian movements as Empire praise ideology.

Civilization, or culture, is a way to say we, modern people, did emerge from nature (as Darwin teached us) and break up with it. We break up with community and nature. Civilization is the exploitation of the Earth and its resources, including human resources. We are seeing the results of this half a millennium imperial mission. Still, victims of genocide resist with their ancestral Earth friendly cultures. Humanity still have choices.

Social sciences are not part of the solution. They claim not be part of science (natural science. They prefer to comply with social discrimination that are used by the elites and the powerful to divide and rule. Social sciences hiper-specialization make it watertight the communication between natural sciences and social sciences, between social sciences disciplines, between subdisciplines of each discipline. Social sciences practices divide to reign power technique inside and outside of it.

The path that aim to turn social philosophy into science of society is still working, outside mainstream institutional activities. We will follow this trend in this course. We will consider the subject of social sciences the singular humankind experience in the Earth, within the ecological and cosmic environment that allow life evolution to give space to the emergency of human thinking.

Violence is “reduction to the body” (Remptsma). Violence is everywhere. As breathing expires and inspires, the similar way life expands (grow, think, evolve, pray, plans) and engages on violence (good and bad, as sex, and sport, and schooling, etc.).
The recommendation is to suspend as much as possible moral evaluation of the violence cases (as better methodological option to push forward science) and see discrimination as it is developed by societies, states, social sciences. After seeing it, after overcoming social secrets, then we can do morals in the base of better thinking and evidence, scientific thinking and evidence.


2020


Emails and subjects of study

Lesson 10. Violence at mentally ill caring and school discrimination

brief presentation of the doc available to help to build the final assignment. Brief presentation of the cases and problems discussed by two groups: the relationships between family and institutional violence, between school and class society violence, structural and everyday violence. The way victims of violence collaborate with the violent process they endure. 

 

Lesson 9. Urban violence, gentrification and obstetrician violence

discussing cases brought by the students, the questions of hard violence versus soft violence, recognizable violence versus hidden violence, come up. what kind of sociological definition of violence seems to feet best with the empirical data was at stake.

 

Lesson 8. Domestic violence

Is it the court's information faithful to the reality of violence? Are not the courts used to force a (right and wrong) decision to coerce some people to do what they do not want to do by themselves? Are not courts used by igneous police, lawyers, prosecutors to deliver sentences according to the ideology of each one?

It is true that courts refer to violence: state violence on the people and violence between people. It is supposed courts activity to substitute hard (damaging) violence for the soft, judiciary, diplomatic, moral, violence able to substitute or avoid social violence. Eventually, courts deliver what is supposed to be the best of the justice system. Not always it happens like that.

What would be the best role of sociology analyzing violence through court cases? Is it to take a side (victims´ side or defendant side)? Women's side or men´s side, when it comes to domestic violence?

Reduction to the body concept of violence presupposes expanding out of the body to compensate for everyday activity balance. Science is about finding out violence in the mass of events happening. Finding both good and bad violence. Good violence is about reduction to the body that is used to add and get some experience and abilities to its “victims”. Bad violence is a reduction to the body that produces fragility on its victims.

 

Lesson 7. Violence and children

 

The presented cases of violence against children show that violence has very different displays and consequences. One should avoid comparing what is harder or harmful violence since pain and damage is still pain and damage. There are violent situations that one cannot compare, such as discrimination at school and sexual abuse.


Sometimes harming violence is not intended: families and school good intentions, educative violence, can have unintended harmful lifelong consequences, such as social discrimination and stigma.


No one planed the virus pandemic. The results are still pandemic. The virus does not plan or intend nothing. Even so, its existence does not normally harm humans. Sometimes, it is deadly. Sometimes the states do not care about it. This time, the alarm calls every state on Earth.
Violence as a reduction to the body, as part of life, is not good nor bad. It depends on the situation and depends on the resilience of the different life forms. Today, in the era of the sixth great extinction of Earth species, maybe life is no enough resilient, or the virus evolution turns a pandemic form, or both trends together produce a perfect storm. We really do not know what is going.


Violence in childhood is common. Children are very violent. They are not enough coordinated to produce harm around them. Children are also targeted by adult violence, both family and institutional violence. This is a very old tradition as much as modern trends. Modern societies built a culture in childhood (and in youngsters) that is very different from what happened in former societies. But sexual violence and other kinds of abuses are still pandemic today, and no modern society gives enough attention to these problems and none try to abolish these practices.


Children are used as scape gouts within families, like Cinderella, even today, a couple of decades on, child abuse became a crime. Courts, police, are not designed to deal with that kind of cultural practices. Children do suffer hard violence whenever they are involved in criminal procedures.


Child abuse has been denounced by women's movements after they win victories to criminalize rape and other sexual abuses. This means that family privacy protection has been used on the patriarchal ways to hide power abuse and social disqualification of caring work. This means, also, that the first years of life – as children – people do not have any significant memory of it, and no one would like to recall abuse and domestic violence. So, it is difficult to disclose this kind of violent events. Each one of us dissolves each one´s trauma in identity personality traces.


Power, as the main aspect of social life analyzed by social theories, should be completed by care and identity analysis.

 

Lesson 6. Virus pandemic as violence (2)

letter from COVID19 to humanity  (ENG)

Bill Gates and epidemics (2015)

 

The ability to use applied science to daily life depends on the epistemic approach one chooses. If one chose to represent reality as what is planned to happen, as the state and corporations´ expert professional reports do, forgetting and hiding caring activities as “natural” (not really important for social life), then the scope of analysis is why planning is not fully working and how can planning work better (some name it as policies). Else, one can choose to be attentive to rare phenomena (as lightning and thunder) and to look at it. Maybe one can discover electricity.


Looking to COVID-19 pandemic as an extraordinary social and global phenomenon, as it obviously is, what can we learn about human society?
 

There is a difference between social sciences and science: the former suspend activity when an extraordinary event arises. People call and listen to the latter to make sense of an extraordinary event.

 

 

Lesson 5. Virus pandemic as violence

using ZOOM software, from now on

Discussion of the use of concepts and methods delivered in the former classes to engage in the analysis of the current global situation.

Imperial democracy - high risk operation

 

 

Lesson 4. How to manage violence, as scientific subject?

 

Read your case to find prejudices and connotations that dissimulate violence:

a) violence is a living phenomenon and not caused by individual moral misconduct;
b) violence cross all levels of society and it is a stronger top-down than bottom-up,
c) bad violence is only one side of the events; normal violence and good violence should be studied out too.

 

Facing a case analysis, one needs to present a knowledge strategy to overcome the modern (imperial) dissimulation system that covers social theories and common sense. To start scientific procedures, one needs to use scientific ways to follow the truth: overcoming dissimulation systems, denaturalizing discrimination, elitism, and hierarchy, reversing the cognitive products of everyday work of languages, as mainstream connotations and social secrets that comes with the words.


Let´s take the case of the connotations of violence and of conflict:

 

Violence Conflict
Natureza Civilization
Animals People
Poor people Elite
Isolated people Educated people
Criminal CEO
Police and army Diplomats and politicians


If all these connotations are at work, how come violence is presented by media and mainstream ideologies as occasional, rare, avoidable, caused by people mentally hill (Wieviorka – cruelty – and Collins – the rare violent – also uses this understanding of violence)?


Social theory and social sciences support professions that are not allowed to mention and deal with violence or conflict: police and politicians do that, not social workers.


Can scientific social theory overcome this obstacle to science? Yes, we can.
 

Let´s give a try:
Violence (reduction to the body) comes with life, with the natural world as it happened on Earth, like the reduction movement of a worm, completed by an expansion movement to go forward; or like the beat of the heart.


Violence is every try to consolidate (social and environmental) energy to survive, and grow old, and reproduce the species. Violence is both receiving it and delivering it, victimization and aggression, both psychological and physical, most of the time no life or injury threatening. It is an all-time everyday activity, that designs our memories and stone miles of our experience of life in our minds, without which no one lives.


Violence is not a bad, or good, thing. Our moral and identity connotate it differently, regarding power, caring and identity each depend on. By itself, emotions (as love) are not good or bad. The same with violence. One can recognize both, emotions and violence, linked tom opposite morals and habits of connotation. Further, it is not easy to go ahead aware of the way words can be separated from connotations that usually come with it.


Emotion is automatic and feelings are reflexive (Damasio): the former uses high speed (out of the scoop of our senses); the latter comes and goes to the brain, slow enough to be managed by it.


The same reasoning can be used to address violence/conflict connotations in an anti-cartesian way. No judicial or communication case (two contenders out of its social and natural environment, with no links to the past and to the future). One needs to build a social case, political, economic, cultural, social, demographic, historic, densified and integrated.


Violence is the relationship between biology and social levels of reality (states of mind): top find out how the expansion of the body, to higher and out, came together with successive reductions to the body. To look to this vital movements, one needs to adopt an emergence theory.


Emergence is urgency and, also, Fenix like event, with no known cause, creation or transformation. This suggests we use violence and conflict as complementary concepts: violence is regular routine, regarding different already known situations, and conflict is a, now and then, organized promotion of new routines; trying to build new situations or to abolish old situations, in a reflexive mode.


Methods:
A) Integrated results of social experience: To look for old abolished states of mind, now a day state of mind and new emerging states of mind. To follow their story, adaptation, glory, and decay, through history. To design a definition of each one of them;
B) Levels of social production: To look to different caring activities that support different social identities and the different processes of hierarchization that deliver elites´ power.
C) How the Empire state of mind evolve? Through discrimination (word connotations and social stigmas), elitism (to understand de legitimation of each hierarchical place in society) and dissimulation of the truth (to find logical incongruences covered by ideologies and sciences, including social theories)


Dissimulation techniques, adding the emotion/feeling and violence/conflict examples:
a) Ontological opposition between people and society;
b) Presenting the state and markets as different and before societies;
c) Presenting the state as Defensor of people, and individual people, from foreigners and from society, and nature;
d) Presenting society as potentially not cooperating with the economy and the latter as a priority, since else no society is possible;
e) Society as a system: national borders as skin; institutions as organizations, and people (workers or clients or citizens) as outsiders;
f) Presenting the alliance between state and markets as emancipatory by imposing attitudes and working lives according to hierarchies promising better lives that never happens;
g) Presenting the alliance between state and society as deal designed freely by everybody how votes, when it is not the case.
 

Lesson 3. Violence as a natural expression of life

 

Lesson 1. abolitionist sociology: looking at injustices (like the secrets hidden by violence) head-on, trying to find out how it is (not) possible to face them

 

Violence is outside the scope of social studies: it is imagined as anti-social (it is the underprivileged and the stigmatized who cause the violence of which they themselves are victims; they are minorities who refuse to integrate, like women, immigrants, LGBT people, gypsies, who provoke the reaction of authorities, such as the police, and do not accept help from social workers). Hyperspecialization of SS (social sciences) do not allow one to discuss what society is. It focuses on select society (power, from above) and blurs naturalized society (care, identities, social relationships with nature, including violence).

Lesson 2. concepts of violence: macro look incompatible with micro look. One need to explore concepts capable of crossing levels of reality, such as state of mind and empire and others.

 

Social theory provides concepts and methods capable of dealing with violence, on the condition of working consciously apart from hyperdisciplinary practices. Multilevel application concepts - such as dispositions (Bourdieu), civilizational process (Elias), religious ethics (Durkheim, Weber), revolutionary spirit (Marx), social energy (Collins), violence (Reemptsma), self and the generalized other (Mead), the genealogy of knowledge-power (Foucault), universal substrate (Shofield), to which biological theories about the needs of care and identities must be added, supported by fear, shame, anguish (Diel, Scheff, Girard).
My suggestion is to identify states of mind in space-time, from the bottom up. The imperial spirit seems to me to be central to understanding social theory and organizing its criticism and deconstruction.

Lesson 3. natural violence: a) violence is part of the whole expression of life; b) there is good and bad violence; c) there is exposed violence and hidden violence; d) moralism shows exposed violence and hides hidden violence; METHOD: zoom in zoom out - as the worm does to move
 

Lesson 2 - Sociological theories and analysis of violence

Use all theoretical useful references (instead of using only the right theory)

1. Historical frame of violence (Wieviorka): who are the military and cultural enemies (aggressor and victim)?

2. Physical and psychological violence (Collins); what are the violent situations (such as war and judicial cases)?

3. Reduction to the body (Reemtsma); what are the processes (victimization dynamics)?

4. Expansion of the body (Dores): what are the processes (dynamics of aggression)?

Empire, violence and ideological aparatus

Lesson 1 - Presentation

1. abolitionist sociologist

2. opposition to sociology (university) humiliation (first intervention as prof)

3. opposition to the humiliation evaluation (“I didn't understand anything” / do nothing, in consequence)

4. secret ("this serves the bourgeoisie; how? I don't know!")I know:a) “as CS is useless” complex of inferiority and ideological secrecyb) "is psychology not sociology?"C) method: exclusive attention to power (“everything is power”, as in a revolution) and a lack of care, identities, nature and violence

5. How to interpret humiliating sociology, humiliating evaluation, social secrets, power and human nature? Empire (state of mind that uses discrimination to legitimize elites in a hidden way, as if it were natural and ineluctable)

6. What is there to do? Understand human nature (sociability of states of mind and evolution) and the empire: denouncing as ideological discriminations, as exploiting elites of nature, an ideological and scientific dissimulation.

7. This is done through the recognition of the greatest social secrets produced by the social sciences: a) there is an inverted pyramid that symbolically supports modernization (there is no change in the constant of relative social mobility or equal opportunities); b) maintaining the focus on imitating the dominant classes and forgetting popular cultures is done by devaluing the relevance of life (Earth and biology, natural sciences), nature, care, identities and violence (treating the elderly, children, women, those who do not have or want power, traditional therapies, food cultures, physical well-being, nature cultivation).


2019


Lesson 10 - Class struggle and  violent social lock to middle classes

 

The essence of Evil, John W. Whitehead, 2019

Transformative Justice

 

The news brought by the link above speaks of part of the world represented by the hidden but actually existing second triangle of social life, below: the search for and supply of children for sexual purposes, for sexual sacrifice, is the expression of the man´s sharing of power against women, both in the symbolic and perverse sense.


To compare the US with Portugal, in this respect as in other respects, do reassure us; we can say that this is something that only happens there, or that at least only happens there with such a dimension. It is a way to avoid confronting us with reality. It would be easier to know that something like that is going on in China or Russia or Africa, which for different reasons are seen as perverse societies. But not ours and, above all, not our family and ourselves.
Of course, no one will publicly expose himself as someone who knows hate crimes like the ones we are referring to. But it is also true that everyone involved in this mega-business does not denounce what they are involved in, and they are capable of intimidating all those who do not participate directly, but knowingly and quietly: all of us. All justified by social theory itself that only looks at the upper triangle and admits and complains that we think that the bottom triangle is the world of violence, cruelty, exoticism that has nothing to do and does not mix with the society of solidarity and politically controlled, for example, through the illusion that meritocracy criteria are in place.


Social secrets are at the same time a (sacrificial, see later) social will and a respected process as the limit of the knowledge of the social sciences: violence is omitted and taken as antisocial, although omnipresent. It is treated as an uncommon and ignored specialization of mainstream social theory.


There is, therefore, the class struggle - which is political violence treated as acceptable violence - that some say it exists even without obvious violence and others say that there is only a class struggle because there are those who want to provoke it to take the place of the current leaders. For some, the class struggle is the nature of things and for others, the class struggle is an ideology that provokes violence. (Which corresponds to the contrast between critical sociology and academic sociology).


Neither one nor the other takes violence as something similar to pain, something proper to live, with important functions to maintain and reproduce life. Namely, functions that stimulate sexuality and the processes of raising children, such as childbirth in mammals and the sacrifices that caregivers, usually the parents, do to bring their children into adulthood in good condition to have a good life.


Sacrifice is not only paternal and supportive. They are also and at the same time imposed on third parties, as a way of conditioning the competition for survival that life imposes on us all. There are sacrifices for abandoned children, served for sexual purposes (especially girls) and for the purpose of atonement of crimes (prison sentences, especially against boys).
A third of children do not have hot meals if schools do not provide them, in return for a stigma imposed by families being poor. Half the population in Portugal is poor, so it can be assumed that a significant proportion of poor families can escape school stigmatization. But most can not.


The bottom triangle, we can imagine, is not just a few remains of people: it is about half of the population. Half of the population disappears from the radars of the social sciences, which treat them as people equal to all others: equal and free. As if the sacrifices were outdated practices and not practiced in modernity.


It is, of course, an illusion. It is a form of apology for modern society, for propaganda, for the imposition of ideologies that venerate what exists and hide the unpleasant part of what is happening (besides wars, genocides, refugees, immigrants, forced sex industries, illicit drugs, arms organized by states, such as prisons, organizations for the care of isolated persons, etc.).
The denunciation of the errors of social theories and the study of sacrificial violence (good and bad) and pleasant violence (such as consensual sex or sport) can be summed up by the figure of a social lock that tacitly intimidates the middle classes.


The repressive state contrasts with the sacrificed classes, fuelled by misery and the prohibition of solidarity with such people organized by laws and practices of charity and control of poverty. In the midst of this violent social relationship are the middle classes, fearful of falling into poverty and also disgusted by the decisions of the state, giving politics (and bosses, in general) the loathsome idea associated. This fear, this shame, produces the sense of insecurity that promotes and sustains legitimate sacrificial practices, professional pride and work sacrifice, at the service of those who pay for our subsistence. Sensations that are later manipulated by the state to justify the performance of their repressive systems, as if they were at the service of society and not the elites of the moment.


Transformative Justice is a example of social policies that can be put into practice, if people become free to do so. They have the potential to reveal the sacrificial basis of modern societies.
 

Lesson 9. Trauma as a tool of power

Trauma as subordinating tool (2019-Prezi)

Power and violence are closely linked. Those who use violence are also using their power. Vice versa is not compulsory, but there is always a basis of prior violence, a basis of threat of violence, which accompanies any exercise of power.

One can distinguish submission power from subordination power. The first case corresponds to voluntary acts of following a leadership, saving the energies of deciding where to go, in each moment. Subordination corresponds to an evolution from submission to a situation of non-retreat: once in a position of subordination, people pay a high cost to withdraw. People expose themselves to violence whenever they try to abandon subordination position.
In modern states use subordination. It is inherited from earlier types of society and it is inherited from history. Modern societies encompasses more people than before, potentially everyone. In this sense, one can speak of totalitarian state (Big Brother).

One of the tools to produce subordination is trauma. By trauma one understand the consequences of violence due to the (non) resilience of those who lived it. The trauma works like dead violence. It works out of the presence of new acts of violence. Violence is revived in the imagination and works physiologically and psychically as if violence were being exercised, without the action of aggressors.

This human characteristic is used by the powerful as a way of maintaining power, even after their leadership functions cease to be socially useful in the perspective of the common good.
The effects of traumas are transmitted from generation to generation, with different intensities. The intensity of the effects of trauma may increase when revival, even in the experience of those who did not experience the trauma directly. The older generations can, like the younger generation, receive the effects of the traumas from the generation in between. It can spread for generations ahead.

The trauma embodies, becomes an integral part of the identity of each one, in terms of personal history and expectations. All of this is done in a transparent, non-conscious way for people and for societies. Even trauma itself hides itself, so to speak, insofar as the repugnance to violent situations spontaneously departs from the simple memory of what has happened (a memory that has been recorded in a less lucid way, for thus the senses work in situations of violence). All this circumstances makes trauma a useful regime to conceal social secrets (justice, war, state, families, etc.) using simply threat of violence.

The professionalization of the social sciences, working to social integration and individualistic modernization of societies under social states, serves the process of subordination insofar as it destroys the traumatic traces in society. For example, it ignores history and ignore material difficulties of survival of people living in adverse environments (hunger, misery). Because it ignores the generations traumatic heritages, social sciences concentrate their attention on isolated individuals, relegating trauma problems to psychology, individual abnormality, disease, each one of which is one of the main tool to transform violence into subordination.
 

Lesson 8. The mechanical-rigid levels and complex-empirical levels: different conception of social world

To think about violence (reduction to the body) one must abandon the dominant social theory (macro violence of Wieviorka - a framework of violence - irreducibly separated from micro-violence - exclusively physical violence).

Modes of social organization, such as families, corporations, and empire, are states of mind embodied by force and by seduction, individually and socially, during conflicting integration processes. Violence can destroy bodies and societies, but it also builds them.

The levels of empirical reality depend on the ability to distinguish elites at the top and profiled people at the bottom, through discriminatory connotations and the credible threat of unbalanced violence.

Definition of violence:

Separated from everything else (physical contact in Collins, situations identified as violent by people, because violence comes from "outside", form “cruelty” in Wieviorka) violence constructs a subsystem, a criminal system or a war system.

Mixed in a way that is difficult to discern from reality, the study of violence allows one to understand what moralism is (Manichaeism around violence) and the implication of research in violent actions (ideology of respect for established powers, those ending up telling history their own way).

It is up to the researcher to avoid moralism and to choose the implication with which s/he will feel better to work with violence. The value of analysis depends on the ability to deepen the knowledge of social moral consciousness, rather than on the existing moralism that favors dominant positions (more protected from violence).

To look for State/power involvement in the case (top-down); to look for caring/identitiy implications in the case (bottom-up) - zoom out and zoom in assessement.

Wieviorka & Collins theories of social violence + reduction to the body

Pluralist pragmatism VS holist conceptualization (substract: incorporated emotions on manipulated identities and spectations)

Lesson 7. Resilience: caring and identities

Empire, violence and ideological aparatus

The social sciences are part of the society and of the violence that it integrates. Why do not students and teachers realize the violence they are involved in?
Only the theory of violence as reduction to the body would help to answer these questions. What social theories have to do with geo-strategic framework of violence? How do the struggles between states (the Cold War, globalization, etc.) imply people who do not decide the political strategies of affirmation of states in the concert of nations? Why does geo-strategic violence impose itself as a general framework of violence? Are not the states about building pace? One might also ask how the symbolic violence - such as the antagonisms of national identities - can have practical effects on physical violence, not only in wars but also in hooligans in sports, for example?

A great difference between theories of violence as reduction to the body and those of violence and physical violence is that the former refer to the animal life, so to speak; it refers to the human species. It do not refer to violence exceptions in modern human daily life: it refers to the use of violence as way of social domination.

To explain it better, we can consider a very long-term 5,000-year old social framework of violence rather than the frameworks studied by Wieviorka aged 30-50 years. The empire is an organization blueprint old of a few thousand years old, different from family, club, gang type of blueprint organization models. Civilizations (both in the West and in the East) are heirs of the experiences of empire. It is within the framework of the empire that violence begins to be used on a previously unknown scale and planning, in war and in social control.

What is the empire: it is a misogynist, elitist and dissimulated society project (a state of mind). It uses the connotations of words as forms of inculcation of lasting moralistic feelings, imposing behaviors appropriate to the discrimination of gender of people with different social statutes. People turn into individual, since each one of us become as essence (we are leaders, workers, women, slaves, children, migrants, since ever and forever). This emotional classification of genres serves the production of elites living separate lives from the rest of the populations. Leaders who are also born leaders, benefiting from imperial misogyny. The implementation of these mutually articulated mechanisms and their consequences are firmly denied by elaborate schemes of concealment, of which the sciences and social sciences are heirs and an integral part.

The empire should not be understood as an ineluctable design of God. This is the idea that the elites promote to conceal the very strong and labor-intensive organization that maintains and reproduces the elites and subordinate peoples. Elites and empires are always at risk of decay, pushed by social movements claiming for justice. The empire is a recent human creation - only 5,000 years old - and it was stated with much patience and hard work, experiencing many defeats as well, defeats used to learn how to make the empire better.

The Roman empire, and all the rest of the classical world, are gone. The Ottoman, the Russian and the Chinese, ended in the twentieth century. The last two reemerged from within the communists that destroyed their respective empires. The nineteenth-century British empire was destroyed by the American empire, during the great world wars of the first half of the twentieth century. At present, it seems that the transition of the headquarters of the empire from Washington to Beijing is taking place.

The empire is a way of strategically imagining social relations that has been experienced and passed down through the ages. It is a social blueprint that is very effective and efficient. It arouses the admiration and sacrifices of those who believe in the promises of redemption, that one day human beings will cease to be animals and will be able to live as gods.
 

Lesson 6  - Work´s review

The work steps, till the final evaluation report, are four. First phase: a description of the violence case to study, as precisely and accurately as possible.

To focus on a particular case of study, it is necessary removing all fait divers as much as possible (zoom in). At the same time, each cases of violence are part of the chain of cases that follow each other in series and/or in parallel (zoom out).

A strange killing in a cult manifestation or at a political meeting or a police beating after a demonstration should be presented in detail and, also, as part of movements that stop, start, or grew of decrease after the violence occur.

The second step: once the specific case is detailed, the Wieviorka, Collins and body-reduction theories apply to the cases.

The macro analysis of Wieviorka, including his analysis of movements of victims that call to protective rights, may give opportunity to discuss how the killings produce sense (or not) at a macro level analysis. For instance, how the Swedish government attitude to disclaim dealing with the killing, in benefit of the courts alleviate political field of the engagement. And how popular rising impose to prime minister to follow its agenda.

Collins's micro-analysis claim that situations, not people, are violent; the violent few are trained to do so, and among these, only a few are able to acquire skills to distract themselves for violence tension; they become violent, avoiding their victims' looks and minimizing the emotions that generally prevent people from being violent; the violent seek easy targets and, people without ability to react.  

The analysis of violence as a reduction to the body allows, in addition to the description of violence, to evaluate how it fits in the way people and societies transform violence into positive situations, using and increasing their resilience, mobilizing themselves and others to produce hope for better lives.

In the third stage of the work, which has now begun, we call for necessary information for full clarification of the case of violence: whether or not the killer killed someone, who were killed and how both killer and victim meet each other. Going through the case with the help of different theories involves asking questions about what has happened, some of them with no known answer. For each of these questions, a methodological plan would be developed to collect useful information to inform relevant aspects of the case. Such a list of questions and methods will be added to the two previous reports.

Lesson 5. Theory aplication to cases

Conflict and violence (2019-Prezi)

There are conceptions of violence coming from theory of social conflict tradition and coming from bio-social theories.

There are differences between conflict theories (as those developed by Wieviorka and Collins: groups define themselves by compared power, neglecting analysis and hiding caring and identities production through generations) and theories of violence, as a reduction to the body (typical from live activities, which supports both impression – incorporation – and expression - printing in society signs of existence).

The first two theories presupposes the separation of the individual from society and the third presupposes society as life considered at certain levels created by evolution. The first two theories presuppose the exceptional creation of violence by the extraordinary will of an aggressor against a victim. The third theory presupposes the daily existence of violence that most of time do not escalade. The prevention of escalation, the appeasement of violent situations through social mechanisms, calling for study. Prevention will therefore depend, in the case of the first two theories, on the annulment of the will of the few violent (bad) people - probably through (good) violence. In the case of the theory of reduction to the body, the capacity for identification and destruction of social mechanisms of escalation, among which the empire, is what one can expect to deliver.

Wieviorka and Collins are two very different authors of the sociology of violence. The main contributions of the first are a) the definition of the general framework of social violence (successively in Europe, the World Wars, the Cold War, the War against stateless terrorism, the new historical phase of Russia-China vs. US); b) the post-May-1968 emergence of social movements to identify victims.

Collins studied micro-violence, physical violence, and discover that people are naturally non-violent. People can be violent for escaping from violence. In cities, as in wars, people escape as much as they can from violence. There are situations that do not allow escaping. People lose energy when they engage in violence, and they need this energy to live better. That is why people face violent situations and feel a tension that spontaneously inhibits them from engaging in violence. When they are socially stimulated to perform violent tasks, thus deserving professional promotion or social prestige, those rare people who learn techniques to escape the emotional tension that emerges in situations becoming violent.

Both authors wish to contribute to the abolishing of violence. They do not refer to the abolition of violent institutions, such as the police, the armed forces, prisons. Neither of these authors studies the state's violence against societies, nor do they question the reason why sociology abandoned the issue to the police and criminal law, as if they knowledge of a world is different from the knowledge of the social world.

The definition of violence as a reduction to the body does not admit the possibility of an end to violence. It call for a reformulation of social theories, reconciling them with the dialectic of life that expands out of the body and reduces to the body, in alternating motions, like the beating of the heart or the filling of the lungs. The cycles of violence-expansion of the body can be observed at the micro (people) or macro (institutions, groups, societies) level and can be characterized in the difference of dispositions to carry out hostile or unintentional violent acts (like accidents at work) in higher or lower scale.

For the good observation of violence, we should not be drawn by moralistic and criminal considerations. For that propose, we must acknowledge the way violence is everywhere (reduction to the body), eventually with positive results (such as sport or sex), sometimes with emotionally trapped results (such as in schools and professions).

To analyze cases, one must look to the social conditions that produced the violent circumstances that led people into violence. One must understand how aggressors, victims and bystanders, including social media reporters and sociologists, how each person did develop her/his social identity (through care that supports identities and power relations), and how he or she was caught up in violent situations. How people become homeless, living in dangerous neighborhoods, choosing the police profession, raised in endemic abusive social support institutions, as it is now recognized to be the case of the Church).

Lesson 4 - Clarifying the subject, testing theories and applying methods

Focus on a case of violence (2019-Prezi)

Studying the violence (2019)

One needs to start from a case of violence, a focused empirical subject of study. Students should be aware that what happened is not easy to describe. Violence emotional perturbation, side effects on the violence action, criminal interpretation of the case, social prejudice, etc., make it hard to make a straightforward clean description of violence. One need to describe also the limits of the data available about the events.

Each person involved in the violence scene will or will not have witnesses to what may have happened. Each person involved also knows what their place in the criminal trial is: prosecution witness, complainant or defendant, which are the two non-symmetrical positions provided in criminal courts. The way sociologist do is to empathize with each one of the actors, one at the time.  

Given a good description of the object of study, it is necessary to apply, in test form, different theories about what violence is. Reading the text Violence in Society one can consider 3 theories: Wieviorka´s theory on the structural and historical frameworks of violence; Collins´s theory, on micro violence, and reduction to the body theory.

Collins wrote that it is situations that are violent, not the people. People spontaneously resist emotionally engaging in situations of violence: there are violent people who are accustomed and are encouraged by their social network to behave violently. Most of the people learned how to avoid violent situations. Some of us did not learned that. Defenseless victims are unlikely to create problems (retaliation, social or institutional condemnation for the violent abuser) following the use of violence.

The theory of violence as reduction to the body and management of violence in favor of the empire is what I will recommend. This theory, unlike the first two, considers the study of state / empire violence and its social repercussions indispensable to any analysis of violence, especially in conditions of postmodernity or globalization or surveillance society.

Questions of method: besides the already addressed in the previous class, we draw attention to the need to, at the same time, distinguish and integrate different levels of reality and different sensitivities of analysis. Zoom in (attention to all the details of the violent action chosen, also identifying information gaps) and zoom out (identify violence tables at local, institutional, national, international levels) exercises do provide lines of investigation and explanation. It is necessary to exercise the empathy capacity with the victims and with the aggressors. One should ask how it was possible becoming caught by the violent situation.

 

Lesson 3 - Looking for a scientific definition of violence

 

Common language use violence as refering to espontaneous violence, bottom up violence. Organized violence, state violence, is represented as protecting society and common people, including those who are violent from themselves and their companion.

 

From the scientific point of view we need to find a way to manage not to discriminate between the different types of violence. Even professionally and ideologically bottom-up and top-down violence are discriminated.

One can distinct violence from morals, even it can be hard to that. Most of the time violence call for Manicheism positions, for and against the police, for instance. One side do think police as a defender of society and other part can see it as potential unpunished offender.

Morals is about each one convictions and depends on experience. Rightwing and order fans are more likely to support police even in violent unjustifiable situations, and leftwing and libertarian fans are more likely to blame police for brutality. In all cases, the support or the blame depend on the victim is someone people care or discriminate as wrongdoer.

Different historical and social situations do develop different sensitivities about violence and violent actors. Under attack, people become easier violent against whoever and in peace is more likely you find peaceful people.

To avoid personal, social, situational morals, one need to develop and test a conception of violence out of moralism, even it is hard to do that. One need intellectual distance from our own prejudgments and prejudices.

To the promotion of these characteristics, one can try to use the following definition: violence is a reduction to the body.

Other ways of reduction to the body (sleeping, for instance) are not violence. Violence is part of the moves in the same direction: to the body, to incorporate.

Violence is effective on promotion incorporating processes, such as in hostage situations, when people suffer from Stockholm syndrome. This is independent of having god of bad results (for instance, one expect good consequences from imprisonment to prevent crime).

What seems clear is that violence reduce people to their bodies, both aggressors and victims. If this is good or bad, for them, or for the state, or for society, or for economy, is other questions.

Violence, from this point of view, is part of everyday life; it is part of the experience of living, sometimes good, sometimes dad. Violence is a move that complete expansion out of the body.

We grow experiencing more capabilities to live expansions out of the body, as social networking, as mind adding abilities, confidence, auto control, discipline. The learning processes evolve reducing students and teachers to their bodies, when they engage in violent classes of teaching and learning. Meanwhile they all grow also out of their bodies, learning from these didactical experiences and becoming professionals of the same métier.

For analysis sake, beside common power analysis, students will be asked to deliver caring and indentities analysis of each chosen case of violence.  

Power

Caring

Identities

Politic Família bonds (strong or weak) Espectations
Economic

Personal disciplina (will)

Projects
Cultural Condição vs aparência (home vs car) Internal conversations

 

 

Lesson 2 - Violence in neighborhoods

 

 

A.P. Dores, Who are the prisoners? Revista Crítica Penal y Poder, nº 14, 2018.

 

Neighborhoods violence is related to poverty, lake of good housing and jobs, both in Chicago and Seixal, Lisbon. Merton´s explanation on anomie compares equal cultural patterns of consumption, produced by media advertising, and inequal capability of buying the different products that shows social bondage to society. This unbalance comes together with higher probability of poor and uneducated people to be incarcerated. So, from a sociological point of view it seems correct to conclude from the data that poor people are more likely to commit crimes because they share society values and do not gather equal share of income.
 

The error of this reasoning is to take as equal prisoners and criminals. It is common knowledge that the more damaging criminals do not go to jail. It is not common knowledge but it is also known that there are prisoners that did not commit crimes for what they are condemn for and most incarcerated are grown ups that when they were children were abandoned by their families.
 

Police, as it happens in war on drugs, manage the clandestine markets instead of abolish them. Because it is impossible to abolish them, and still there is no political measures to minimize damages – for instance, using health care services instead of police.


When it comes to poor neighborhoods, as Bairro Jamaica, in Seixal, for decades it was allowed (and still is) people living in very unhuman conditions without public intervention, except stigmatizing the place and its residents by police force.


As it happens everywhere, in Chicago and Seixal, maybe there is a common ground for the similar kind of events to happen in so different societies. By hypotheses, police protecting elites would develop strategies of dividing people to open the floor to elite rule. Signaling the violence coming bottom-up, from dangerous neighborhoods, police shows up as protecting the rest of society staging a war with poor people, projecting everyone as pro-elite and threatened by masses of non-integrated people, as black, gypsies, immigrant workers, etc.


Social science´s professionals do not work with violence because they share the social work with the police: police are the professional of violence and social works do not work with violence, even they can try to deescalate conditions of violence – only from bottom-up perspective, working with poor and stigmatized people to incite them to avoid using violence.
 

To understand cases of violence one needs to have good and detailed information about what really happened – there is always at least to side of a story – and we need to have a long run perspective about how the stage of violence was built and still is maintained, many times for a long time.
 

Lesson 1 - Presentation

1927´s Copenhagen conference, physics chose pluralistic way to do science and let down holistic one. Conceptualization drop close to zero. Pragmatic relations between mathematics and technology – technoscience – take the floor, supporting technocracy. The professionalization of the social sciences, under Parsons System´s theory as scholar book, start few years later, finding inspiration in cybernetics (machines working under math programming), in the context of the emerging New Deal. Critical movements against Parsons' schooling and theories were not able to avoid the continuous flow of his views. 1970s Marxian like social sciences critic of Parson´s pragmatic analysis join his efforts to produce static and alien to reality theory, obeying authors instead of building incorporated ideas. Today, teaching sociology is about manual reading instead of effective experimental critical action.

Social science do not anymore aspire to become a science. It presumes human activities are incomprehensible. They may only be controlled and redirected by seduction (commercial or intellectual) or by force (state policing).  

The sociology of violence can choose to become another specialization of sociology: a study of the uses of violence AGAINST power (the violence coming from power is taboo, in social sciences). The sociology of violence can choose exercise self-criticism of social theory, denouncing the unjustifiable violence of the state; regardless the state fund our professions.

Beside the reverent study of power, sociology of violence must engage in studying all caring worlds hidden from public and power stages. Caring is the stuff from which identities are built from biological characteristics incorporated by living experiences as dispositions, abilities, power, in each and all human beings.

We can make a sociology out of the responsibility of understanding the world and humanity (centripetal science) or we can use sociology to collaborate with all kinds of knowledge, including the specialized knowledge of the social sciences and their respective disciplines, to learn even better what the world is about (centrifugal science).


2018


Violence in society (2014)

 

Collaborative science and the conception of violence (2018)

 

 

What is changing about violence? New ways of understanding rape as imoral (gender equality mov.);  new ways of taking property from commons (rule of law)

What is continuing about violence? Rape (gendered sexual abuse), urban speculation (capitalism)

Power+caring+identity / organization against instability / imperial organization

 

 

Congo´s crisis

World monetary corruption (US Congressional Hearing of Saudi billionaire "maan  Al Sanea"  and Money Laundering with bank of America)

What to do to tackle shoot guns at schools?

School and prisons

The Earth and man kind

 

"Nothing to Hide" (1:26 movie) - post-modern commercial and state violence (reduction to the body in a way that reproduces imperial organization: gender discrimination, hierarchical power maintanance in spectacular dissimulated manners)

Lesson 10 - Summary of lessons

    The common-sense concept violence coming bottom-up, outside from power struggles, must be challenged. The strategic framework, organized by states (by empire), within which violence spreads in a positive and negative way exists and is maintained by force (Wieviorka). The concept of violence will not be treatable by sociology, since it, as a science, intentionally excluded value judgments that are linked to violence (Wieviorka). To begin with a sociology of violence, Collins proposes, we must observe violence in motion (which can only be done in relation to direct, physical, legally recognizable violence, out of doubt). Reemtsma suggests a different definition of violence as a reduction to the body, which we will use in the course. It would serve macro and micro analysis of violence as expressions of living bodies and societies.
    The advantage of understanding violence as a reduction to the body is to introduce life in the analysis (reduction and expansion of species and specimens, within the framework of the work of evolution of life). This, on the other hand, requires a rupture with current social theory. The subject of study becomes the unique experience of humanity and the imperial organization, which is the most effective organization ever. It seeks to unify the world against itself, that is, to unify humanity by force against nature, exploring it.
    The empire resulted from the relative and competitive efficacy of the articulation of misogyny (gender discrimination), elitism (hierarchization) and illusion (manipulation the virtual world of imagination by seductive language and art) in the realization of the practical needs of language use (naming always come with connotations), use of cooperation (bossing for decision monopoly and privileges over vertical cooperation) and the use of performative art (politics, rhetoric, promises) for the incorporation of dominant language and cooperation in everyone´s bodys.
    The idea of ​​physical detachment from the subjects of study recommended, by methodological sociology textbooks and practiced in schools by separating the ranks of methods and theories, is appropriate to produce performative arts (humanities, literature, fiction) but unsuitable for producing science. In the latter case, the best recommendation, of course, is to develop the deepest physical and spiritual involvement with the subject of study, as Wacquant suggests. Distancing will take place conceptually and not physically.
    The appropriate methodology for the study of violence at break with traditional social science methodologies should be organized around the 3 dimensions of analysis foreseen in lesson 3. Other concepts can also help:
    In the framework of the proposed theory-methodology (imperial violence) emerges the relevance of social phenomena such as the natural secret (limitations of human attention capacity) manipulated socially (through states, organizers of politics, with the participation of schools and the media).
    States emerged around the most effective organization of collective violence and evolved through the potential of incorporating forms of cooperation as social-professional identities. People, adaptive like no other living being, become instruments of the empire on their own free will, as a form of personal self-identification, as a sense of common life, as energizing social solidarity and, at the same time, compromising freedom and equality (the famous social inequalities).
    The spirit of sacrifice (solidarity or mysticism) has always been the most effective way of establishing cooperation among people, with a view to the survival and evolution of the species. Violence (reduction to the body) is pleasurable but risky: the sense of duty or heroicity may include damage to the chances of survival of the sacrificed individuals. But it gives meaning to life, without which the struggle for survival would be impossible. No wonder, therefore, that the victims have been organized into sacrificial positions. Including in modern societies.

It will be impossible (and undesirable) to abolish violence and sacrifice. But it is possible (and desirable) to abolish organized retaliation, on the international scene and within the framework of state and corporate activities, as much as within families.

Lesson 9. Abuse, sacrifice, retaliation, organization - violence and morals

Wilkinson and Pickett show the existence of society (solidarity, equality), in contrast to the (hierarchical) state and the (competitive) market: fewer social problems with greater equality (less bad humor and depressions as well). Clark shows the empire: organizational capacity against the tendency towards equality (elitism and misogyny, hierarchy and discrimination, favored by retaliation used as manipulation of human nature). It is under the empire that markets and capitalist economies develop.

Rituals of superiority respond to the awareness of the precariousness of existence, in the double meaning of life and living conditions. Human ability to survive is socially tested as a form of survival, from the earliest age: rituals of passage, and then on to war.

The spirit of sacrifice results from submission to rituals of superiority, until the rights of superiority (spirit of forbidding and imagining missions, authoritarian and democratic leadership, management, coercion and seduction) are deserved.

Such rights of superiority are difficult to attain and maintain. But very satisfactory from the point of view of "the law of liberating from death", the erase of each one existence form memory, since the body presence is no more possible.

The mode of imperial organization maximizes the stability of superiority and the spirit of sacrifice (without hope of superiority, unless mediated by the imperial elite).

The existence of a modern social mobility that would not previously exist, under the aristocratic regime (by contrast to modern meritocratic regime), is denied by Clark. It claims to be an illusion that there are different mobility regimes. In spite of the manifest increase in nominal income in modern societies, the intensification of the production of names of social roles (professions) in increasingly specialized and hierarchical organizations, the exponential increase in the production of school certificates, all together, in practical terms, as Villaverde Cabral pointed out referring to Portuguese case, results in an increase in income (the modernization of the Portuguese economy and state) AND an increase in social inequalities, mainly through relative poverty. This is also what Louçã would say concluding the study of the elite´s families and social networks in Portugal. The same one can understand reading the family names of the professors of the faculties of law and medicine or comparing the sex of the authors of sociology literature compared with the sex of the majority of sociologists. Elitism and misogyny are probably grossly similar to what they have always been, despite appearances (ideologies and dissimulations, political and social sciences). The struggles against imperial organization are strong and not strong enough. As Pierre Bourdieu put it in France in the 1960s, the school does nothing more than reproduce the middle class, limiting the rise of the children of the workers. If social distinctions are no longer made through law, they continue to be made by cultural means.

Lesson 8 - Evolution of organized violence

Violence, the organization of violence through the teaching of the arts of war and the diffusion of propaganda (demonization of the enemy and sanctification of "ours"), never ceased to be at the center of the significant activity of societies. History is presented as interrupted by acts of the greatest violent. History is told always on the side of the winner.

The propaganda is part of that process of evolution and intimidation that is the military organization and its civil consequences. The social sciences themselves are not free from this context of war in which social organization (imperial and bourgeois) is generated. The winning strategy of the dominant bourgeoisie omit the presence of structural violence in modern societies. The social sciences outsource the violence of society and the market, separating social control systems - such as social services and police or the criminal system - from the military and criminal police security system from the society itself. "Anti-social" violence comes bottom up. Top down is security measures to avoid violence.

Violence is absent from social theory because it is represented as antisocial, outside society, to the same extent as nature, minorities, criminals, etc.. Violence can also be presented as being outside society, as foreigners, traditions, specters of the which was the human species before it became modern. The dominant systems theory in the social sciences allows this arbitrary discrimination between the parts of society. Social theories, depending on the political evaluations of funders and the understanding of common sense, arbitrarily cut society (in dimensions, levels, systems) more in function of the reception of the public than in function of the cognitive pertinence. Mainstream doctrine come first than knowledge. That is why each sociologist can choose his or her own doctrine (sometimes presented as theory) and stop discussions about it with other sociologists (axiological neutrality).

In contrast to science, where discussions about study objects are developed within science, the social sciences validate their theories and discussions in terms of the political and social acceptance of their theses and the power to assert themselves against other theories competitors. This explains the hyperspecialization and the mutual isolation of disciplines and subdisciplines among themselves.

The sociological treatment of violence (whether in Wieviorka mode, without any attempt to define what is violence or in Collins mode, reducing violence to the "objectivity" of physical violence) is a specialization that does not require a reform of dominant social theory. The discussion of what might be the best definition of violence for sociological use, for example around the notion of reduction to the body, can only be organized and carried out if one build the possibility of questioning the anti-scientific practices of the actual sciences social policies. Or if it constitutes a sociological current of thought isolated from all others.

If, instead of modern society or civilizations, in their diversity, is the human species, in its singular whole, product and agent of the evolution of life, taken as the object of study, the fallacious argument that it is not possible to adopt scientific methods for the study of societies because they are very close to us and we are emotionally involved with them do not apply anymore. Arguments that serve to justify and stimulate racism embodied in theories when they discriminate against what are not modern organizations as if they were part of nature do not apply automatically, as they do today.

Lesson 7 - Social secret

Social secrecy is a broad-spectrum phenomenon, such as violence, which can make violence an imperceptible phenomenon and its revelation a surprise and even a scandal. We have an idea that because we are awake we are aware of everything going on around us. We do not realize that the habitual and the extraordinary escape permanently to our senses and to our conscience.

This characteristic of human nature (to be aware only of a small part of what happens around us) must be associated with the empire, which is a mode of organization of the expansion of competences and qualities of elites particularly effective and that has developed under the strictest organized violence (organized violence between the elites and in the military form also, way of imposition of the superiority of the elites and their maintenance through territorial expansion, capable of nourishing the ambitions of increasing the number of people forming part of the elites). Social secrecy is manipulated (to build specialties, people that should pay attention to a specific aspect of reality and forget all others), along with violence, to allow the maintenance of these elites (Novak, Hirschman).

During the war, people lose memory of what they have been and become other people, who may not want to acknowledge after the end of the war (Levi). Eventually causing problems of identity and self-flagellation or post-traumatic stress, in turn also objects of secrecy.

During the revolutions this also happens. Revolutionary periods reveal a new personality when experiencing new situations. The same happens when people fall in love or get involved in social movements.

Social secret is the reverse of social consciousness: people's focus is limited to five or six themes and is conditioned by propaganda. Propaganda organized by the nation-state, with the support of newspapers and television, which makes its agenda according to the political interests of the moment, even in the opposition.

Examples of social secrets can be read in Graeber, Elias, Hirschman, Robben, Klahr, stories of sexual predators, domestic violence, in the Tintin books, and many others.

Each one of us acquires a series of social life codes and skills, such as social genetic code. Some are mobilized to become active and others are deactivated and dormant. When we decide to study science, we fall asleep to our artistic skills and vice versa, to give a simplified example. When the situation changes, by passion, by war, by revolution, by crisis, by scandal, by the group of friends getting involved in social activities, especially younger people can change the lot of active and active skills and orientations and change personality. The memories of the first self are obscured and distorted by the new orientations that come to organize the mind.

The secrets, therefore, result from the limitation of human attention capacity and the organization of selective memory in terms of orientations and ideologies. Secrets can re-emerge in the mind and memory when there is a change of social regime that favors it. The secrets are also the target of manipulative uses of people's lives, such as practices of marginality and eventual consolidation of alternative social regimes.

Graeber speaks of three economic regimes: the communist (used in many families), the hierarchical (used in associative and church membership), the market. The latest has overshadowed the formers. Economic theory (social theory) has a central ideological role here.

Elias speaks of the repugnance towards the violence that the civilizational process incorporated in the modern people, compared with those that lived to the 400 years.

Hirschman mentions the transformation of bourgeois ideology, which has since become dominant, between the feudal regime and modernity. When it was not dominant, the bourgeoisie was very sensitive to violence and denounced it as a vice of aristocrats. When it became dominant, it ignored the existence of violence by the state that fulfilled its business-friendly policies. Even today, countries that are not allies are portrayed as violent and allied countries as non-violent.

Robben refers to the emergence of the mothers of May, women mothers of young left-wing activists in Argentina murdered in secret by the general’s regime. The mothers complained against the disappearance of their children and assumed the ideologies of their own children. The intention of the state, which was to end the race of leftist activists, was frustrated that other activists - their mothers - continued and continue to assume and develop these ideologies today. Already after the generals were condemned by history and the courts.

Klahr reports the consequences of the war (zero tolerance) against the young children of foreigners in California who eventually endorse narco-regimes in Central America through the circulation of California-born youths of Honduran and Mexican who were expelled to the countries of origin of their parents by unruly behavior. These youths were used from prisons by criminal networks that sent them back to California with guns and drugs, mingling and assaulting migrants.

References:

Alberoni, F. (1989). Génese. Lisboa: Bertrand.

Collins, R. (2005). Sociología de las filosofías - Una teoría global del cambio intelectual Barcelona: Hacer.

Elias, N. (1990). O Processo Civilizacional (Vol I e II) (1a edição). Lisboa: D. Quixote.

Graeber, D. (2011). Debt – the First 5000 Years. NY: Melville House Publishing.

Hirschman, A. O. (1997). As Paixões e os Interesses. Lisboa: Bizâncio.

Klahr, M. L. (2006). Hoy te toca la muerte. México: Planeta.

Levi, Primo (2013) Se isto é um homem, Lisboa Teorema.

Novak, M. (2001). A Etica Católica e o Espírito do Capitalismo. S.João do Estoril: Principia.

Robben, A. C. G. M. (2008). Pegar donde más duele – violencia política y trauma social en Argentina. Barcelona: Anthropos.

Lesson 6 - Methodology (Collins vs reduction to the body)

 

Violence and other forms of reduction to the body


The methodology for studying violence that pulses within life - before understanding what is good or bad, formative or destructive, producing identity or disgust in each case - should follow three main lines of investigation, namely: identifying the polarized classifications around which violence is organized, such as gender, classes, streets or cities, nationalities, etc .; the elites in dispute, such as males, proletarians, civil servants, citizens, marginals, etc .; contra elites concerned, such as victims, workers, consumers, children or the elderly, etc .; forms of camouflage, such as escapes, seeming dead, hiding behind social roles, homeless, etc.

Methods should be able to produce data on these various strands of analysis of violence in order to extend the depth of final analysis.

Lesson 5 - Taking seriously the fact that social theories does not deal with violence

The notion of violence as a reduction to the body is not just another way of defining violence. It implies a scientific approach to sociology that social sciences has not been able to accomplish. Whether as part of the common sense notion of violence used by (as in Wieviorka, one does not know if he is talking about war or urban violence) or violence as physical violence only (as in Collins, which explicitly excluded symbolic or psychological violence), sociology is referring to episodes that are isolated from the flow of everyday life. That is why Collins can conclude everyday life is almost free from violence.

Social science must focus on its objects of study - in this case violence, but it could be society itself - instead of using common-sense ideas or definitions to avoid contradictory discussion about what its objects are.

Violence as a reduction to the body is a way of systematically organizing a discussion about what violence is about in each circumstance, insofar as violence is associated with life, associates with its counterpart "out-of-body expansion" like birth, growing people, learning, social action, etc.. It is, therefore, a practical critique of current, reductionist and reifying social theories (as Mouzelis says) that imagine that it is the modern state that creates free and equal individuals (as Kuhn says). To criticize and confirm, one must adopt adequate theories and methods.

People of flesh and blood should be considered, rather than individuals hygienically classifiable by their political, economic, cultural, and social characteristics. People of flesh and blood act on what they have learned in life - Bourdieu's habitus - and the state of accumulation or exhaustion of emotional (social) energies at every moment (Collins when writing about the chains of rituals that lay the foundations of sociability).
The proposal of analysis of violence can then be developed from a structured idea about the evolution of the millennial social organization that occurred from the social needs inscribed in the biology of the human species. By hypothesis, modern societies are the current state of evolution of the hegemony of imperial organization, in a synthesis characterized by the horizontal differentiation of genres of people, by the vertical differentiation of the ruling elites, by the positive symbolic and cognitive elaboration of virtual reinforcement of these differentiation processes (virtual means imagined and therefore effective, as self-fulfilling prophecies or equivalent physiological experiences between those who act and those who only imagine that they are acting).
In mnemonic, one can say that we live a misogynist, elitist and disguised society. It is not an inscribed destiny of human biology. On the contrary, it is the result of the contradictory struggles between tendencies for equality (especially biological ones, to take into account the genetic homogeneity of the human species) and the tendencies for differentiation (especially cultural ones, since it use language that use names to differentiate things and people from each other, attributing them virtual symbolic essences).

It is the result of a long evolution of the species that is conducted culturally, not in a rational way. Plans and intentions are real but subject, as always, to the ambiguity proper to the relations between the physical world and the virtual world (symbolic, cultural, ideological). Plans and intentions are at the same time orientations and achievements, anticipated satisfaction of desires and deceptions - politics and law.
Social sciences are a form of apology of modernity. But the practical results of modernity - misery, war, hunger, environmental risks for the survival of our own species, after the extinction of many others, the growing exploitation of human labor, the failure of long-term plans, always postponed - does not pay much in favor of its merits. Much less justifies his worship. What self-representations for the satisfaction of people and societies are not to be confused with the set of observable realities (including the physical, environmental, social, and biological world, coupled with the virtual world of representations, symbols, cultures , which show and hide, that learn and repress knowledge: violent and expansive mixing, of which the empire is the dominant expression, today).

In analytical terms, therefore, it is necessary to replace multidimensional analysis (politics, economy, culture, society) with structural analysis (genres classifications, elitism and dissimulation) explained by the accumulated conditions of existence (social and economic), and its relationship with the dynamics of social organization (politics and law applicable or not to the situation: presence or absence of the state, as it is also said).

It is worth remembering Max Weber's discovery that the modern state claims for itself the monopoly on legitimate violence. Which means that all violence of origin other than state violence is illegitimate. That is why people and social sciences hide everyday violence: it is forbidden and state police should abolish it. However, this illegitimacy must be demonstrated in court, to be punishable, for justice to be done - as one say improperly. And the perpetrator of the violence must have been intent on producing evil results. Appeal to court that has its own costs and risks. For it is a question of litigants surrendering themselves to the superior decision, produced on the basis of second-hand proofs, presented to a judicial theater.

Lesson 4 - Methodological questions

Violence as a reduction to the body is distinct from Collins´ physical violence and Wieviorka´s frame of violence because a) it does not need to separate the macro from the microanalysis, b) it focuses on the effect (reduction to the body) and not the causes (criminal people), c) it does not refer to a special state of relations (like war of fight): it refers to violence as a constant presence in people's lives, discarded of moralism in the analysis (hiding "good" violence, "our" violence, state violence as legitimate defense) d) it demand the analysis of dynamics (gender, hierarchical, propaganda) rather than the analysis of isolated and extraordinary perverse cases.

For Collins and Wieviorka violence is isolated in a world generally free of violence. If we accept the definition of violence as a reduction to the body, violence is as necessary as breathing, since the expansion beyond the body (growth, elevation, learning, etc.) is not done without the experience of reduction to the body. The body incorporate forms of sociability imposed by force, like beating or menace. The force of circumstances and the strength of established social powers, directly or indirectly, impose themselves to everyone.

Is violence rare or is it always present? It depends on what is meant by violence: is violence only the blow or is violence also what oppresses and inhibits us without physical contact? The option of defining reduction to the body is also to take what inhibits us, even if it is part of our education, if it makes us grow. Removing the moralistic burden - violence presented only as evil – removes the strange and false idea that violence can be abolished if everyone is good. Violence is probably as necessary to life, and to human life as pain.

Of course there are states of war (macro) and states of excitement associated with the perception of approaching a scene of risk of the reduction to the body being negative to the body (micro) that Collins called emotional tension that accompanies physical violence. This is not to say that violence exists only in states of war or when there are beatings. When children are inhibited from caring and caring they can reduce the volume of their brains. This is: the violence to life that does not require physical touch. The reverse: the absence of the touch can be as or more violent than the violence that positive moral condemns. Is not what happened and still happens with child sexual abuse?

The analysis of violence as a reduction to the body, therefore, should not resort to the traditional dimensions of sociology, namely, politics, economics, culture, and social prestige. It must rather resort to the millennial tendencies that revealed the empire as a particularly effective mode of organization founded on extreme violence that other forms of organization did not dare to develop. The imperial organization - of ancient Egypt and Rome - is based on a particular mode of horizontal and vertical differentiation, covered by its own moral legitimacy. Imperial society is misogynist, elitist, and disguised. It offers each head of household a private power over his domain, taken as property; each elite offers techniques of maintaining its place of privilege throughout life and generations; explains the differences in the social status of the people on grounds of destiny or merit, shunning patriarchy and oppression of the elites, by force - by the police and the military - but especially by the blackmail of breaking the protective order if people decide to claim the moral of equality and freedom.

Lesson 3 - Gender, hierarchy and virtual world manipulation

Typical social analysis distinguishes political, economic, cultural, and prestige dimensions as explanatory variables. Age, gender, race are demographic variables that are also often used. Violence can also be analyzed in this way. Therefore, Wieviorka focused mainly on the political dimensions (leaving others to other authors and other occasions and warned the reader that mere social analysis does not account for the meaning of violence). In Collins, in his micro-analysis, violence appears as a masculine thing, although the author does not discuss it. Neither of them deals with violence as a way of building and maintaining hierarchies. Nor do they speak of psychological warfare, that is, of the cover-up of "our" violence, the exploitation or even the invention of "other"´s violence, as military or police do, both with precious help of media alliances and censorship more or less enforced by the states.

The definition of violence as an omnipresent vital phenomenon of reduction to the body requires instruments of analysis that can contrast, highlight, the violence of the existential ganga in which it is involved. For this purpose, the suggestion is to consider classificatory violence (which has its origins in gender discrimination, precious for the organization of the reproductive life of human societies), hierarchical violence (which will have its origins in the economy of the gift to superior beings protected by gods capable of protecting human beings in charge of storing and investing surpluses, or good story telling, in a useful way for society) and the violence of illusion (which makes the victim feel guilty of the violence that falls on him and, therefore, legitimizes gender and hierarchical discrimination in terms more favourable to oligarchs, who are always at risk of being stopped, fall down the social ladder or killed).

Humans are very adaptable but at the same time overly susceptible to the legitimacy of their identities (identities completely forged by each other during the course of life, mainly childhood). Violence, reduction movements to the bodies that are part of the experience of all, is integrated into the self-image that each one has of himself. Otherwise, violence is at odds with a previously constructed identity and counter-violence becomes a necessity.

Violence derives from the rigidity of one's identities (including collective identities, such as nation or state) and at the same time provokes transformations in these identities. They are the ones that make the history of people and countries.

For instance, the great incarceration in the US since the 80´s can be described as the next step that follows after the abolition, the Jim Crow Law of segregation of Afro-american and the Civil Rights Movement: 13th amendment already preview prisoners alike slaves, from a legal point of view. An Afro-americans, as other minorities, are the main relative number of inmate. The war on drugs is one of the ways US politics use to deliver retaliation against the descendance of slaves.

Lesson 2 - Body+soul; living conditions+organizations; case+struture.

Loïc Wacquant is a pupil and friend of Pierre Bourdieu who worked his PhD in Chicago University, in the black ghetto. He becomes famous because he finds out the consequences of the huge incarceration rates of afro-american male juveniles and wrote about it. He works as teacher in Berkley Univ. and he is today a specialist in Bourdieu thinking, now a day very appreciate in the US.

His PhD thesis was about his own experience of incorporating boxing spirit as a way of socializing and auto-identification. Especially useful where there are few opportunities to build a satisfying social net and a strong social identity.

His methodological recommendations go in the sense of personal and body involvement of the students with their empirical subjects. One should know better than by rational means, such as news and storytelling. One need to know by feelings the situation, using the shoes of one actor or comparing the case with one´s own experience, for instance. This will enable the researcher to discuss with him or herself what is involved in the action, as human condition. He or she cannot just accept any version of a story that there is no way to access the accuracy.

One can separate micro analysis from macro analysis, as most sociology do. The course is about criticizing the approach of splitting what comes together. Be careful whenever you use structure to avoid discussing empirical cases or when we use description out of an explanation. The best is discussing the ways society produces and destroys the situations and technologies that oppress and develop it.

Lesson 1 - Violence as reduction to the body

Each student choose a subject to deal with during the semester. The teacher expose the main argument of his paper on violence available at the website of the course: two sociologists develop macro and micro sociological analysis of violence. They support a new subdiscipline on sociology of violence. Both avoid to deal with state violence.

Social sciences, and sociology among them, build cognitive walls between them and inside them, isolating subdisciplines, such as sociology of emotions, of the body, of the law, etc.

Violence is an always present risk, to Wieviorka. To Collins, humans are not violent: situations are violent. Both approaches seems to have nothing in common. And symbolic or psychological violence, for instance, turn to become mysterious to this two approaches.

If one want to deal, at the same time, with violence at the macro and micro level, physical and not physical level, whatever the aspect of life that is instrumental for using violence, be it culture, economics, politics, we need a different approach: violence as the cause of reduction to the body is the hypothesis proposed by the teacher to be used during the semester.

Reduction to the body needs to consider also the expansion out of the body. Growing as person and as mind by cyclical movements of reduction and expansion. Some of this cycles are as training to endurance, for people strong enough to take advantage of this training. Reduction to the body, in the end, reinforce expansion of the body and mind. Other cycles can be destructive to people who have no conditions to benefit from the experience. Reduction to the body jeopardize any attempt to expand body or mind out of the situation.


2017


Violence in society (2014)

Violence taboo here: http://www.ipvr.eu/people/steps/research_projects?token=gqu2G7_rE1MKZ4J7D1b06Q)

Lesson 10 - Final Balance of the Course

Social theory about violence is an insight persistently absent on social sciences. It is not enough to make violence a subdiscipline of sociology to assess the role and place of violence in social life. It is necessary to adopt another general social theory, a theory that admits the existence of violence as part of social experience.

Social morality designates violence as morally reprehensible. State violence against criminals or enemies, however, is not reprehensible. Mentioning it as violence is avoided. Legitimate violent actions are socially denied as violence, as a reprehensible behavior. Reactions to risks and dangers is presented as legitimate defense, not violence.  An example of this is police violence. It is not spoken of as violence, but as enforcement of law and order, proportionate use of force, maintenance of peace, etc. War violence of our side is presented as side-effects, casualties, etc.

It is not irrelevant that important sociologists as Wieviorka and Collins, in their studies of violence, discarded the study of state violence. Traditionally social theories uses deviance, conflict interaction, labeling, as concepts to deal with violence. Crime classifications or social profiles of criminals are held hostage to criminology, biased as much as common sense moralistically controlled idea of violence. Moralistic politicization of violence is accepted by sociologists.

Wiewiorka theorizes the moral / political evaluation of violence. He thinks one needs to extrapolate from sociology to deal with theory of violence. Political philosophy, the philosophical notion of Touraine´s "subject," guides the author in a well-defined moral defense of western civilization. It is this philosophy that organizes the typology of violent subjects. The author acknowledges the intrusion of morality into social analysis, but instead of alienating it he organizes its extra-sociological validation.

Collins, interested in sociological micro-analysis and in the study of aggressor-victim interactions, discards symbolic violence. He discarded the analysis of the reasons why people end up engaging in violence. He discarded the fact that there are those lives and institutions dedicated to create the situations that make people violent, in the police and in the military, for instance. Collins ignores police and military training. He only shows how, even high trained men instead of becoming violent, the military resist engaging in violence. Being rare those who overcome the violence tension / fear barrier just because they are given orders.

Wacquant's theory of penal state - and his method of embodying social objects of study - offer interesting clues to establish studies on state violence, namely its dual aspect: symbolic violence (left, social, integration and assimilation side of the state) and direct physical violence (right-wing, police, stigmatization and exclusion side of the state), as well as the role of prisons in enhancing state power vis-à-vis the people.

Using the definition of Reemtsma, violence as reduction to the body, violence is a way of dealing with sociability problems and challenges. It reveals what is commonly called the animality of human beings. It's neither good nor bad, at first. Violence is certainly necessary and indispensable, as pain is. It can have harmful effects in the immediate, and good in the medium or long term; or vice versa. Moral evaluation is important. But it can be suspended by social theory, until a more extensive general evaluation in time and space can be done.

As Wieviorka will say, there are violence that promotes progress and well-being. There are deaths and injuries that are not in vain. They produce, in the long run, good results for people (albeit at the cost of the suffering). When people do sports, or go to school they risk death, physical and moral injury. Schools and sport promote destructive inferiority complexes for many people who fail to compete and who are therefore frustrated and diminished. However, morally, schools and sport are among the most benevolent institutions, perhaps the ones that contribute most to avoiding violence, in society. Hospitals and vaccines are also responsible for preventable injuries and deaths. But not only hospitals and vaccines are a unique contribution to the longevity of the human species, as health scientists use animals and even people as guinea pigs for their experiments to find solutions that can save lives for many others and make money to corporations.

Bio-ethics and an educational and professional ethic have full right to be scholar disciplines. Medicine, however, can avoid morals for a large extent. Such as sociciology of violence can do. Sociology needs to be attentive to moral kinds of discussions. But, to study violence in society, to stop the present denial of social theory about violence being everywhere, we recommend suspending moral judgments, during social analysis. Many good violence is denied to be violent. Just because common sense presume that it is indispensable and even good in the long run.

Instead of mixing good and bad intents with violence analysis, and separating aggressors and victims, one can look for reduction to the body effects, out of morals. One can consider separately the processes of incorporation - of habits, dispositions, knowledge, information – and the assessment of if violence/reduction-to-the-body is good or unsuccessful (for instance, because incorporation process is forgotten, do not remain in memory).

Society needs to abandon the theoretical ghetto in which it has been placed in the last century, describing a society without contact neither with the environment, not even with the bodies and the emotions of the people. Individuals in society are not hangers where one can assign same properties as each one respond to questionnaires or interviews. Society also needs to lose the pro-statist moralism that characterizes it. It needs, therefore, to open itself to biological (and environmental) studies and to normative (moral, ideological, theological) studies and to the ignorance that underlies our wisdom, per the wise quotation from Socrates: "I only know that I know nothing." I know that the scientific study of violence has no place in current social theories, although violence is present in all social action. Changing the working parameters of the social sciences is not an easy task. But preview social changes for the next years can give the strength to do it. As social changes are under way, there is a historic opportunity to open the social sciences to violence. One needs to the study of the human species as a unique experience, and to the study of the social character of this species.

Lesson 9 - Violence and social sciences

Violence as anomie, APD

Why to deal with physical violence as distinct from other kind of violence? Who do that? For what propose?

Why to deal with political violence as distinct from other kind of violence? Who do that? For what propose?

What should social sciences do about it? Should one accept as dogma criminal justice decisions and military propaganda? Should one give priority to political and power problems? Should one be able to approach criminal justice decisions and military or political propaganda as one look to the evolution of social configuration, in history; referring to the better or worse social quality of these configurations?

Should social science take the side of nation-states? Should social sciences aspire to survive the historical epoch of nation-state domination, where they emerge as knowledge disciplines? Should social sciences aspire to universalization, to the representation of human spirit out of nation-state constraints?

Social sciences should be able to take nation-state as a distant subject of study, as any other. State institutions activity, as state violence, should not be considered “good” or “normal” as opposed any (real or imagined, violent or not) treat to the utopian vision of a preconceived eternal harmony presented as “evil” or “exceptional”.

Violence is not abnormal or exceptional. Violence is part of life experience, as pain is. It takes everyone and all of us. However, per circumstances, including social circumstances, the posture and sensitivity of people, violence do occur more in certain territories and social configurations than others (why?) with different causes and consequences regarding incorporation processes, disposition and character formation of people, social groups, through generations.

There is people to whom violence is a second nature, eventually non-conscious. How self determination to violent action develops in society? Is it reversible? Can one avoid it?

 

Lesson 8 - case studies on violence

Violence as anomie, APD

Different method approaches, APD

Looking for cases to develop some perspectives on studying them, one student brought to the class the violence around the case of independence of his country. Under the Ottoman Empire, his people shear the same Christian faith, language and writing characters (Cyrillic) and the same fate of discrimination over rights and taxation. Many people upheaval in several points of the territory. But when they tried to come together, killing the leadership were the reaction of the Empire. Stopping the building capacity to oppose to its power. Made by kidnapping children, the first born of each family, and train them to become warriors of the Empire.

Ottoman Empire finally fall. And several countries raise from this. Many of them aspiring to become the center of a new empire.

This is part of the history told to everyone. National heroes were former rebels against the Ottoman Empire, used by new emperors to be as symbols of nobility and strength.

Every national history is about killings and pain, heroes and devils, bad empires and good empires. Even traditional histories of people without a state are about killings and survival under big ideas that can be turned and oppressive practices.

In social theory, English or French modern states are the historical references for a modern society. Even all societies did start working before that historical time. They worked differently. With different orientation ideas (ideologies) and process of legitimation of power (arguably more violent in the Middle Ages). This means that social theory applies better to the history of these two countries and western Europe then to the history of other nations and states.

To the present national history, one can apply Wieviorka violence paradigm theory and characterize what is the difference between Ottoman Empire paradigm of violence and today paradigm. From a micro analysis point of view, one can also to look at the importance of identity (national identity) in the life of common people. How state history presented at schools by teachers do incorporate children (and adults) personal identities as an emotional part of themselves, revering their heroes, their violent heroes? What kind of consequences this emotional incorporation of national identities has in the life of the people? In political decision making or in everyday life?

The other violent situation that was raised by the students was about an episode of violence in an amateur football field. A player (with good reasons) get violent against the referee. One can use micro analyses and ask how can the player manage to overcome emotional constraints against violence when he was violent against the referee. The answer can be given by injustice: when people feels, injustice is being done, they get violent. Which is a situation not mentioned by Collins. In macro analysis one can think of staging the violence as a modern commercial procedure, including industrialization, entertainment of workers, globalization of media, building a world though as inhabited by individuals, alike. Differently from the former idea that each town each tradition. One can also think of the incorporation of social identities – such as a fair good football player, and the importance of the confirmation of this characteristic on the views of friends and partners in the period of life when sex mating is one of the main concerns to men (and women, as well).

Lesson 7 - Bodly analisys of violence, Wacquant

 

Loïc Wacquant (2015) For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood

Both authors, Wieviorka and Collins, do not refer to state violence. War, interinstitutional violence, intrasocietal violence are always bad news. Police use of force, army defense of population at risk, state violence is sometimes good news.

State do help to get peace situations. Even they can also make war. Many times, it is not clear if state violence will develop in more violence or if it is the end of violent situations. Depending of the point of view and the social e geographical situation of those who are judging.

Besides the aggressor and the victim of violence, there is the state and its juridical-political frame work. Intolerable actions and events in some moments of social life are unnoticed and tolerated in other moments or in other societies at the same moment. Depending on the law, the habits, the historical situation. To do science one needs to suspend moral judgments and find adequate definitions of violence, as scientific concept. As Reemtsma definition: violence is reduction to the body.

Loïc Wacquant is a disciple of Pierre Bourdieu. He develops a theory of the penal state. He works within flesh and blood method, using habitus as an analytical concept and as a methodological tool to record information in the all body of the sociologist. Both intellectual e body experience, that is how it should be social research.

Per Wacquant, the state as two wings: leftwing, workfare and management of class, and right wing, prison fare and management of race. (In different papers, the author refers to these state wings as female wing and male wing). Both wings expand to penal practices as well as urban scene. Towns and states impose residential sites to working class and race communities with stigma.

This approach reveals the roots of social organization: differentiation (as gender) and hierarchy (as elite formation) dissimulated by ideologies that legitimate inequalities. They naturalize inequality as deserving or resulting or merit. Social theories do also dissimulate the roots of social organization. They are found of apologies to modern societies, apologies of modern as only the better that comes with modern societies. The negative aspects of modernity are neglected or minimized or separated form modernity abstract concept.

To discuss or understand violence should have in mind the link of violence and society concepts. For instance, separating macro society from micro society, thinking of society as frame work for individual action, as Wieviorka do, or thinking of society as a search for energetic kind of experiences, as Collins do, presents violence in two different ways: violence is natural, in Wieviorka, and violence is rare, in Collins.

If we refer to society as a way human kind link biological evolution that authorized our existence to efforts to understand cosmological activities, that authorized life on Earth, violence, as Reemtsma defines it, is what causes reduction to the body, a defensive reaction that revert the expanding movement of each one to exterior, to expand; using desires and expectations. Using recursivity: building social identities and developing dreams of the future.

Methodological problem of objectivity. (Thank you for the question)

Wacquant proposes to use the body as a methodological tool to gather and record sociological information on the field. He recommends sociologists to use not his mind at a safe distance of social struggles for identity and survival, both social and communitarian. He recommends we use all body to learn how people are living in a local situation.

Is this approach subjective, since we become part of the struggle? Yes, it is subjective. In the sense that each sociologist will feel differently, per his unique (Bourdieu´s) habitus and per the contrast that habitus on the field of research produce with sociologist life before research. That is why this subjectivity is more objective than the common distance objectivity developed in inquiries only by questionnaire or by interviewing. Comparing and feeling different habitus, using habitus as a research tool on the field, sociologist collect much more data and data much more integrated than it is possible to do with other methodological approaches. Questionnaire and interviewing seems superficial comparing to body (flesh and blood) method. Learning process required by body method is absent in the common methods. The data record on the body stays forever. The reverse happens with the common method: they produce superficial data and big waist of data and experience at safe distance from the social subject of study.

Lesson 6 - Micro analisys of violence by R. Collins

After a presentation of Wieviorka´s macro social analysis of violence, centered on the characterization of two different paradigms of violence experienced in the West since World War II - developing the theory of action by Touraine, and ending with a typology of Social subjects who use violence – the hyper subject, the anti-subject, and others – one present today a micro-social analysis of violence by Randall Collins, a North American sociologist.
With a well-known work of great merit, Collins uses concepts produced in previous works. As the "domination of the space of attention" (used in his work with the title of sociology of philosophy) and “interactions ritual chains” that presents society in the some sense anthropologist Durkheim does. People look for situations that can benefit them by increasing their emotional energy (self-esteem, social relations, social networks, social recognition). By doing so, they weave their identity and society at the same time, though at different levels.
The study of more than thirty violent situations led the author to conclude that "people are not violent, situations are violent". Contrary to common-sense thinking, people flee as much as they can from violence, although violent situations do not stop producing themselves.
For example, joining the military, professionalized people are put into violent situations and have to react to them. The available data on how troops react to violent situations reveals that, even trained and ordered to be violent (i.e. killing or doing other people harm - Collins's violence has a definition: direct and physical violence, excluding symbolic violence) most of the troops do not perform violence and most of the violent minority of the troop is not effective in enforcing violence. Doing it, being violent, is disturbing to the deep nature of people.
People's repugnance to violence creates an emotional tension whenever a violent situation arises. The tension serves to hinder the exercise of violence and the violent will have to overcome this barrier to be violent. There are two main ways of overcoming this barrier: panic (or a version of what is a moral holiday, as in riots or genocide) and emotional detachment, which allows rare among specialists in violence to become violent professionals (learn to entertain themselves with the technologies of death as if the target were not a person; they play with extreme violence, as if it were not real). A recurrent form of facilitating the use of violence is to "attack the weakest" those who have no defense possibilities and do not risk being able to contra attack: such as at home, against subjugated women or children or old people, or on the street against isolated or stigmatized people. As the kidnappers or bullies do, too.
There are also scenarios of violence that deceive it. For example, there is the idea that violence is contagious, lasts for a long time, and aggressors smile when they produce violence. This is a mix of staging (like in duels or sports) and entertainment (cinema, tv). In reality violence is limited (as in the case of large hooligan groups where only one or two are violent, to rise to the degree of intragroup prestige), do not last long (what matters is to create an incident on which to dramatize an appropriate character to the identity of the aggressor / assaulted within the group) and no one is happy or controlling the situation when performing violent.

Violence arises from the need to maintain social bonds; that is, from producing situations from which emotional energies can be produced for the group and its members through the practical confirmation of the self and hetero identities attributed to each one. The violence proceeds to the effect of creating a situation of domination of the emotional attention of the people around the violence. Like the criminal who does it to be a protagonist, to appear as a subject.

 

 

Lesson 5 - La Violence by M. Wieviorka

Michel Wieviorka is a French sociologist. He was presidente of International Sociology Association in 2010. When the World Sociology Congress declare violence a subject in need of attention by sociology community. Wieviorka, himself, and Collins come together in the same sense. In 2005 and 2008 were published books of Wieviorka´s macro analysis and Collins micro analysis of violence in society.

In the present curse, after presented a description of a case of violence to be dealt by each student, the next classes will present the content of these two books and, in the third class, the presentation of Reemtsma definition of violence and same criticism on these sociological approaches to violence.

La Violence is a book on French sociology. Dedicated and inspired by Alain Touraine´s theory of the subject. It evolved from the theory of then new social movements: women, students and ecological movements that Touraine supposed, in the 70´s, they will challenge the protagonist of workers movement and unions on contributing to design a new progressive society.

From the theoretical and methodological point of view, Wieviorka, following Touraine, uses sociology to discover now a day subject of changing action that produce new forms of society. Sociologists as Wieviorka like to follow these leaders form a critical perspective. As sociologist, he supports societal changes designed by social subjects in a progressive direction.

Wieviorka´s book has three parts and 12 chapters. The first part shows the differences between two paradigms of violence during the first three decades after the II World War and since the 80´s till today. The first paradigm are able to develop conflicts, to produce elaborated interpretation of different interest at stake in each moment and open the opportunity to negotiations between different social groups. Mainly workers and bosses. Conflict avoid violence.

The second paradigm has to face globalization and social exclusion. Welfare state is no longer able to translate in conflict every important problem, such as too much immigration and run way of capital to avoid taxes. Money shorts to support social integration processes.

Wieviorka wrote about meta politics (above the state to deal with globalization issues) and infra politics (under the state and out of its control). Fundamentalism of religion, economics, and politics at the same time that grows exclusion and victims become more aware of they own immobile condition. At the same time, media become private and internet explode the ways people get information. Symbolic and real violence became business; and advertising of violence too.

In the second part of the book, Wieviorka presents the way some author deal with violence, from different points of view. He conclude they are to disciplinary - more economic, more political, more social, but fail to draw a framework to study violence. In the third part the French author present his own view on violence. A five type typology of violent social subjects. He works under the Weberian theory of action. So, what sociologist have to do is to find sense to the actions of the people they observe.

He propose two main subjects of social violence: the hiper subject and the anti subject. Both are probably more effective in changing societies than the other three type subjects. The difference between them is that the violence hiper subject uses is directed to progressive goals of society changes. Anti subjects work on violence to destroy existing social bonds, not to build better societies.

There also violence coming for other type of social subjects: the floating subject - lost sense of what to do and hesitate the direction of action; the no subjects that do not know any sense that can organize the action - they just obey orders or run the same direction that everyone else seems to run; the survivor subjects that engage in violence in order to avoid to be massacre by society that ignore them or become genocide about them.

To common sense, violence is cruelty, caused by pleasure of harm other people, by revenge or else. For sociologist, violence is cruelty but is also a very common phenomena, sometimes accepted by society as normal and useful. So, it is worth to differentiate types of violent social subjects to be able to know what position to present when choices about violence has to be done.

 

 

Lesson 4 – improving use of Reemtsma definition of violence

Look at the agenda

 

Descriptions of situations of violence should be investigated. For example:

A) Does this type of violence have a known name? Are there studies and / or statistics on this type of violence? In the country of the occurrence, are there many or few episodes of this type of violence, compared to other countries or regions?

B) Did the violence have a well-identified cause, a person or group that wanted, planned and executed violence against others, unaware? Or did the violence arise spontaneously, without anyone wanting or could foresee it? Who watch the violent situation could avoid it? Or did bystanders encouraged it?

C) What is the point of view adopted by the researcher to observe the violence? Is the information we have about the case of violence direct information or mediated by other people or institutions? What are the interests of informants in the violent situation - do they want it? Are against it? Are you struggling to know more how to avoid violence? Do you feel any kind of responsibility in this regard? Guilty? Can you describe the situation uncompromisingly?

D) Do you anticipate any practical possibility of abolishing this type of violence? Does this type of violence have a human or social function that can be understood? If so, which one? Was violence exaggerated, in the case? If so, what sense of the exaggeration? For what purposes was it exaggerated, by whom?

E) Are there relations between politics and this type of violence? Are there legislative processes to address the issue? Have there ever been public debates, in the newspapers or on the television, about this? Are there associations dedicated to supporting the victims of such violence? What is being discussed and what positions have arisen?

 

 

Trying to attain moral distance from the violence and taking as reference the characterization of human organization as misogynist, elitist and dissimulated, one will: a) study the conditions that turn violence in a good experience and what turn violence in a bad experience. Can bad experiences turn to be good in the long run? Can adequate intensity of violence, as punishment for instance, be good immediately (to stop bad behavior) or in the long run (teaching lessons to wrong doers)?

b)  identify functional violence: gender violence or hierarchical violence used to organize society and to develop it;

c) identify structural violence, directly or indirectly organized by institutions;

d) identify naturalized violence, able to dissimulate real causes or long term causes of violence, misleading people to false understanding of what is going on. Namely to support stabilization of corrupt powers;

 

Lesson 3. Case study - applying sociological definitions of violence

Conceptual approach to cases, studying the differences of using common sense, strict definition of violence as physical violence only (not symbolic violence) and violence as reduction to the body.

Consider three proposals of studying violence:

a)       Wieviorka calls for definition of epochal violence paradigm. Violence paradigms are the main risk of violence used against progressive development of western civilization. During Cold War, for instance, we have the risk of polarized violence. Since the collapse of USSR, the global police, US, faces with its allies the risk of multiple little stateless terrorist groups. Internally each country faces the calls for recognition of victims and their rights to security from risks of violence. Specialized NGO develop campaigns to pressure the states to prevent violence and to punish perpetrators;

b)      Collins defines violence as a cause of physical violence. Symbolic violence should be discarded. It not possible to reach a scientific agreement on what is in and out of symbolic violence. The causal nexus is not clear and undisputed. There are lots of types of physical violence to be discovered, characterized and discussed. This should be what sociologists will do, for the time being;

c)       Reemtsma propose to focus on the effects of human action. Violence is any action that reduce someone to the body. Violence can cause reduction to the body both to a perpetrator or to a victim. Both symbolic or physical (or mixt) causes can result on violence.

Most of the time, Wieviorka´s macro analysis is out of the scope of an episode of everyday life violence. That is the case of a bank robbery or a protest of pro-animal rights activists. Collins´s micro analysis can be useful. He stresses that violence should be defined as physical violence and symbolic violence should be excluded from scientific perspective, since it is vulnerable to subjectivity and it is difficult to design a frontier on what is and what is not symbolic violence (in the sense Bourdieu use the label).

Collins though focus on the relation of aggressor/perpetrator and victim, as cause and effect. It is good enough to present the robbery case. Victim´s trauma, both physical and psychological, are centered on the memory of the violent action on the crime scene. One does not know much about the identity of the aggressors, since only one out of five has been caught. One just know he was a student and it is common knowledge in Senegal that students do not have how to live. One knows also that is not common bank robbery and less common bank robbery by students. So, there is not much information about the case, even we have the news of the newspaper and the testimony of victims.

There is many times few information about what is the former life of the criminals. Newspaper focus strictly on the violent episode an in the emotions it brings to mind. Readers just have to choose between forgiveness of anger, as if criminals deserve hard punitive time.

However, as mention before, to understand violence it is useful to look to other parts of the events, beside perpetrators and victims. One will benefit of knowing what was the means in use (a pistol or a knife, for instance) and what was the capability of the perpetrators to use these weapons. Who was by standing on the scene and behind the scene, as bankers that organize security of the bank, police or public opinion. How did the newspapers present the case to the public? Did the public respond?

Reemtsma definition of violence, as reduction to the body, needs to be used as part of a broader social theory where people can expand (when violence is not around) and can be reduced to the body (when violence happens). The bank robbery was violent and did not help anyone we know to live a better life. When violence is over, neither the victims or the perpetrators benefit from the experience nor anyone else. The robbery was only waste and only trauma rise from it.

It seems it was not the case of violence on the Circus. In this case, symbolic violence against the Circus, against the traditional use of animals to entertain the public, wins when the legislative power wrote a law forbidding the Circus to use animals for show.

Violence sometimes is just waste and other times is useful for progressive proposes and to avoid bigger violence which are hidden from the common knowledge. The revolt of activists starts as a strange anger against every-day way of doing things. Eventually this revolt changes main culture or the law of the land. It is learning violence.

 

Lesson 2. Case study

Two students presented two cases.

One about a robbery of a bank, 10 years ago. It went wrong. No money available, security personal was weak and could not prevent the robbery, the police just caught one of the five robbers. Happily, no one gets hurt, except the security guard. He was thrown to the window that separate the public from the bank workers. The robber who was caught by the police was a university student. He and his companions did appear at the bank constantly, few days before the assault. The security guard did send them way. He did not report his superiors. Or, at least, no previsions were taken. Only after the robbery some changes in security system at the bank did happened.

Students in this town have serious difficulties to get along. No much money to survive in the city. Security industry seems to be not very attentive to peril. It was not a violent town. It was a rare case of bank robbery. Newspapers show the case, because it was rare. Eight years in jail, awaiting trial for the robber-student. Robber was condemned to community work for some years. No victim complained about it.

A 11 years old girl get traumatized on consequence of the menace with a gun on her neck robbers did to her mother. And the blood presented all over the face of the security guard when he asked her if she was all right, after the robbers leave the scene. She did not sleep well during a long period of time after the robbery and she felt her character was molded by the event: she becomes defensive with social relations in a way other people fells like being rude.

Incorporation is a concept that can be useful to explain the trauma that change the character of a person for life. Violence can spread in society. It was not the case. But it is in different situations. And it is the case, somehow, when violence against the girl turn her in an aggressive way for life.

The case and its consequences in the personality of the people involved were not treated by those who suffer it. They just shut up about it. The story did not happen in the US, when many people do use psychoanalysis help to deal with their little and big traumas.

The second case was about the violence suffered by animal activists when they decided for an all week-end to pressure circus costumers to avoid to support circus animal abuse for entertainment. The circus personnel used violence against activists. Activists cannot do the same. If they respond with violence it would be bad for their political claims against violence on animals.

Respect, it was proposed, is at stake in this story. Respect for animals and nature. Violence against animals is no longer needed in modern times – someone has argued. A strong exchange of arguments about violence and respect happened. Maybe not by chance, two male students against two/three female students. For men, fighting or killing do not mean lack of respect. For women, violence is always lack of respect.

Genocide is lack of respect. It is the intent of erasing the existence of some people and their culture. War can be respectful. The difference is that war respect the identity of the enemy. Genocide don´t. Genocide is about extinction of social identity of the enemy.

From a female point of view, we know, that the first victims of any war are women, children and old people, as anyone with difficulties to be autonomous. When groups of young armed boys are teached to get what they want, as warriors. Maybe the incorporation of these knowledge for ages make a difference on the character of men and women relating to violence. Men strongly concerned with identity and women concern with avoiding violence.

We can represent this dispute of arguments and characters as opposing sexes and hierarchy. Even and hell, peace and war, both accept hierarchy: organization and conducting war is about groups of people working together and competing with each other. Female, in both situation, are always second.

On other hand, respect by animals is not only with circus animals. It is also with animals that are industrially produced to feed people. What means that evolution, industrial evolution, is not only a good thing. It has it´s dark sides.

Respect concept can be enlarged to include respect for other cultures, especially traditional cultures, as anti-extractiviste cultures developed by people who lives embedded in forests (in Amazonia, for instance). Respect for environment by western civilization. We need another civilization to deliver it.

 

Lesson 1 - Working goals and main theoretical references

To select and describe a situation of violence in which profanity, dirty words are used, for analysis during the course. This is the first task for each student.

Students should read and follow the website of the course. The different pages were presented to the students.

One will work considering the following notions of sociological approach to violence:

A) Violence is neither good or bad. Violence is present at the social bottom line - the masses or the poor. Violence is also present at the top of the organization and institutions. Violence will be understood as “reduction to the body”. It is used to give birth and to fight for a better life. Violence is used to build solidarity or authoritarian regimes. After violence one feels better or worse. It depends on the experience. Same times one feels good and bad, at the same time. Every aspect of live, such as education, sport, health care, intimate life, they all deal with violence.

B) This definition, suggested by J. P. Reemtsma (2011). Confiance et Violence. Paris: Gallimard: 111-115, presupposes the recognition of movements of expansion of human influence out of the body, so as to be possible, through violence, a movement in the opposite direction.

C) Indeed, people born and grow: violence is our companion. Some kind of violence helps us to live well. Other kinds of violence reduce our personal and social aspirations of ascension. You can tell the same about social groups. For the future, people and social groups play violence with two different intentions: gaming without general practical consequences - by sport or for mating - or gaming to get practical consequences - on war or politics or policy.

D) Common sense uses the word violence, in general, to refer to a bad thing. One refers to who pushes people and anticipate their death or incapacitation. Violence, in this sense, opposes life. As if death was anti natural. The descending cycles of illness, incapacitation or death are hidden. As if magically modern society could avoid them by ignoring them. Only personal and social ascendant moves are considered. The caring needed to grow and live, the long incorporation of identities, are treated as natural, with no need of work. As much as traditional women work at home is unconsidered.

 This conception of violence demands a proper social theory: sociology of instability.
A) People are both growing body from childhood to adulthood, and access to the virtual world - thus they are distinguished from other animals. People grow developing the body as their capabilities of manipulation of the virtual world, through which they identify person and society.

B) The human species results from the evolution of life on Earth. And its history is itself an evolution. Humans constructed hierarchical levels of power, to which some have access and others do not. One usually describes organization as a pyramid, since the time of the Pharaohs.

C) This organized hierarchy is a way of reducing the instability and vulnerability of some, who live closer to the top, with the sacrifice of others who live at the bottom.

D) However, social organization is precarious and unstable. It calls for mechanisms of social stabilization. (a pyramid up side down). This double pyramid, as a rhombus, stabilize the sacrifices at the base and the privileges at the top.

E) The main foundations of organizations are misogyny (dual differentiation of sexual orientations, with privilege for masculine), elitism (consecration of leaders with privileges) and the concealment of sophisticated means of substitution of practical experiences for discursive experiences, for the purpose of stabilizing the powers of the day, de facto or in becoming.


2015


Violence in society (2014)

Practical and Epistemological  Struggles for Abolitionism (2015)

To look for other Antonio P Dores papers in English:

http://iscte.pt/~apad/novosite2007/ingles.html

http://iscte.pt/~apad/novosite2007/cap%20livros.html

Philipp Reemtsa youtube conference and book on (2012) Trust and Violence

Notes:

Wieviorka - paradigmes of violence

Collins - violente situations

Foucault - place of violence in the history of ideas

Wilkinson e Pickett - social violence and development (Acosta)

Bourdieu - simbolic violence (Generation Five)

Greaber - human and change economies (Citizen Income)

 

Evaluation:

Charlie Hebdo case and discrimination

https://prezi.com/u8vjjymbmkil/discrimination-and-social-theory

 

Summary 10. 04.05.2015 - Final conclusions

 

They hate black people - BBC about Portugal

Final conclusions of the course: a) better than micro or macro violence without connection – two different phenomena – we need to understand violence as a part of sociability experience of mankind; Wieviorka´s epochal violence paradigm and Collins´s direct and physical violence should be represented as sociological views to Reemtsma´s violence: reduction to the body. Violence is everywhere and not always is a bad thing; b) Misogyny, elitism and dissimulation are characteristics of all human societies. If one wants to avoid the discriminatory consequences one should not imagine any of these characteristics to be overcome by modern societies and only backwards societies are dealing with these problems; c) social dynamics are centrifugal or centripetal. Today social science suffer of centripetal hipper specialization. One needs sociology of violence to integrate and transform mainstream sociology by usinf centrifugal strategy that is coming up from society.

Girard´s scapegoat theory can help us to look at victims and aggressors as people linked to social institutions that are able to help them to produce social identities. Reduction to the body comes as result of expanding out of the body, as balanced exercise both of individuals within themselves and between individuals placed inside the same institutions or representing services to different institutions.

 

 

Summary 9. 27.04.2015- Prevention of violence - Citizen Income and Anti-extractives politics

Two more examples of social movements that address the prevention of violence, besides transformative justice about sexual abuse of children, are Citizen Income (CI) and Anti-extractives politics (AEP). Strong inequality of income and exploitation of the Earth - as if it was a gift from God - are two big violence against humankind. CI and AEP denounce these violent social structures, economic and technological. And propose to reverse now-a-day trends of deepening inequality and exploitation. Doing so, both movements develop violence prevention strategies.

Citizen Income is about the individual right to get money to live a decent life regardless what each one do with it. Without conditions and the state should send to each one bank account an amount of money (1000 euros? 420 euros?) each month in order to ensure that every one can survive free of extreme poverty and stigma.

Acosta´s anti-extractives politics is to turn our belligerent thinking around conflicting interests on harmony thinking. Harmony between human society and environment, including animals and plants. It means that organization of politic conflicts should be developed on defense of the environment that is common good since it is better to be conservative regarding the rarity of the environmental conditions where human life is possible.

Several initiatives address violence in different ways. Some of them using violence to mobilize people against violence and others (like the examples given) that look violence as part of life, society and human nature not to conform or to magically deny it. Instead one needs to face it. To understand it and change whatever is needed to avoid violence.

 

Summary 8. 20.04.2015 - Prevention of violence - Transformative Justice (II)

About the prevention of violence on the cases of child sexual abuse a controversy pop up. Looking for the use of Wieviorka theory of violence (epochal paradigm of violence) one stopped by the religion role on this kind of violence. It has been argued that stricter Catholic rules, comparing with other religions, explain or even causes the deeper tendency to abuse inside the Church.

This argument sound very strange to the teacher. But not to the class. The class argue that it is a regular and understandable psychological explanation. Presumably male sexual instincts coercion develops psychological tension that can release violent action, as child sexual abuse. Of course, this does not mean that class approve or is receptive to dismiss criminal accountability of abusers. What this mean is class approve to dismiss social accountability on violence. There is forensic psychology and there is no forensic sociology.

The idea of Generation Five that it is needed to change social conditions that support the continuing child sexual abuse is strange to the class. Class prefer to stress the need for specialization of disciplines and sub-disciplines such as sociology and psychology (in a way that sociology should accept psychological explanation but not necessarily the reverse) and dismiss unrealistic integration of knowledge (nobody is able to get all knowledge available today, so one needs to specialize). The use of most social science is not compatible with each other.

The teacher argued that this understanding of violence is common and it is misogynic, elitist and dissimulated. It shows a (false) link between manhood and violence as instinct instead of looking at it as a social conditioning of manhood: being a man in society is to be able to overcome tension/fear caused by the likelihood of the presence of violence. If you are a man and you want to survive you have to follow the path of showing no fear and strike first on weaker targets and avoid consequences for yourself. That is what some people do to avoid being victims themselves.

In practice this evolved in different kind of directions, in close and private places, such as families or asylums, in economic relations and human nature relations: first the strongest side strikes to show manhood and to avoid insecurity. At the same time those who are in charge work hard to hide the consequences of violence, both directly and consciously and indirectly and ideologically and symbolically. Education, and social theory as part of it, hides bad behaviors and make all references to them taboo. If one wants to be able to look to social secrets, such as child sexual abuse, one needs to transform the way to produce knowledge as well one needs to transform society.

 

Summary 7. 13.04.2015 - Prevention of violence - Transformative Justice - Lessons from social activism about sexual child abuse

 

Discrimination imbebed in Social Theory (prezi presentation)

Transformative justice

Social theory is discriminatory. It does not face society as misogynist, elitist and dissimulated regarding gender, power and bodies, turning itself accomplice. Ideology as source of will and energy to people, as well as sexual relations as source of life, or omnipresent violence are turn out as taboos to social theory. Centripetal policy that make subdisciplines to this matters isolate them from mainstream theory. The same movement separates modern societies and modern aspects of societies from other societies and non-modern aspects of modern societies, as if those were not worthy as human social experiences.

One example of the exclusion of the sight both from common understanding of what is social experience and from social theory is sexual abuse of child that happens without notice, in modern societies. Since last years, when scandals showed who pervasive this practices are. Big confusion between what is pedophilia, homosexuality and child sexual abuse shows that the elusive mind still covers the matter. Criminal treatment of cases do not help to clarify or prevent these kind of events. Human perversity is still taboo.

Human ability to adapt goes with our ability to hide many immoral things done. Talk seems very distant of representing fully action.

Generation Five activists on sexual child abuse cases produce a report about how and why they feel the need to change their practices from restorative justice to transformative justice. They fell their activities are nor worthy enough because the same social causes (patriarchy and state power based on that) still produce the same effects: discrimination on women and children as possessions. They fell it is no good to restore that state of affairs. They need to change it, to transform society if one wants to avoid that kind of violence.

 

 

Summary 6. 23.03.2015 - Contributions for a centrifugal social theory

 

Social theory Hiding the face, presentation; The brain, the face and emotions, paper

Discrimination imbededd in social theory prezi presentation

Discrimination and social theory prezi presentation

1.                  There are raisons that explain why modern people fell and think misogynist and elitist and dissimulate these feelings and thoughts.  These raisons should be discovered studying the built of autonomous virtual worlds: the voice (writing and images) as if it is separated from the action (labor, war, for instance). The way virtual world (the voice) use and change space-time living experience. This separation reveals to human experience a double nature that can be use to discover nature as well to dissimulate feelings and thoughs.

2.                  Social theory is not immune to this dissimulation effect. Its criticism to misogyny and elitism is not radical. It is unable to show the full extent of them in society.  Social theory is not yet a science in full power. This is the raison why is so difficult to take violence as a subject and to consider it at its full extend, especially when violence comes from the State: http://www.ipvr.eu/people/steps/research_projects?token=gqu2G7_rE1MKZ4J7D1b06Q

Social theory is not easily able to avoid bourgeois ideology that dissimulate modern state violence as property rights and market places rules (read Hirschmann in the bibliography)

3.                  One of the consequences of this state of affairs is what Collins refers: the idea that violence can be explained by the testosterone of young male when reality is other way around. The most violent place in modern society are homes and social institutions, were children, women and old people are treated violently by who takes care of them or by people around them. Violent as well are the social condition of women and children of prisoners. They are not condemn by court but any way they suffer from staying alone in a misogynous world, becoming a big part of the poor population. Women get poorer jobs and less payment and still have to take care of the children. As Collins state, violence looks for weak people and find them. It looks for the safer situation for violent people, including the State.

4.                  The centripetal thinking, like the water running in the hole, runs from outside in. Social theory becomes extremely specialized, such as sociology of violence, and do not look at its framework on the all of sociology world. What we need to avoid dissimulation effect and to go deeper on misogyny and elitism criticism is centrifugal thinking: to deal with the borders of society at the micro society level (biological conditions of human kind to live) and at the macro level (moral and legal voices that makes sense from social action, such as religion or ideology) and to define society and the level of reality in between this two borders.

5.                  Wieviorka and Collins approaches covers these two limit aspects of violence. Violence paradigms based on mainstream "subject" self determination to action in a special historical epoch relate society and moral environment is Wieviorka´s view. Violent interactive situations that pushes people to act violently and to spend a lot of emotional energy for that propose, against non-violent human nature, is Collins´s view relating society and biological human condition. Both approach do not break clearly with mainstream social theory and accept to become a part of a sub-discipline without deeper consequences.

6.                  The distance and contradictions between social paradigms and every-day states of mind through mimetic and recursive dispositions of mankind indicate the level of social tension at each moment. This is monitored by political and social and security institutions as legitimacy problems (anomie) and it should completed by the assessment about the kind of social spin (energy, intensity) as instituting mud or emancipating mud of voices and action, favoring innovative or subversive kind of social action.

Summary 5. 16.03.2015 The limits of social theories of violence in Wieviorka and Collins

 

Social theory´s limits, prezi presentation

The students felt, as non-available theoretical concerns at Wieviorka and Collins´s theories on violence to address their subjects about January 2015 Charlie Hebdo case three fields of problems:

a)      How to deal with communication. Violence spread through the media as well as by the consequences it has in people who are out of the field of action (friends, family, and partners)? Most of the information available about what happened is dependent on these social subjects. The scientific inquiry depends heavily on them. Emotions, politics, shared social identities that media and families stand for. There is violence concerning locals and violence (less violent) that concerns all the world. How it works?

b)      It seems clear that there are people looking for violence, as a personal characteristic. Of course, society and specialized institution make it real what else could be repressed. But we know there is desire of violence we can fell. Violence is a universal and omnipresent thing and not really something we can separate from building societies and producing power from nature and environment as well from other people. Different forms of expressing violence depends of history and can be trained: that is right. Is there something in human society and in life that we can call violence, regardless the historical and local shape of it?

c)       Is it violence always negative, destructive? Wieviorka say no. Hiper-subject is constructive and is indispensable for maintaining and changing society and the world. Then, who can evaluate what is destructive and constructive in violent events: Islamic Fundamentalists or western sociologist?

We found conceptualization (what is violence and what is society?) perception (focusing action and disclaiming diffusion processes emotional and media, short and long term) assessment (moral and political and identity) and scale problems (macro and micro split).

These and other social theory problems on violence are social theory general problems. Lahire´s hiper specialization exclude epistemic debate on dominant and old social theory tradition that no one supports (because everyone is a specialist). Wieviorka is macro sociologist and Collins is micro sociologist: how can we merge them approach? That is why something is wrong with social theory, as Mouzelis claim? Should not we consider omnipresence of violence instead of accepting to draw a line between society and violence, as if rarely and only from time to time they merge? How can we understand sociology focusing in power (main stream weberian dimensions) and neglecting violence? Is not it power the same that the use of social violence – as a monopoly of the state, as Max Weber said?

Giddens propose to embed violence in the social analysis dimensions: industrialism, capitalism, warfare and social control. He was not able to use it or diffuse that way of transforming social theory. Social theory remains faithful to misogynist, elitist and dissimulating epistemology heritage of the 19th century former aristocratic cultivated salons. It is still needed to hidden violence of the state and present violence exclusively bottom up. As physiological caused event. That is way it has been excluded from social theories. Which is not conform Durkheim´s idea of top-down coercion and solidarity as social glue.

Summary 4. 02.03.2015 - Wieviorka´s and Collins´s theoretical use to understand violence

How can “paradigm of violence” Wieviorka´s notion help us to understand Charlie Hebdo case? It relates history, long term history – such as Crusades – and short term history – colonial wars and stigma – with present violence, nor only at political grounds but also at working place grounds. This violent backgrounds of violence are many times hide by the urgency of action to avoid violence to continue. But they are also indispensable when it comes to the violence prevention opportunities.

Staying with Wieviorka´s proposal, it is clear it is difficult to find out a single dimension that explains the main causes of violence, be it politics, economics, culture, or prestige. Every dimension plaid a big role as containing some cause of Charlie Hebdo case. Still, we have to explain why were these three or four people who engage in such a violence and why they get the massive public attention they were looking for. All the time, there were all thinkable sociological causes active and no violence has occur. Why, then, it happens this way?

Wieviorka´s answer is outside sociological cognitive field. We need to frame, he argue, the building of the subjects, social entities able to break habitus and turn out to develop violent activities. We need to include same kind of moral judgment on the motives and consequences of violent acts. Mainly differentiating hipersubject and antisubjects, those subjects that act violently in order to better the society and the world and those subjects who just destroy what has been built before without any constructive propose of bettering what humanity has already conquer. Many subject, maybe the most part of them, are more grey motivated than that two ideal type of action. Fluctuant subjects, non-subjects, survivor subjects are all grey types of subjects, not enough destructive to be anti-subjects and no perspective of bettering      society.

Collins contributions calls our attention to the dirty aspect of violence. Such as the search for weak people incapable of resisting violence. The need of social support for violent few to act violently – guns available, moral support, lack of opportunities to express oneself in pacific manners, etc. For violent situation turns out to be strong enough to downsize the need of energy to overcome the tension/fear proved by violent people – because the target will not be able to act violently – and the energy of the violent few need to be full.

The notion of stage violence used as a way of proving each other as part of the same social strata can be use here to understand the way violent few fells in Eden when they have the opportunity to face the strongest powers on earth as equals. For the weak it is deadly. This includes the victims and the suicidal violent. For the powerful, for each side, it is staged violence: signals of power sent by media to each other.

The specific ways terrorists prepare themselves to action is discussed by Collins as a professional training. The traveling to Syria or to Yemen can be understood as such.  

Summary 3. 23.02.2015 Collins´ views on violence

Wieviorka and Collins look to violence in very different ways: the French sociologist analyses macro violence as action theory. He looks at the different kind of sense that are supposed to cause violence, as an integrated kind of move: normative will plus social capability. The north-American sociologist analyses violence as energy spread and retrieved as social ritual, promoting tension/fear that avoids easy and frequent violent actions (real physical harm). Violence is very short. The person the first to strike wins. The bigger the strength differences between opponents, the higher the risk of actual violence against the weak. The violent few are rare and pushed by the situation they find themselves involved in.

More about Collins´ book HERE

 

 

Summary 2. 09.02.2015 - Wieviorka´s views on violence

Presentation of the subjects of research chosen by the students.

Wieviorka´s subjects´ typology on violence

 

Fluctuant subject

“lorsqu´un sens préexistant disparait ou de l´aval, lorsqu´une attente, un besoin ne trouvent pas encore leurs formulation claire (…) la violence correspond ici à une subjectivité qui ne débouche sur aucune emprise réelle, concrète” (op.cit.:292) un vif sentiment d´injustice, de non-reconnaissance (…) se transforme en violence (…) la violence urbaine explose (…)”(op.cit.:293).

The sense of life disappears and no new one arises. Violence comes about a sense of profound injustice and it goes nowhere, as in urban riots

Hipper-subject

(Estado nascente) recharge de sens, “il cesse d´être ´flottant´ pour aller chercher ailleurs, une nouvelle légitimité” (op.cit.:294). “ (…) caractéristique essentielle des phénomènes totalitaires et sectaires naissants (…) une intense subjectivité (…) et une grande hétéronomie (…) charisme (…) mouvement (…) Mais se serait commettre une profonde injustice et une grave erreur que de réduire cette figure du sujet à ses seules dimension d´autodestruction et de destruction (…)”  (op.cit.:295).

Fluctuant subject stops by a recharge of a new sense that drives it. It is unjust to present the hiper-subject violence as only destructive. Sometimes in order to transform itself and society some amount of violence is needed to build new social relations. .

Non subject

Banalidade do mal, Milgram, burocratas, “ (…) non pas un quelconque déficit de sens (…) mais plus radicalement encore un déficit de subjectivité (…)”  (op.cit.:296) . “ (…) celle où la violence est possible précisément parce que  la subjectivité n´est pas en cause (…)”  (op.cit.:297) .

Lake of sense and lake of subjectivity characterize this type of subjects. They claim no empathy feelings towards victims or repugnance to perpetrators of violence. They just pragmatically live their hierarchical alienated social role on an everyday kind of life.

Anti-subject

 

Crueldade “ (…) sans lien avec un quelconque sens en dehors de celui que [la violence] constitue en elle-même (…) non référée à un rapport social (…)”  (op.cit.:297) “ (…) intense subjectivité (…) mais quasi animal (…) rompt, en définitive, avec tout humanisme, et avec tout esprit démocratique (…) il est destructive, jamais constructive (…) il ne cherche pas à se prolonger dans l´action”  (op.cit.:298)

Violence has only destructive sense, both at social and personal levels.  Cruelty arises. Intense and animal subjectivity.

Survivor subject

 

“ (…) menacée dans son être même (…) la violence des jeunes, dont les conduites de rage et de haine ou les émeutes urbaines (…)”  (op.cit.:299) “ (…) la violence fondamentale est ´préambivalente´, elle se rattache à l´instinct de vie et ne découle pas de la pulsion de mort  (…) ne relèvent donc ni de l´agressivité, ni du sadisme.”  (op.cit.:300) “la violence fondamentale est l´expression du refus de l´écrasement ou de la négation de soi (…)”  (op.cit.:301)

When society do not recognize social identity displayed by young people they can feel alienated and respond violently, claiming recognition for themselves as part of society.

 

More about Wieviorka´s book HERE

 

Summary 1. 02.02.2015 - Presentation of the course

The goal of the course is to discuss what society is and what violence is. Even controversial and central to social theory, these concepts and not often discussed. AS it happens with common sense, social theory suffer from the cognitive taboo that surround both concepts.

Society is almost always “my” society (western, class, gender, ethnic). Violence comes with moralism attached, suffering the same bias as society. Would science overcome unilateral concerns and conceptions with society and violence? Can science do it?

The program of the course has three parts. Macro and micro violence as presented by Wieviorka and Collins. Criticism on that theoretical approaches as unilateral. Presentation of different grass root prevention of violence strategies.

My idea is to test a definition of violence taken from Reempsta: violence is the “reduction to the body”. This can be good, in sports, sex, leisure, sleep, education. Can be bad, when time, space, intensity of violence break limits of resilience of people.

This understanding of violence suppose a collaborative conception of society. The juxtaposition of bodies are not a society. Society is upper than that. Not so near the body as psychological level of reality; nor so high as spirituality. Society is something in between. If so, violence will return people and societies to their bodies. Can kill people and diminish society, downsize on communication, knowledge, cooperation, and so on.  

As Hirshman and Foucault argue, modernity proceeds to a denaturalization of violence, turning it to a taboo. Monopoly of violence by the state becomes hidden (look at the available research areas at this site http://www.ipvr.eu/people/steps/research_projects?token=gqu2G7_rE1MKZ4J7D1b06Q)

All other forms of violence, they are cover by the state (and hidden) or they are exposed by the state and become more or less scandalous.


2014


Violence within demonstrations, described by the police side

Where is violence? The dark side of the Chocolate Nov 2012

Strutural violence perception: Americans are completely wrong,

 

For those students willing to understand my concerns with relationships between sociology and psychology please read Dores, A. (2013). The brain, the face and emotion. In A. Freitas-Magalhães, C. Bluhm & M. Davis (Eds.), Handbook on facial expression of emotion (pp.129-181). Porto: FEELab Science Books.

 

Summary 10. 20.05.2014 - Final synthesis

 

A violência da vida APD

Beyond the pioneer value that opened to us contradictory paths to challenge sociological concerns to deal with violence issues, macro political and micro relational stylizations brought to us by Wieviorka and Collins – both important references of sociological trends and traditions – a) both do not conform with statements built by activisms concerned with prevention of violence; b) both suffer  the same epistemological problems pointed to social theory by Mouzelis and Lahire: reductionism and reification; unicity and elitism.

Both theories of violence are straight forwards and rational. However enable to produce an account of observed violent episode characterized by complexity and irrationality. Both theories also are contradictory to each other. It seems they treat of incommunicable worlds.  

Studying Reempsta it seems right to define violence as something that results on a “reduction to the body”. This idea makes sense once one conceives a reverse sense social phenomena: an “expansion beyond the body”. Neural scientists and psychologists (as Corballis) mention consciousness, intelligence, recursivity as different forms of expression of homeostasis (manner by which living symbiotic bodies cooperate with each other by auto-organizational  and virtual modes in the long run and extensively). Developing people – by a frame of age or of civilized acquisitions – is presented as elevating positions, spiritual abilities, sociabilities, using ideologies, religious faith, professional and cognitive disciplines, and so on).

This violence is, at the same time, macro and micro, direct and symbolic. Violence happens to be constructive – when people engage on training or sports. Reduction to the body, even when it is extreme, can stimulate spiritual, status, military, economic, sport or other kind of constructive reactions.  

The moral negative assessment on violence is ideological: the war lords look to violence as a way of honouring the warriors. Bourgois prefer to concentrate on economic and power results, accusing others than themselves to behave violently (even when any one can see the real cause of violence concerns profits).

Sexual abuse, extreme poverty, the continuation of colonial genocides, for instance, has nothing to do with common sense violence. For the street, violence means psychological   motivated actions of bad people. One can concede that there is a violent institution that may be sometimes violent to defensive or attack proposes. That parturition, possessive love, social exclusion arrangements are violence is hard to easily accept and to discuss as being violence related.

For common sense and social theory, violence is strange to human kind: it is a devil incursion in social life. It is a mechanical evil; a temporary presence among us. Only as external to society and human kind one can accept to present violence.

For scientific proposes one think it is better to consider violence as the type of social dynamics that reduces each one to the body. In everyday life as well as for institutional proposes, violence is often stimulating. Other times it is warm full. Most of the time one just does not proceed to any moral evaluation – as in the cases of domestic violence or wars.

One needs to work for other kind of social theory able to built bridges with other kind of knowledge and methods. To learn how to deal with complexity and avoid social specialized closed in itself kind of theory.

 

 

Summary 9. 13.05.2014  - The exotism of violence as seen by social theory 

A violência da teoria social APD

The Mouzelis´s reductionism process of reasoning attaches society to a single level of existence. This simplification is completed, in order to make sense, by reification process: it completes the reductive picture with imagination, as Descartes full fill life out of the body by a religious concept of soul.

Other characteristic of social theory is its attraction for discussion power and anything else (cf. Lahire, Therborn). It ignores mechanisms and ambiences that integrate social powers, such as physical strength and determination or xenophobic or solidary social mood dominating the scene. Social design profile and do not recognize natural instability e plurality of potential action to each social entity, that can surprise us all at any time.

Both Mouzelis and Lahire notice the lake of a deeper and dense sociological approach to reality; instead of a superficial approach to power appearances. In-depth analyses should interact with discussions about human nature (discussed by biologists) and about ideologies and theologies (that give us some account on the cycles of life, more and less dynamic, more or less destructive).

Morals and development mix with violence perceptions and assessments. For instance, generally one considers structural violence as legitimate violence (a form of constructive violence) and popular violence (on parades and fests) as bad and uncivilized violence. Most of the time misses to uncover the ambivalence of human nature facing or promoting violence. Violence is training for harder times - as military do with troops - or abuse of power - as in cases of oral arrestment at work. Moral assessment of violent actions depends, beside other topics, on time opportunity (and its epoch) and on lives stories.

Social theory neutralizes time. It takes only modern society as subject, instead of all history of human sociability. It discriminates colonized societies. This mental process split theory (what society should look like) from empirical data (where victims of colonization are everywhere). The same way virtual imagistic world is separated from practical world.

Wieviorka and Collins stay incarcerated each one of them, outside and inside the social bubble. The violence structural paradigm (States vs. terrorist networks) contrasts with after World War II violence paradigm (controlled by the state). Collins refers to efficient and physical violence - parallel to what courts do in order to address violent acts. Wieviorka reifies violence as international and foreigner affairs specialists usually do, in order to present a moral ground to social and political analysis.

The civil society proposals to refrain or abolish violence presents before can be useful for conceiving a new way to deal with social problems and social theory. One needs to conceive different levels of reality and developing each one always taking in consideration the virtual influence and the physical impact of each level in the others; biological aspects below and ideological aspects above, as human nature presents them.

Summary 8. 06.05.2014 Mouzelis critic

 

Reducionismo e reificação, segundo Mouzelis

One can conceive society above the bio-psychological level of reality and under the spiritual, ideological, theological level. The social theory looks superficially to society. It looks micro at the concaves surface and it looks macro to the convex surface. Both ways, it looks from outside in – from a distance. Social theory does not consider time and space and energy as important variables to look for. Social theory refer to photos of modern societies. It even doubt if non modern societies are societies at all.

Mouzelis present us the epistemological grounds of the non effective work of social theory. The main causes are reductionism (at micro analysis) and reification (at macro analysis). One really are not sure what society one is talking about. It lacks a clear definition. The main concern seems to be to isolate sociology from bad influences, such as positivism or biologism (both ways of claiming for new approaches to hard sciences world and methods). For this propose, tabou (of considering bio-mechanisms and spiritual ambience of social events) is needed.

Social analysis turns out to be superficial and avoiding in-depth progress, looking at the surfaces reflecting separated micro and macro worlds both reduced to two dimension images and reificated as one needs to complete the lack of sense of the reduction operation. Social theory needs to look forward to become a science as any other instead of staying a social science, a second class kind of rationality.

In the first place one need to acknowledge social secrets and the way social theory reinforce them, instead of uncover them. Crime and intelligence worlds, as well as violence, emotions, bodies, transformation, technologies, all are examples of research routes sociologists avoid to integrate in social analysis. That is way it is so difficult to find a better theory of action, consistent with empirical observations. Mouzelis claim that multilevel and articulate analysis would help, thinking society as an onion: several concentric layers.

Summary 7. 30.04.2014

Sociological definition of violence PP

With this class we enter the third part of the course. This part will deal with the criticism to social theories. What avoid them to refer to violence? This time one did present a definition of social violence, according to Reempsta: reduction to the body.

To make sense of this definition one needs to reformulate social theory.  One needs to merge body and conscious in both directions as intimate relationships instead of separate destinies as body and soul. Body expands itself by physical growing as well as by mental development. Violence is to bring down the human efforts of expanding.  For good or bad raisons.

Society should be recognized as a consequence of human sociability nature. There are no people out of strong social bonds; and these strong any one, as individual. Society should not be understood as modern society, as an exclusive. Simpler societies as well as classic societies are societies because they all come from the social nature of human species.

People got biological levels, social levels and spiritual levels – mechanisms and ambience where society evolve using the middle levels. Why, then, should sociologist to avoid biological knowledge as biologism? For instance, is not it relevant to know the existence of neuro mirrors that reproduce movement’s people see or feel in other people? If one knows better biological mechanisms, one knows better how society works.

It is possible to look to society as different from the institutional pillars we are used to think about. We can think society as a level of reality, as Durkheim proposes. One can communicate by conscious with it. It can be nearer or far from our bodies. Any way society is part of each one of us, as well each one of us is part of the society. One live together (by oneself) the cycles of solidarity and of emancipation, when everybody feels safe and enjoying a stable social identity and when one needs to transform one self and society in order to adapt or even survive.

Recursivity is a natural and spontaneous characteristic of humans. That is why sociability works on a special level of reality imposed and make available by this human nature. To understand better what society about one is to get help from biology sciences and their late results. One is call to treat social theory in ways to turn it in legitimate science theories.

Summary 6. 22.04.2014 - Transformative Justice and CI (Citizen Income)

There are various social ways to struggle for preventing violence. This happens most of the time out of public awareness. The proposals happen to be innovative; such the cases are presented briefly. The three examples are very different among them.

Proposals

Economies (Greaber)

Positives (auto administrated  harmony)

Negatives (hetero administrated competition)

Communism (familiar)

Transformative Justice

Administrated justice

Hierarchy (asymmetric)

Good living

Development

Market (among strangers)

Citizen Income (CI)

Salary

David Greaber´s typology on economies is useful to explain the differences between the three approaches. Harmonization in any case is the main logic. It opposes the dominant logic of competition. The auto determination struggle organization opposes the administration of violence prevention work.

Transformative Justice is a North American activists on child sexual abuse. They point out the inability of restaurative justice approach to identify and transform social conditions that support and allow opportunities for sexual offenses against children. These conditions should be address since they are environmental conditions that replicate the support to offenders. They should be transformed instead of restaured. They point out as well the inability of legal justice administration to deal with the prevention needs. For example: charging against the accused person penal system avoids the collaboration of abusers on preventing violence happens again. Moralizing the victim position, justice administration takes away from the victim the ability to have something to say in the process of judgment of the case.

Generation FIVE, the NGO that developed this proposal, claim for political activism that protect victims and make offenders accountable, both process supported by community and avoiding State intervention. Prevention of child sexual abuse is jeopardize whenever the State police and administration are in charge. Victims can be victimized again by State standard judicial procedure. And transforming social conditions that build the condition for child abuse are not as issue for the State.

Citizen Income is another proposal that guarantee dignity of living for anyone and everybody. This would be achieved by an unconditional income given to every citizen without any duty at all. It is a kind of empowerment that free everyone from the uncertainty of raw life. Rich or poor, nobody will be asked if you need or not to take money. Any money spent of social security should not stay with administrative staff (80% of some aid proceedings stay out of the hands of poor people). The simpler the rule, the better.  Since everyone is treated the same way as everybody else. Doing so difference of bigger and worse income will decrease and, as Wilkinson and Pickett show (Spirit Level), this turns out to be a way of downsizing very different kinds of social problems, as well as the money the State spends now a day taking care of the victims.

 

Summary 5. 25.03.2014

social secrets and development

This session start the second subject of our course. The first part of the program – the presentation of the social theory of two authors on violence – ended. Now we will look at cultural productions aiming abolition of violence (exploitation/development, sexual rape/domination, social closure/stigma).

Social secret notion has been presented, in the first place. The teacher use it to refer the social phenomena of producing ignorance (on propose or not) about information and knowledge that cannot possibly be omitted to one´s senses. The students were invited to try to use it to explore the analysis of each one description of violent actions.

 Social secrets are ways of ignoring boring presences in our daily lives and societies. For instance: we normally do not pay attention to beggars. We just pass ignoring them. Never the less everybody knows they are there. Those who decide not to ignore make the difficult effort to join them (for supper, for instance) as a helping, solidarity, tolerance, charity mood, for a while. After this moment, everything comes back to normal indifference to beggars, criminals, drug addicts, immigrants, ill people, or people insane, one delegate to professional care behind walls.

Violence, as well, knows these phenomena. When it grows a tunnel focus of conscious and action facing an opponent, in a violent confrontation, one just do not see, feel, look, sense, what is outside the tunnel of attention. Sometimes, even it comes aggressions from outside one do not take knowledge of the event. When the media describe a violent event, for modesty raisons or avoiding media information to join causes  of future violence or avoid to describe disgusting situation that indispose the readers and viewers or for political raisons , they overlook parts of the violent events. The same can happen with the description reports students have produce to this course.  

When one chooses a scientific theory or a political ideology to give sense to any observed situation, one ignores many feelings that come and go in our minds. One needs to focus. One avoids thinking outside the tunnel. One produces or reinforces social secrets, eventually.

This phenomenon explains how one knows and one ignores – at the same time – colonial practices used to produce modernity. This the second subject of this lesson.

The original peoples of the Andes at Equator and Bolivia resisted for 400 years to conqueror’s genocide practices all over America. After the II WW, USA proposes the goal of development as a ranking over economic activity in the western part of the world. All other countries were invited to follow the path of USA institutions and economy, under its control.

From the point of view of the original Andes people, protectors of the forest and protected by the forest, development has been the continuation in a stronger path of colonial threat to their cultures and lives in symbiosis within the forest. The every-day violent threat has been reinforced by development politics, organized by local political oligarchies heirs of European colons. For these people abolition of violence is not only a hope and a culture (Sumak Kawsay). It is also a utopia that lends them energy to survive the violent environment. They dream the end of development.

Since harmony with the environment is needed for western global civilization to survive its suicide, Acosta feels it is a good opportunity to accept, study and develop Sumak Kawsay culture as a contribution for new civilized approaches to well being. Boaventura Sousa Santos wrote about epistimicide, the need for diversity of episteme and the political goal of enrich human culture heritage as environment with bio-diversity.

 

Summary 4. 12.03.2014

reading cases through theory lenses

After describing two sociological approaches to violence and each student to write down one episode of violence, to confront theory and real life is the next step. Two cases have been presented: one about turmoil in recent Turkey where one student has been part in the demonstrator’s side. Police has been considered the aggressor, media cover this aggression, the government controlled indirectly the media by conversations between PM and Director of main media in the country, no much information comes outside the country. People like the student reporter that used to see police as a prevention and defensive tool for population saw the other side of policing (a modern institution) which is repression by violence against peaceful demonstrators, obeying orders from the State. In Greece it happens something like that; even the situation is very different. We are invited to avoid the common thinking of blaming the victim, which goes like that: Turks or Greeks or both are not really civilized people. That is why it happen these violent events. It is because the police should control ancestral violent instincts of the crowd. The same happened in Paris or London or Lisbon; or New York or Cairo; everywhere.

This description calls for a macro theoretical framework, such as provided by Wieviorka – even he does not look at State violence. One needs to understand politics to understand the meaning and the evolution of violence. One needs to realize that several level of problems and conflicts come to join in violent action, from international pressing on Turkish State to become similar to EU state model till religious reaction  to the decline of EU to accept Turkey integration as full member state.

Other case of micro-violence presented referred to striping a female employee in a heating   shop by order of a fake policeman on the phone by several people who join the action. No one touched the girl but the mental pressure was enough to go on for one hour till someone realized it was a bad joke. For micro violence proposes one compare with Collins theory and find that one can say that there is no violence in this episode, if no one touched the victim. If it happened any violence, it would be rare and short. Most of the time, will say Collins, no violence is occurring. It seems unsatisfactory approach for the case.

Summary 3. 25.02.2014

Wieviorka book synthesis can be like this: a) each historical time runs a paradigm of ways to engage on violence; for instance a paradigm more conflictual or more anti-social, more coordinated or with no rule; b) social theories are to specialized and no broad enough to give a perspective on violence; c) outside theoretical contribution is needed to integrate morals and historical stream, such as the theory of the subject of Touraine, to deal with violence social analysis.

Collins, Randall (2008) Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Randall Collins book propose other reasoning to deal with violence from a sociological point of view. He focus on violent people interaction in a micro approach, by observing the closely. Deepening specialization and focusing on a especial definition of violence: no symbolic but physical violence, no threatening violence but consummated violence.

He proposes to avoid common sense polysemy and focus on an objective subject. He risks controversial declarations supported by hard evidence and challenge sociologist of violence to built new broader and better sociological theories of violence. Himself announce to be developing a sociological macro theory of violence.

Looking at evidence filmed by surveillance camera systems and brought by testimonies of violent action, at war, in urban areas, in close areas, Collins conclude that it is easy and common to quarrel and it is difficult and rare to be violent. To be violent means to build up inside enough emotional energy to overcome tension/fear barrier that normally avoid violence to happen. Even when the barrier is overcome violent people are commonalty incompetent to drive violence to an efficient end. They are to stressed to do so.  Even at war or when violence spreads – hooligans or riots – most people avoid be violent, even they support violent few.

Collins inquiry deals with how people fight – the first two parts – and why people fight – the third part. The name of the first part is “the dirty secrets of violence” (raw and low status violence). And the second part is “cleaned-up and stage violence” (culturalized and high status violence).

Examples of secrets are general imposing the presence of soldiers in battle fields to unwilling young people: most of them do not fight. Just stay in the ground because it is severely forbidden by martial law to walk out. Doing so one stays alone and hunted by both enemies and fellow soldiers. Most munitions and chances to kill enemies are not used and casualties of friend fire are common and ever present.

Heroes and heroic combat actions most of the time results of situational forward panic, when people just flee together and desperate use violence to survive.  

Other secret is to be violent with those who cannot be harmful for the aggressor: weak people, at domestic violence or at bullying experiences at school or at knapping industry. These proceedings are covered by the effect of blaming the victims, since people avoid feeling accountable for what happened to weak people blaming them to cooperate with violent ones. And they probably are right, from a non moral point of view. Victims and weak people “attract” violence events because violence becomes easier for violent people.

Violence is not all secrecy. There are forms of violence that show off. People can claim for fair fights, as a way to become different from common people. Dueling, sports, gang or hooligan fight tours are examples. People make their own social identity out of the shows of violence and organized social hierarchies over the involvement on violent actions.

Why we fight? People are not violent: interactional situations are violent. Few people engage directly on violent episodes. They learn how to build up enough emotional energy and to accept and maintain their social status. They learn to be violent before the opponent, because this is one way to build emotional superiority over the combat. Fights are mostly very brief. The emotional attention space is limited and who ever dominate it will receive emotional support from the crowd of bystanders. Engaging in a fight means to enter a tunnel of focus attention hopefully in the right direction. It would disturb and upset enemy's rhythms.  

Emotional superiority is much more important to fight winning decision than war hardware.

Summary 2. 10.02.2014

Michel Wieviorka, La Violence, Paris, 2005, has three parts. One presents the different paradigm that frame violence before and after the 80´s. Second part presents different sociological approaches to violence. Third part presents the view on violence from Touraine theory of subject regard. Being a subject a built social entity, as a person, as a group, as an institution, as a movement, or else.

The author stresses the distinction between constructive violence and destructive anti-social violence. The first one makes sense to the coming society. The second one does not make sense.

Grey situations are presented at the very end, in a typology of violence. Beside the hiper-subject claiming new senses for social development and the anti-subject protagonist of cruelties, one find the floating subject, driving feelings of injustice; non subject, social entity that act mechanically; survivor subject, fight against the social deny of the its self.

The first part of the book presents arguments in favor of the statement that historically there is a reduction of the opportunities to develop conflicts, opposed to violence such as diplomacy does oppose to war: a) diverging infra-state (less control on economy by privatization) and meta-state (religious ideologies) problems out of state control; b) proclamation of the rights of victims over citizenship; c) media coverage and uncontrolled use of new media.

 The second part of the book presents sociological analysis of violence from psycho-politic, economic and cultural separate points of view. Mass e social movements violence, unionist violence, uncivilized violence do not include any explanation of cruelty, genocide or gratuitous violence. Sociology recognizes instrumental and cold violence, expressive and hot violence. It does not refer non-sense cold violence.  

In order to include that occult kind of violence into the analytical frame work one needs, claim Wieviorka, to come out of sociological views. One needs to find on the subject theory, upstream of socialization, in the sense of history, looking at the built of protagonist entities building societies, the analytical criteria to present violence; including cruelty.

 

 

Summary 1. 03.02.2014

Violence: social phenomena or sociological concept?

Violence is a new sociological subject, as a sub discipline. Is it a special social field? Is it another way to look at social relations? Why and how did violence emerge recently as an important sociological topic? Should violence be another social field to be looked at by standard social theory? Or should sociologist use the call to understand violence to challenge and evolve social theory under a fast changing world?

Each student should prepare (5 pages maximum) description of a violent social episode. It should be as neutral description as possible. Never the less, the description should be framed by a brief explanation of the way the writer came to find the chosen empirical episode (be it experienced live or through tales, literature, theater, film or TV) and choose it to the scholar exercise. Each writer can conclude the paper with a personal comment on what and how the episode represents as an opportunity to discuss violence. Teacher hopes everybody could present the paper in the next fortnight.

When it comes to ritualistic reception of new students at university first grade it is controversial what violence is: for those in favor of traditions they say that what happens is not violent; those against, say the ritual is violent. The public discussion started with the decease of six students in ritual practices. Most of the Portuguese people would say that students’ rituals are a youth institution. During the public discussion, secrecy has been disclosed and some victims come to declare what has not been heard before. The families of the deceased call for knowing the truth about the preparation of the ritual and of the public presentation about what happened by the top hierarchy of the ritual. Public claims of police investigation neglect rise suspicion over the will of criminal prosecution bodies.

For the moment, it is not clear what would be the position of Portuguese audience about “praxes”. Anyway, more people will join those few who think that integration assimilation rituals are intrinsically and brutally institutional violence.

This example shows that violence is an action and the way people look at the action.  Habitual action changes over time, as well as the look changes, depending on who is looking. For different people the same actions can be classified as violent or not violent. For the same people, in different time of her or his life, what seemed to be acceptable and non violent becomes unbearable. To be or not to be violence can also depend on the collocutor or on the sequence of the arguing. Sometimes violence seems to be a joke. When people have the opportunity to look again and reflect, they can change their minds. The victims are to blame for her or his status? Is it power exercise an abuse or part of a competition for god life? People acceptance of the legitimacy of violence is also influenced by opinion makers’ statements and for the general social mood.

Gender social use of violence is very different – men are powerful when they present violent potential and women are not supposed to be powerful that way. The victims are more likely to be female gender, poor people background, dominated ethnic groups background. There is a social differentiation about the publicly acceptable relationships to violence. Traditionally women do not fight for power and show subordination to men. Modern times are changing patriarchal thinking. But practical inequality is record anywhere and everywhere in the world. Structural and dominant violence is most of the times developed in secrecy and under the abetment of all power systems, avoiding accountability, using criminal justice to reinforce domination and stigmatization of the victims.

Some societies, now a day, condemn women for being sexually abused, blaming the victim. Western societies are changing our common past. Doing so, sexual assault and gender inequality becomes blamed by society and State. Never the less, rape and sexual abuse is still secret, as private matter. And the number of people involved in sexual violent practices is huge, cross class, most of the time a long with deep emotional feelings linking abusers and victims, as well as economic and social links, as family, for instance. There is no effective policy to address the epidemic gender violence, as a main civilization human rights goal. Each case should be brought to judicial institutions, wait for a decision and mixed up with opportunistic personal use of the fight against gender violence.

To understand violence, the teacher asked each student to decide what side of violent relationship she or he will choose. Because it makes a difference to look at a violent episode from the abuser, the victim, the bystander, the state agent, the activist, point of view. For clarity, to help the reader and the scientific discussion, even each one of us is able to slide from a point of view to another, to avoid slippery; each student is urged to play only a part of the presentation of her or his case, for discussion sake.

A social actor we need to consider, as well, is the crowed or the mood of the people, for historical or ritual raisons: when people are waiting for social change (or not) or when people are used to confront violent situations, in sport for instance, violence becomes different as well as the perception about what is dangerous violent.  

Violence is a polysemous word. In order to make it scientific we need methodic ways to turn it one sense only. This is a non solved problem. Yet.