SPEAKING OF ELEPHANTS... Dr. Louise Braddock ISRF Director of Research
F
inding the title for this Bulletin took the Editor and me some time but in the end Society and Violence seemed to capture the idea that violence is intrinsically social, and to be broad enough to cover its protean workings at and below the whole social surface while also holding onto the thought that some of it comes up, so to speak, from below. Not all violence pertains to the polis even if ultimately it impacts there. But, while violence might be grounded in human nature the conundrum of violence is a social one; from the human point of view it is both enigmatic and normatively challenging. In this year’s annual workshop the normative aspect presented itself in the question of the right attitude to the conduct of research, to the description of violence and the modalities through which its affective impact can or should mediated; in the need for an ethic of respect in the research and in the discussion of it; and in the emotional demandingness of the research itself. It also requires a certain fortitude of mind to ‘call’ power on the truth of what goes on. This demands a fortitude which is equally emotional and intellectual; the research requires a determined, subtle and intelligent critique that will discern and articulate the hidden, indirect and camouflaged activity that is part of the enigmaticity of violence. Violence is also enigmatic because it is ambiguously related to speech. On the one hand violence can suppress speech, overtly or covertly, directly or indirectly. On the other hand, it stands in for speech; not only as humour or satire but when as a mode of communication of last resort it takes over when speech runs out. It can even mediate itself, performatively, to provide a pathway back into the public domain for what is unsaid or unsayable from prior violence; sometimes from its immediacy of scale but very often from the slowness of ‘slow’ violence, its unremarked accumulation over time. 7
