SPEAKING OF ELEPHANTS...

SPEAKING OF ELEPHANTS...

Dr. Louise Braddock ISRF Director of Research

Finding 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.

Such thoughts, arising from the workshop and from subsequent feedback—for which my best thanks—lead inexorably to the question of synthesis of approach. Violence is a Real-Life Problem all right, but how can the different social sciences, disciplinarily separated by theories, methodologies, methods, levels of scale and focus, ontological commitments and so on, ever come together to produce an intelligible approach to any complex social phenomenon, let alone one as ‘difficult’ as violence? How can interdisciplinarity in social science, however understood and pursued, be adequate to Very Large Problems? At such moments my thoughts stray to the well-worn story of the six blind men all convinced that their take on the elephant of their perceptual encounter is the authoritative one. You can draw the moral you want from it, pretty much, but although they were all dogmatic in their assertions at least they noticed the elephant. Another familiar trope makes the elephant, unremarked while nevertheless enormous, the un-spoken referent of discussion, figuring what we manage not to talk about. Not noticing is part of violence’s social effect, something that needs itself to be noticed if it is to be spoken about.

It must then have been a nice change for our iconic pachyderms to appear at the workshop both entire- and centre-stage, as the subject of a presentation on accumulation as violence while also being emblematic of violence accumulated (force more-or-less precariously in place). Absent from the research proposal awarded for this Mid-Career Fellowship, the elephants in the workshop neatly figured for us the importance of speaking about them.