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© Richard J Tilley. All Rights Reserved.
balance = properly appraised
balances = property appraised
There is the potential movement today for even the brightest types of democracies to normalize into a hybrid totalitarian, democracy-lite, formational violence. Of course, whether these institutions were ever true democracies to begin with should, must be questioned, but that historical mapping is beyond the scope of this present section, though not out of mind. The younger generation presents potential to revolutionize the very interpretation of a democracy, but we have seen this potential in the younger generation with prior generations and it has not come to pass. It is possible any type of government tied to capitalism necessitates violence and a forced acceptance of inequality. This seems the most likely scenario that will develop in the future. However, of course, that could arguably be changed if different types of people ran for office, were enticed to run for office; a different personality type compelled to run for office would offer a revision of New Deal politics that pundits and commentators may well say is the first step towards a post-capitalist society, if corroborated correctly.
If first, institutional change caresses the collaborative self towards systematic change then the educational model that transfixes the self towards a strong, unrelenting invitation of peoplehood propels the self towards self-regulation and the inviting of spiritual, abstract, and dexterous forms of unrolling the scroll of inviting, shared selfhood.
It is true that the educational model that works towards preparation of the individual becoming the collective is needed regardless of what regulatory reparations are performed within and alongside the elimination of structural violence forms. However, this is an educational model that is firmly and specifically separated from capital interest. The removal of capital reward from firm study is holistically required to replace the burden of support from the individual to the group. Joanne Savage, et al., concluded in their study, “The Role of Poverty and Income in the Differential Etiology of Violence: An Empirical Test,” that there are greater incidences of violence among their sample with those in lower income brackets. Their conclusions, drawn from their data, was,
The pattern of mean incomes suggests that violent delinquents live in families with lower incomes than nonviolent-only offenders (M = $43,051 compared to $54,374) and nonviolent-only offenders have the highest income in both data sets, even compared to nonoffenders (M = $51,352). The poverty rate among violent offenders was 20.3%, compared to 14.6% among nonviolent-only offenders. The poverty rate among nonoffenders was 15.9%, slightly higher than the nonviolent-only group. (2019, 9)
With the from the ground up approach of a holistic Green New Deal paired with an institution so invigorated with anti-capitalist values that it invites the beginning of a post-capitalist environment, structural change manifests itself in many, divergent forms. The marriage of capital and wealth separates the more valuable self-interest of the self-valued principle of wealth of knowledge. Throughout the entire three-tiered path of least resistance model it is the invitation and value of knowledge that alleviates a great deal of violence-debt and exhilarates the self away from violence-customs.
Mary McCormick illustrates in her article, “Through a Different Lens: The Social Sanctioning of Family Violence,” that,
During most of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, child abuse and neglect were articulated as failure to train the child in moral conduct, and failure to provide discipline and structure to the developing child, thus failing to socialize him to assume his role as a productive citizen (Dolgin, 1997; Peled & Kurtz, 1994; Chicago Vice Commission, 1911). It was not until Henry Kempe identified battered child syndrome in 1962 that the outcomes of harsh parenting or corporal punishment were viewed as child maltreatment, a social problem, not a parental option in child-rearing (Peled & Kurtz, 1994). Society’s ambivalence toward violence in the family is apparent in the various definitions and interpretations of battering and abuse including, physical aggression toward a child or intimate partner, corporal punishment, harsh parenting, non-accidental physical injury, assault, and crimes against women (Ateah & Durant, 2005; Rothenberg, 2002). Based on these definitions, violence in the family has been viewed as the result of individual pathology, moral failure, lack of internal control or as a crime (Worden & Carlson, 2005; Erickson, 2000). (2007, 46)
Our inherited roles in perpetuating a culture of violence-customs regulates the sustained chores of non-violence inquiry against a backlash of those who wish to preserve traditional modes of violence. This is not without willful participation or collaborative insistence on a focus of capital-centered, valued violence. McCormick continues,
The use of force in families in the service of maintaining the social order is normative. While regulating behavior is essentially a function of family structure, when this structure breaks down, it is the role of society through its institutions and structures to regulate the behavior of the individual (Durkheim, 1951; Ross, 1900). Coercion and control, in other words socially sanctioned aggression through financial, legal and religious institutions and structures, becomes culturally consonant. (2007, 53)
Epitome scaling, that is what I call, summaries of abstracts of perfect examples of humanness symbolic of the reducibility of capitalist functionality and normalcy of dispossession are concentrated in terms of solidifying conquest and habitual norms in a divergent society. The populist tendency to navigate from one hyper-concentrated form of epitome scaling to the next exposes a projection from being witness to ontological reduction while the more harshly dispossessed are displaced, dislocated, and dismissed by the triggers of those navigations to the new form of (un)equal expression. Between epitome scaling and those concentrated, navigating tendencies resolves a share-metrics that reflects time out-of-bound. There is only one reality, we simply each share and split different lived experiences of that single reality leading to (un)shared perspectives. Share-metrics is the buildup of external retreat from the resemblance of truth that our participation in this other staged reality demands of us and encourages.
Violence-narratives among and tied into the social classes carry with them a sense of authenticity of the national-bound experience. Our narratives act as texts and manifest as plays to be performed. As Edward Said’s Orientalism shows, “texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe” (1978, 94). Violence-narratives appear in contemporary societies as waking dreams that in turn become manuals for further illustrations of a point or thesis. They are not limited to those of ill intent, but also become inspiration-stories for activists fighting for racial justice, restoration in Syria, justice for families who are victims of gun violence, and science fiction that dictates a future communal democracy that stabilizes the worst indulgences of violence-perpetrators. These all fulfill the acts of violence-narratives indirectly or unabatedly. The perpetuation of violence-narratives is not dissimilar to Frantz Fanon’s explication of the bourgeoisie from European heritage to an “racketeer mentality” in underdeveloped nations:
The bourgeoisie, which evolved in Europe, was able to elaborate an ideology while strengthening its own influence. This dynamic, educated, and secular bourgeoisie fully succeeded in its undertaking of capital accumulation and endowed the nation with a minimum of prosperity. In the underdeveloped countries we have seen that there is no genuine bourgeoisie but rather an acquisitive, voracious, and ambitious petty caste, dominated by a small-time racketeer mentality, content with the dividends paid out by the former colonial power. (The Wretched of the Earth, 2004, 119)
Fanon’s bourgeoisie are maintained by violence-narratives. A consumerism capital reading of Václav Havel’s post-totalitarianism, that totalitarian regimes continue to thrive not through unrestricted oppression but through economic displacement of societies into a consumer goods dependency, reifies the opposition of power that is mutually dependent and equally participatory. They sell us the idea of money and we buy into their leadership and quasi-national sense of direction at the cost of human rights and in the contradictory spirit of the myth of self-determination.
The relocation of violence-narratives demonstrates the agility of violence to persist and extend itself even under the duress of quarantine. Here violence only becomes more valuable to those who wish to attain its lure. Are we to believe that the same could occur in the restriction of violence-narratives in human life? Would childhood trauma and the relapse of predisposition be a sought-after commodity to be attained through back alleys and meetings in dark rooms? Are we truly traders in guilt? Merchants of pain? Is there a collaborative orchestration taking place in our reality? Truly a directional approach to satisfy our need to consume violence under the illusion of commerce. Are patriotism and diplomacy, capitalism and the economy, health care and human rights, all exterior portrayals of demonstrative “intentions” to resolve violence built in natural defenses to preserve the continued existence of violence-narratives and the sources of predisposition?
Perhaps the Neo-Freudian, Ernest Becker, would imply that yes, we are so driven by the hero’s quest to imitate immortality that humanity, at least in contemporary capitalist societies, has been driven to devise a system where we can feel good about ourselves for attempting to deride violence on the surface while simultaneously restricting our ability to move beyond violence-narratives and preserving the sources of conflict that restitute these narratives. Perhaps white picket fence and 2.5 children quests of norms are a form of nuclear religiosity that seeks to cement violence-narratives as being unapproachable and unrelatable in our quasi-civilized society. If we state we are living in peace with world through admirable, peaceable means – a family, a house, a stable career – then we create the illusion that the slow violence of persistence of norms is not relevant or that peace can be created in isolation against the grain of globally preserved integrated violence.
Law enforcement, the state of institutional public education, political doctrine, capitalist interdependency, all demonstrate the fabric of bare minimum of fostering social growth. They are as though we are projecting into social order what we know are necessities, but we do so with one blind eye and barely visible sight in the other eye, impaired by our slow – through historically evolving – ideas of living with other and living while self-shaping. This precludes a more natural and nuanced selfhood, sainthood, otherhood, and base understanding of the necessary reciprocal involvement of living towards the great labors of freedoms that determine our evolution towards sustainability and human rights of difference and embrace of othered personal architecture. Conflict resolution begins with the other. We are taught, with a contemporary allegiance, that it begins with ourselves. Through the process of obtaining forgiveness from others we can begin to mend and reshape the balance of the self and how we fit into the stars and cooperative society.
In “Feminist Thoery and Economic Geography,” (1994) a review by Andrew Leyshon and the prolific scholar, Liz Bondi, acquaints the reader with the 1994 IBG Conference, put together by the Women and Geography Study Group as well as the Economic Geography Study Group. The session was titled, “Feminist Theory and Economic Restructuring.” Many of the speakers worked to argue that the economic exploitation of women and women’s labor in new capitalist functions highlights that a holistic insightful needs to give a strictly economic outlook a second review. Women’s work was changing, as it continues to change, and masculinarity, with its advantages of being able to forfeit domestic duties to his partner, warrants the need to review the economics of humanistic geography through a feminist lens. Increasing privatization paired with the largest increase of women’s work then coming out of the public sector created an economic climate of greater insecurity (Leyshon and Bondi, 1994).
Consider the pentameter and meter; the non-metrical intonation that has sharpened and swayed the motion of voices through ages is a poetical discourse. The matter of substance is intertwined in the detonation of reason; abstract patterns made logical through practical affairs. Romance is common, meter more than a dalliance of human affairs, but, instead, a science of discourse. So, too, does the chained reason for our meted-out mercies seem opaque and non-controversial. As those acquainted with discourse theory know, the phenomenology of discourse is the study of dominance. John Guillory states simply in Cultural Capital that “[t]he movement to open the canon to non-canonical authors submits the syllabus to a kind of demographic oversight” (1994, 7). The canon of the discourse of mercy also derides the white-washed syllabus as an “oversight” to say the least. Guillory later turns his reader to scholar and critic, Erich Auerbach’s, functional definition of “literary language,” – what he condensed under the triumvirate diatribe of “selectivity, homogeneity, and conservatism,” or what Auerbach referred to as Hochsprache (1994, 71). With a selective, homogeneous, and conservative canon, Hochsprache is little more than maintenance of quasi-scholarship or from a sociopolitical discourse or dominance, it is he continuation of dedicated voices to a standard of reason that does not serve in the interest of all, but the few. It is well-reasoned neglect. So, too, is the perpetuation of violence-narratives that incubate and tolerate violence-societies within the capitalist state.