Six Sideways Reflections, New York: Picador. (2006) 2008
Subjective, systemic and symbolic violence form the triumvirate Žižek writes about in his 2006 book on violence. Systemic violence is the consequence, often catastrophic, of the ‘smooth’ functioning of our economic and political systems, while symbolic violence is the violence inherent in language, in its ‘imposition’ of a certain meaning. Both these forms of objective violence work to maintain what is deemed as the ‘normal’, ‘non-violent’ state of things, against whose backdrop, subjective violence is then perceived to take place, recognisable by the obvious signs of crime, terror and the like.
The same lens however, cannot make both subjective and objective violence perceivable. Systemic violence is the counterpart of subjective violence, against whose complex and extensive mechanism the ‘sudden’, ‘irrational’ outbursts of subjective violence need to be understood. One needs to keep in mind that that humanitarian responses to instances of subjective violence do not depend on the magnitude of violence, per se, but are mediated through cultural, ideological-political and economic considerations. To prove this, Žižek cites the example of a 2006 cover story of Time magazine, documenting the death of 4 million people in Congo over the last decade, as a result of protracted political violence. But the magnitude of this humanitarian crisis failed to elicit any of the expected responses from the reading public, and Žižek reads this lack of a response as being clearly politically mediated. A mediation that ensures who is an acceptable victim (the victims of 9/11, Muslim women etc.) and who is not.
Žižek further illustrates that the horror of a violent act and empathy with the sufferer, inevitably acts as a lure away from a dispassionate engagement with the typology of violence. In fact, even in the recounting of a violent experience, the associated trauma makes the recollection more ‘truthful’, believable, as it is unexpected and unacceptable that the victim will be able to recount her experience of horror in any coherent manner. “The problem here is part of the solution: the very factual deficiencies of the traumatised subject’s report on her experience bear witness to the truthfulness of her report, since they signal that the reported content “contaminated” the manner of reporting it.”
Then, Theodor Adorno’s famous saying, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (published in “An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Poetry”), would no longer hold true, as the rational, cold realism of prose would tend to be suspect, and inadequate, while perhaps only the evocative sensibilities of poetry would succeed. This, Žižek claims, might hold the key to the Left-Liberal urgency to ‘do something’, about the horrors of violence. The urgency can both be witnessed in statements like ‘A woman is raped every six seconds in this country’, and be exploited by capitalist enterprises like Starbucks that urged their consumers to have coffee because a portion of the proceeds would go to Guatemalan children, from where they source their coffee. The urgency to act, to react, can then be a recourse of only the post liberalization rich, incapable of seeing beyond their immediate surroundings.
Žižek would, quoting Marx, resist the temptation to react, opting instead in favour of sustained critical engagement, one that would refrain from knee jerk reactions to subjective violence, and bring back to view both other forms of violence and our own active participation in it.
Invoking Picasso and the modernist chaos of Guernica, Žižek writes: “According to a well-known anecdote, a German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist “chaos” of the painting, asked Picasso: “Did you do this?” Picasso calmly replied: “No, you did this!””
This anecdote, brings back into focus the systemic violence that engenders subjective violence, and the task now, Žižek claims, is to focus on the two less visible aspects of the triumvirate of violence, i.e., its symbolic and systemic forms.