<underfire> re fluid borders, structured chaos, weak discipline

[Ryan Bishop]

What would be an originary event of peace?

Wolfgang provocatively asks this question after reminding us that violence is an event and peace is a state, the former more visible, tangible, material and evident than the latter. Can a state become an event, or is this merely the impossibility of trying to find what is perhaps impossible to find? James der Derian usefully tells us that the majority of the “volunteer army” (a misnomer if ever a nome missed) did not simply sign on for financial and educational opportunities not offered to them through any other venue in US society – that, they also were looking for meanings, solutions, direction, purpose in a world and place bereft of it. When the trajectories of western history repeat an oscillation between the “two violent conceptions of history” reconciled under the silence wrought by the unassailable thought of “security,” as Wolfgang, argues, to where can the youth of a nation turn for meaning? The centrality of the violence, and the institutions that seek to contain it and turn it to their ends as well as those organizations and individuals that seek to undo it, results largely from the inescapable situation that the problem of violence is inextricably intertwined with the problem of knowledge itself.

The issue, then, becomes one of epistemology and violence, as well as epistemological violence – all of which seems deeply counterintuitive to us, children of the Enlightenment that we are. But it is more evident in the current moment than perhaps at any other point in time that the part that knowledge plays in creating meaning in the world is bound by and made possible through force: the force of an argument, the subjugation of counter positions, the dismissal or erasure of traditions, the mobilization of wealth and material to legitimize and circulate knowledge in a form, medium or institution (including our beloved internet). Military technology (including our beloved internet) is the most obvious manifestation of epistemological power as it materializes specific technicities that pertain to centuries of scientific, rational and instrumental thought. Our current model for the global university is the research and development institution that emerged under the guidance of coordinated government, corporate and military demands in the US immediately following WWII when the country decided not to demobilize for peace time, as after the first World War, but to step exponentially those processes and knowledges perceived as making a decisive difference in the outcome of the just ended conflict. Such would make us secure, we believed and were told to believe, and security became common knowledge. With these steps, we find ourselves caught in a simulation of security and even a simulation of war (pace Baudrillard) without either being a state or an event. 

What would be an originary event of peace? Perhaps a thought, a thought well-considered and contemplated, but withheld. 


Ryan Bishop


-----Original Message-----
From: underfire-bounces at underfire.eyebeam.org on behalf of Wolfgang Sützl
Sent: Thu 11/2/2006 2:32 AM
To: underfire at underfire.eyebeam.org
Subject: <underfire> re fluid borders, structured chaos, weak discipline
 
Hello everyone,

I was wondering where to enter, until I re-rad Michael's posting, where 
this caught my attention:

> Yet violence seems much more interesting to notice, watch, playact, 
> imagine, bemoan or discuss than more peaceful topics.


I agree. But is this not because war and violence are events, whereas 
peace is
commonly thought of as a "state", and not as something that could
"occur"? And as something that does not occur, how would it enter the
archives, the news, or anyone's attention? In the
most common representations of western history, "peace" has the meaning
of "formally concluding a conflict", as in "Peace of Westphalia", etc.
Only in this form it ever appears as event. But int this form, too, its 
meaning remains
fully dependent on the war it ends (and tends to be defined by the 
victors). So only when the meaning of peace is
set into work by a war - only if war is that father of all things
including peace -  does peace enter the official archives, or become
newsworthy.

On the other hand, thinking peace as fully independent of war, as a
entirely distinct reality,
as peace researchers have tried to do, tends to leave us with a peace 
that does not
happen, but merely "is".  As such, it remains a metaphysical, heavy, and
a-historical concept, charged with the emptynesss  and awkward solemnity of
things beyond this world, and also with their violence. For this kind of 
peace easily
can justify
war, or violence in general, because the metaphysical, non-occurring 
peace knows no representation except the representations of 
unaccountable power: it is not something we can engage in, or even speak 
about, its language used to be the imperatives of power and is now 
incrasingly the silent, factual mode of technology, against which, there 
is no political appeal.

That is why I believe that this two predominant conceptions of peace, 
each with a
violent gem, have made for a view of history in which war is and 
violence (direct, structural, cultural)
are the principal forces, and peace seems strangely
"absent" - we have been unable to even develop a sensorium and a
conceptual tollbox that would allow us to know what we are looking for, 
let alone find it.

That is why we are surprised when we read

>> The actual amount of violence at any scale is
>> tiny. It is so especially in comparison with what we can easily
>> imagine and what has been repeatedly prognosticated. It is certainly
>> so in comparison with the spasms of killing that dominated the first
>> half or even the first three quarters of the last century.

But now we are a step further. The circular movement between the two 
"violent" conceptions of peace that form the fabric of western history - 
cannot but continuously re-enact a kind of violence that seems 
increasingly "inevitable", justified, normal, does NOT give rise to 
discussions. It is this kind of violence - let's call it the removal of 
language in the heart of politics - that to me forms the common 
denominator of the two violent peaces, and it goes by the name of 
"security". In it, the historicity of the "occurance" and the arbitrary 
and unaccountable power of the metaphysical become one, illegitimate 
political power seems to become the only political power.

The question to me therefore is: what would be an originary event of peace?


Wolfgang Suetzl

Vienna

http://suetzl.netbase.org







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