Is Violence Possible Today?

Long before the 20th century period of structuralist critiques of ideology and even before Kafka, Tolstoy pointed out a strange discrepancy at the heart of effective bureaucracies: bureaucratic organisations, with their dense division of duties and opaque systematic methods, do not function because every one of its members is ‘in on it’, because of the fidelity or belief of its employees regarding the goal of the organisation. In fact, a powerful bureaucratic system functions paradoxically by relying on the passivity and ineffectiveness of its members. Stephen Oblonsky, of Anna Karenina, is just such an example of the logic of ‘effective inefficiency’. He is described as somewhat lazy, an unreliable socialite, and a disinterested middle management officer of Russian “Society” life. But it is this very infidelity, his lack of any serious dedication, which makes him such a great bureaucrat. Imagine, for example, a modern investment firm, social media company, or major insurance provider, all of which claim to have found ethical alternatives, to put the consumer or client first: a new recruit who told his bosses that they were truly excited to prioritise customers and make an ethical difference would surely be fired very quickly. His enthusiasm would quickly transform into disappointment once he realised that the ‘ethical’ business is merely a front for more advanced forms of economic appropriation and manipulation. In order to truly fit in, a new employee would need to already have tacitly acknowledged that this claim to being ethical is a complete farce.

If ethical alternatives to exploitation furnish their own form of exploitation, if bureaucracies function efficiently by the passive inefficiency of their employees, I would argue that a similar self-defeating impasse is confronted today by our attempts to resolve the question of violence - in particular, the justification and meaning of violence. During a recent talk on film, literature, and Gaza, I claimed that a subversive logic underlies the broad news coverage of political atrocities: rather than inspiring mass action, endless images of starving Palestinians by mainstream outlets served a paradoxical pacifying function. By a truly Freudian disavowal, watching in horror at political violence inversely kept us immobilised, it offloaded responsibility for direct intervention by keeping Western audiences complacent in their abstract knowledge and compassion of such violence. Endless discussion of Gaza should be rethought not as an approach to the goal of peace, but frequently as an indirect obstacle to serious