Wolfgang Suetzl: Re: Fluid Borders, Structured Chaos, Weak Discipline
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 emptiness 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 increasingly 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 toolbox 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
"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 emptiness 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 increasingly 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 toolbox 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