VIOLENT LOVE AND OTHER PARADOXES

18 Jul VIOLENT LOVE AND OTHER PARADOXES

Introduction

In the modern world we often witness phenomena that bear paradoxes within themselves: incompatible combinations, contradictory attitudes, self-destructive ways of living etc. However, some of them, such as love that hurts or demands violent sacrifice from us, should perhaps not be taken as cut and dried. Is love possible as something violent or should this phenomenon be analysed more thoroughly, and its dark side brought to light? You can guess our answer to this.

The invisible bully

There is a beautiful part of Novi Sad called Liman, which lies along the banks of the Danube and at this time of year smells of lime trees. Since last year, this idyll has been violated by patriotic symbols that are anything but subtle.  At one moment, murals began to appear all over this neighbourhood showing the flag of Serbia very simply, but in rather imposing dimensions.  Someone managed to paint the entire walls of buildings and structures in three colours. Unlike the usual graffiti like “Ratko Mladić, Serbian hero” or “Kosovo is Serbia”, these seem rather less aggressive; at first glance, perhaps there is no reason to condemn them?

Nevertheless, when we analyse this phenomenon, we very quickly come to the problematic aspects.  First, we can pose the question of the legality of painting the walls of buildings that at the same time are a living space for some people and for others their immediate environment? When we recall the videos and posts that could be found on social networks in the days when this action of the “beautification” of Liman took place, it seems that the answer is no. In the videos we could see young men dressed in black, with hooded heads, who would hide their faces during the painting process.  Some among the public asked them why they were doing it, and the way they responded indicated that they were performing something like a paid job, rather than a vandalistic practice they were personally convinced of.  Who ordered these murals? And why on earth are they being painted? In order to remind us all of the country we live in? (even those who are not of Serbian origin?) In the context of an already extremely nationalistic atmosphere on the streets of cities in Serbia, can these “subtle” murals be interpreted as a call for violence?

In fact, it seems that the law on whether we can paint or repaint the walls in public spaces without apparent permission for doing so, depends on who paints them and what is written on them.  When the activists of KROKODIL Association, having obtained permission, painted the originally white wall – but which was in the meantime scrawled with hate messages – into the same white colour – they were punished for doing so. Shortly afterwards, the message “When the army returns to Kosovo” appeared on the wall, the writing of which did not seem to have any consequences for the perpetrators. We can conclude the following: the law is interpreted in relation to whether the messages we send through graffiti will be in the service of so-called patriotism.  What is very often a feature of this patriotism is its direct connection to violence.  It is expressed by celebrating war criminals, calls for fighting, defence (who is attacking us?), military actions, unity (who is separating us?) and similar messages.

In response to the recent horrific outbursts of violence a large section of society has taken to the streets with the intention of rising against them, so it makes sense to ask the question of whether there is a connection between the constant presence of these messages and the atmosphere of violence and fear in which we live? In a survey supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands on the undue influence of political and media messages on the increase of aggression in Serbia we come to some interesting results. Almost all the respondents agreed that there is a connection between graffiti promoting nationalist violence and violence in society. But what they couldn’t recognize was who was responsible for the increase in violence? If we cannot perceive who is responsible, it is logical that we will not be able to devise steps to take as a response to the violence. We recognize this problem in the key issue of the now common protests on the streets of Belgrade and apparently of other cities of Serbia. The rebellious citizens fear that the protests will subside at some point without achieving concrete results. If the way in which we can fight the culture of violence is not soon concretized, there is a danger that some things may change formally, but that a fundamental change cannot be expected.

In his pioneering research work on violence, Johan Galtung placed violence in the modern world into three categories: individual, structural and cultural. Tragedies that triggered the protests will be easily recognized as individual violence: it is easy to define the bully and the victims and to describe how it happened and how to react. The situation is more complicated when we talk about cultural and structural violence. The key difference between these is that violence that is not individual has in principle no clearly defined perpetrator.  It is therefore more dangerous and poses a greater threat. It is not possible to single out one person or an institution that leads to it: it happens at various levels, including the individual cases. In this way, it is not surprising that the respondents were not able to name and explain the mechanisms behind the culture of violence that surrounds us.

The bully and his influence must therefore be invisible, otherwise we would not be talking about cultural violence.  However, this does not mean that violence cannot be answered and understood.  To avoid turning the phrase “culture of violence” into a platitude, we must ask ourselves just what it actually is?

Culture of Violence

In the modern world, in which societies around the globe are largely organized into nation states, special attention should be paid to the very relationship between the nation and culture. Culture in the broadest sense is a network of relationships connected in space and time, in which a society builds and practices its language, practices, values, ideas, etc.  It is also a communication network or a symbolic system. In this sense, graffiti certainly belong to the national culture of Serbia.  But how do we understand that our culture carries with it an index of violence?

Patriotism is primarily defined as affection and love towards one’s country, its history, culture and language.  Nationalism involves promoting the interests of a particular nation and advocating for its sovereignty and independence.  Although both patriotism and nationalism are initially determined on the basis of the idea of love and as such are legitimate concepts, unfortunately they are often misused as sources of division and distorted into the exact opposite – hatred.  Although Schopenhauer said that national pride is the cheapest form of pride because, simply put, the individual is proud of a trait – national affiliation – for which he himself is by no means responsible, there is nothing inherently wrong with this kind of pride in principle. The problem is when a specific nationality is taken as superior to another because this most often entails opening up space for hatred and violence. The individual therefore is not proud of particularities and uniqueness of his nation, which from the outside is the same as any other precisely in this particularity, but exactly in the construction of superiority on which a mythology of holiness and the chosen nature of the nation is built.  According to anthropologist Ivan Čolović, this is characteristic of all nationalisms of the world, so the same tropes such as “the nation as mother”, “pure blood that runs for centuries”, identification with geographical areas can be found in both, say, German and English and in local narratives about the nation. We see this explicitly in the widely popularized idea of Serbs as the “people of heaven”, a kind of eternal sacrifice that must and should be defended. Here we should bear in mind that one of the most effective ways to mobilize the population in violence is to call for self-defence.

Although this idea of superiority and supremacy is most often understood in the political framework, it should not be forgotten that natural science has largely contributed to this mythology.  When Mendel set the ground for the laws of inheritance as we know today, he probably never imagined that his immeasurable contribution would be (mis)used for ideological purposes.  Namely, pre-existing hatred on national, religious or any other level (which almost necessarily entails violence) received a scientific basis – genes began to be interpreted as the fate of man, and therefore inferiority, sin and misdeeds, or on the other hand the superior intellect and the superiority of ancestors acquired a legalized, hereditary character. Thus legalized, unchanging characteristics began to be attributed to certain groups. To this day, the status-quo is often justified like this – the influence of the environment and upbringing is powerless before what is written in our genes, and the nation cannot redeem itself for what is “in its nature”.  This most often leads to denial of national crimes that have obviously happened, because “we do not have it in ourselves”, but also to a distrust of others – “they carry it in themselves forever.” 

This way of thinking claimed to be shaped within a specific discipline – sociobiology, all under the veil of science and evidence. Moreover, nor was Darwin’s theory of evolution spared from abuse – a model that among other things tells us that in nature there is a law of survival of the fittest has led many to understand it as a recommendation for action and the derivation of moral norms.  On the macro level this usually implies that one should adhere to a stronger entity (Russia or America), and that the use of force in everyday (inter)human life is justified, natural, normal. This interpretation of a reality that remains within the framework of natural science undoubtedly has a devastating influence on the understanding of male-female relationships – a woman is physically and intellectually weaker, emotionally unstable, etc. while a man is stronger, more powerful, more capable, more rational and so on, but also on attitudes towards diversity in general – everything that deviates from the normality defined in the biological framework is classed as pathological, abnormal and unacceptable.

It is precisely this uncritical acceptance of science and the departure from the social and spiritual framework that has entered the educational system, and in an invisible and systematic way exerts a devastating influence on a person. To understand why this is so, we must place things in a broader context, and examine the very values that make up people’s reality today.  These values can be identified in many ways, from the analysis of the education system, through careful observation of media content to the phenomena that seem completely harmless and insignificant such as messages written on the walls of buildings. 

Can freedom be gained by force?

For Hannah Arendt, freedom is the whole point of politics. People enter into political relations, they act and actively participate for the sake of freedom. Freedom is also a condition for true political action. Citizens of Serbia seem to be at least doubly unfree. On the one hand, they are not free to decide and think for themselves, given the complete monopolization of all channels of communication by the authorities. On the other hand, they are not free from existential needs: the fact that people can be conditioned by short-term financial aid shows that it is not possible for the majority of the population to meet the most basic daily needs of life. In the public discourse many would characterize this very dependence of citizens on the authorities as these authorities practicing power. But we see that the authorities do not practice power, but force.  It is crucial that these concepts be separated.

Following Hannah Arendt, but also our own language (here’s a little patriotism), we can analyse the concepts of power and force. The concept of force leads us into a series of similar expressions: compel, force, but also to violence itself. Strength is in one who imposes himself. For example, if the leading man of a country manages to appear 300 times on nationwide television in the 365 days in a year, we can agree that he successfully imposes himself. In the same way we can agree that if people in a city are forced to read and look at nationalist symbols whenever they come out of their houses and apartments, then this clearly is violence.  Violence is enforcement. Enforcement to work for the minimum wage, to come to the rally, to wait months for medical services, to listen to monologues (without dialogue), to doubt all the news that we hear, to learn a warped and uncritical version of history in schools, not to talk about certain topics, to suffer sexual violence and so on and on. What we recognize in the concept of force is the trait of restriction, prohibition, pressure, conditioning.  Force doesn’t appear as creative; it is a constant state of paranoia, a feeling that something unpredictable is about to happen. Ruling by force, the authorities  thus maintain a permanent state of emergency, a state from which one can slip into violence at any moment.

On the contrary, power is associated with what is possible, what can be – but doesn’t have to be. To enable is to be creative. Power is available only to one who knows, who is capable. Opportunity means also that plans can go wrong, but also the courage to try in spite of uncertainty. Power has nothing to do with paranoia, with silencing. Power is a creative activity, it is a call, it connects people, but does not unite them in uniformity. The main feature of democracy is the diversity of people who coexist despite their differences. In fact, contrary to force that imposes a model of life, power is seen where it is possible to come out of a conflict of different interests with a non violent solution. A free society must be a society of plurality, both ethnic, gender, religious, and individual. It is important to emphasize that power is never restricting: when we encounter the practice of restriction, it is clear that it has nothing to do with power.

Let us take, for example, the way the government responded to the tragedy in the primary school. In each school we got two police officers supervising the students. In a way, they functioned more as a threat than a support system for them. The abolition of classes before the planned end of term is again a form of restriction. What can be done when the space is abolished, restricted? The fear that violence will happen again is completely understandable, but the way we react to it must not be the abolition of the school atmosphere altogether. Once schools are turned into surveillance spaces or abolished altogether, creative change cannot occur.  And power is only recognized in what can be done.

In this sense, it seems that the government here has not had power for a long time. In situations where new, fresh ideas are lacking, there is a reproduction of the same ones. As Hannah Arendt reminds us, such a society must be “counter natural” if nothing else because each generation of new people will necessarily be different from those who lived before it. The question then arises, what happens to our youth if there is no room for novelty in the political sphere for 30 years? Will the nationalism we spoke of, dressed in patriotic ideas, manage to cope with the rise of violent young people or the mass emigration of those who have realized that they have no opportunity to live? Unfortunately, as long as there is rule by force, there will be violence. Nevertheless, this situation leaves room for the public to take opportunities into their own hands.

In this sense, we cannot reach a non violent society and a free space by force.  Forced life is not life. But cultural violence has another trait. It abolishes creativity even in ideas of resistance. Cultural violence is characterized by the fact that the population feels as if no alternative is possible. In this sense we note that the demands of those who protest are often demands for greater control, abolition and restriction. And perhaps these demands make sense, they show one of the most tragic qualities of non-freedom, it is the inability to think diversely. In this way, when we reproduce the same principles of force in an attempt to combat coercion, power eludes us.

Violence disguised as love

Almost a century ago, German Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann identified a problem that seems to affect society, today more than ever. In essays such as Deutche Ansprache, Ein Appell an die Vernunft (1930) and Achtung, Europa! (1938) he speaks of the crisis of European culture, the invasion of techno culture and the mass liberated from the Self that increasingly threatens young people. The decadence of culture, the massive scale and the satisfaction of animal instincts ultimately lead to hatred and violence that are often systematically shaped, sometimes in a subtle way and sometimes transparently. Fleeing Nazi Germany, Mann went to America, noting that if fascism came to America, it would come in the name of freedom. Indeed, it turns out that after the Second World War – when hatred and violence were officially condemned, they began looking for other, more subtle ways of disguising, acting and appearing. It is therefore not surprising that hatred under democratic systems is often disguised in the robes of love.

Today’s countries are divided according to their values and politics, and according to this sharp division, the other side is presented as aggressive, destructive and hostile. This is interesting to observe when we remember that fascism could not have existed without the idea of the enemy. It is even more interesting that in this particular case of our country, the enemy is identified within its very framework, and he is either in the ranks of the authorities or the opposition. This makes the very idea of politics essentially a failure since, when things are set up in this way, both sides cannot work in synergy in the interest of their people, but it is assumed that it is necessary to take power away from one side. At this point, there is room for violence that ranges from the subtlest and invisible to the transparent and shameless.

Perhaps it would be good to recall that one of the most famous fascist theorists, Carl Schmidt, conceived his idea of politics precisely on the idea of the enemy, thus imposing the attitude that the country must at all times have an enemy against whom it is ready to go to war. The enemy of course is not limited to those living outside the borders. In this way politics becomes only a justification for violence, and everyday life turns into a state of emergency. It is therefore especially dangerous to talk about people divided into “us” and “them”, which, don’t forget, can be heard everywhere in all the media, precisely when there is talk of caring for the population.

This type of division allows for a permanent enemy that can take on a variety of forms – which calls for the most diverse, violent, self defence strategies. In her latest book on the issue of violence The Force of Nonviolence (2020.), Judith Butler points to the porous character of the self defence narrative. Based on the claim of the necessity of self defence, various centres of power in society can justifiably demand violence from their population. The question arises: where does the “I” or “We” that need defending begin or end? Which trait will be critical in determining belonging? Gender, nationality, or perhaps religious beliefs? Everyone who lives in this region knows how few (if any) there are that correspond to the ideal of uniform origin. In precisely this way, under the auspices of love for the fatherland, the willingness to give one’s life for it (although no-one can define what it is), serves the call to violence. When we look at the graffiti, it seems that in the last 30 years there was no period in which the population of Serbia was not under a dangerous threat of extermination, both from the people across the nearest borders, the West, the LGBT population or some undefined opponent, who had to be reminded of some of the former Serbian heroes (read: war criminals).

Talking about vulnerability is particularly effective in a society where real vulnerability exists. If we look at the World Bank statistics, we will see that 1.8 million people in Serbia are exposed to extreme poverty, and that the differences in the standard of living of the majority of the poor and the minority that owns capital are radical. In this sense, a large part of the population is in a constant state of threat. This danger doesn’t only come from some abstract enemy, but is a consequence of a policy that has only short term goals, thereby selling out both the resources and labour force of the country it supposedly patriotically defends. The population that lives in precarious conditions is easily mobilized because it is actually in a constant state of fear, dissatisfaction and pressure.

This mass frustration must somehow manifest itself and it often takes the form of violence that serves as an “exhaust valve” for the individual and for the state as an accessible and safe tool to achieve a political goal. So, for example, certain groups of young people are being used to leave threatening messages on the walls of associations and organizations that are not aligned with the government, but also ideas that on a broader level (consciously or unconsciously) should influence people’s attitudes and send certain messages. The way the state reacts or does not react when it comes to inscriptions on the walls unequivocally indicates the connection between political interest and the messages being sent. We might say that this is just one of the most subtle ways in which the state systematically affects people’s awareness (especially young people) – while the state expresses ambiguous, often neutral attitudes before the international community, it is enough for the people to look around and understand what the system is telling them.

Professor of sociology at the University of Belgrade Jovo Bakić tells us about the instrumentalization of fan groups for political purposes. Starting from recognizing the connection between nationalism and sport (because sports competitions are often conceived as national competitions), he realizes that fan groups themselves are ideologically oriented towards nationalism, xenophobia and authoritarianism. It is precisely at this point that the state is presented with the opportunity to use the aggressive potential of these groups selectively and, if necessary, for political purposes – whether it is a Pride Parade, opposition demonstrations or cultural events promoting “anti-Serb” values.

What is particularly disturbing in this situation is the fact that graffiti was not originally another channel of communication for those in power. The streets and their illegal inscriptions were a way for those on the social margins to win some kind of voice. People who didn’t have a way to communicate their needs with the public because they were systematically excluded used public space to point out the problems they encountered. How is it possible then for those who are in power, i.e. those who actually have all kinds of communication channels at their disposal, to take over those that are not natural for them? Should this sort of monopolization of symbolic space be understood as another totalitarian practice? It follows that violence lies not only in the content of such messages, but also in their form. If they are able to place their own symbols by depriving the most vulnerable of already risky ways of speaking, then this act itself is a kind of violence. 

However, this brings us to the question: shouldn’t the government’s limitations and closure reach a limit? The strategy of taking over the channels of communication of the oppressed, perhaps, should not be seen as proof of the omnipotence of the state, but it can be a sign of the inability to truly communicate with the people. In the atmosphere of the society we are in right now, it is not difficult to imagine that a change is near. If it is impossible to see it clearly, that may not be a bad thing – the new always appears unexpectedly, in a very short period of time, precisely when there are no conditions for new possibilities. If the conditions for a free and democratic society existed, we would already be living in it.

KROKODIL’s journalists for a day:  Katarina Grković and Srđan Jevtić