The Will to Violence E-Book

Susanne Kappeler

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 601

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This is a major contribution to feminist theory and debate, addressing issues such as sexual violence, social violence and hatred of foreigners in a lucid and highly original way.

Leseprobe

THE WILL TO VIOLENCE

The Politics of Personal Behaviour

Susanne Kappeler

Polity Press

Copyright © Susanne Kappeler 1995The right of Susanne Kappeler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in the United Kingdom in 1995 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Editorial office:Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production:Blackwell Publishers Ltd108 Cowley RoadOxford OX4 1JF, UK

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0 7456 13047ISBN 0 7456 13055 (pbk)ISBN 9 7807 4566 739 3(eBook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Bemboby Pure Tech Corporation, Pondicherry, IndiaPrinted in Great Britain by T.J. Press Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Violence and the will to violence

  1  Why the personal is political, and where the private comes from

  2  Love of foreigners and love of the ‘other’

  3  Personal communication behaviour is political

  4  Is the political psychological?

  5  Psychotherapy, or the legitimation of irresponsibility

  6  Ego-psychology, or My relationship and I

  7  Ego-philosophy, or the battle with reality

  8  Sex and the intimate relationship

  9  Female desire, or the democratization of violence

10  Relationship as trade, or the free market of bodies and services

11  Needs, or the legitimation of dominance

12  Identity, or history turned biology

Resistance and the will to resistance

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Many friends, students, colleagues, and others will recognize discussions we had and issues we chewed over together. As I see it, my task as author is less to have ‘new’ and ‘original’ ideas than to try to draw together, and then connect, arguments and analyses we make in different contexts and about varying issues. The published work of feminists has played a similar role to those live discussions and analyses — it has become integrated, as it were, into an ongoing discussion.

Academic referencing is not an adequate tool for reflecting the influence that such work, let alone live discussions, has had on my own thinking. On the contrary, the more profoundly someone’s thinking has contributed to shaping my own, the less easy it becomes to acknowledge it point by point in the notes. Hence, in this book, the notes primarily serve the conventional purpose of academic referencing.

I would like to thank all those who enthusiastically participated in discussion as well as those who have published feminist work, and to acknowledge how much they have contributed to shaping the ideas in this book.

I would also like to thank John Thompson of Polity Press and Hilke Schlaeger of Verlag Frauenoffensive for their crucial interest in and support of this project, Annabelle Mundy and the staff at Polity in Cambridge and Oxford for seeing it through production. Special thanks go to Connie Hallam for her invaluable help with permissions, and to Henry Maas for his constructive copy-editing and patience in dealing with last-minute changes.

The author and publisher are grateful for permission to quote from the following works: Extracts (translated from the German by the author) from Ariane Barth ‘Schau mir in die Augen, Kleiner’, Der Spiegel, 7 January 1991 © Der Spiegel/NYTSS, reprinted by permission of The New York Times Syndication Sales Corporation. Extracts from Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach, What Do Women Want? (Fontana, 1984), reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited and the authors. Extracts (translated from the French by the author) from Alain Finkielkraut, La Sagesse de l’amour (Gallimard, 1984), due to be published in an English translation by Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff as The Wisdom of Love (University of Nebraska Press), reprinted by permission of The University of Nebraska Press. Extracts from Robin Norwood, Women Who Love Too Much (Arrow Books, 1986), reprinted by permission of Random House UK Limited. Extracts from Adrienne Rich, ‘Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia’, are reprinted from On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978, by Adrienne Rich (W. W. Norton, 1979/Virago Press, 1980), by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1979 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Extracts on pp. 53–6 from Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, published in Great Britain by The Women’s Press Ltd, 1984, 34 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates.

Despite every effort to trace and contact copyright holders before publication, this has not been possible in some cases. If notified, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any errors or omissions at the earliest opportunity.

Violence and the will to violence

Violence is a ubiquitous reality in our society.

Violence is also a topic of public debate, although context and manner of discussion vary – from racist violence, sexual violence, the violence of youth and youth culture, the increase of violence in society, to the violence of war and the question whether it could be stopped by the use of greater violence. Violence is categorized into acts of violence, to be listed and prosecuted by the law. Violence is named after its victims: violence against women, sexual abuse of children, exploitation of animals, attacks on old people, hatred of foreigners, anti-Semitism – except where the violence is attributed to such marginal groups of society that any association with those naming it seems out of the question: the violence of today’s youth, right extremism and neo-Nazi violence, hooliganism, or racist attacks where this means attacks by ‘racist groups’.

What is striking is that the violence which is talked about is always the violence committed by someone else: women talk about the violence of men, adults about the violence of young people; the left, liberals and the centre about the violence of right extremists; the right, centre and liberals about the violence of leftist extremists; political activists talk about structural violence, police and politicians about violence in the ‘street’, and all together about the violence in our society. Similarly, Westerners talk about violence in the Balkans, Western citizens together with their generals about the violence of the Serbian army.

Violence is recognized and measured by its visible effects, the spectacular blood of wounded bodies, the material destruction of objects, the visible damage left in the world of ‘objects’. In its measurable damage we see the proof that violence has taken place, the violence being reduced to this damage. The violation as such, or invisible forms of violence – the non-physical violence of threat and terror, of insult and humiliation, the violation of human dignity – are hardly ever the issue except to some extent in feminist and anti-racist analyses, or under the name of psychological violence. Here violence is recognized by the victims and defined from their perspective – an important step away from the catalogue of violent acts and the exclusive evidence of material traces in the object. Yet even here the focus tends to be on the effects and experience of violence, either the objective and scientific measure of psychological damage, or the increasingly subjective definition of violence as experience.

Violence is perceived as a phenomenon for science to research and for politics to get a grip on. But violence is not a phenomenon: it is the behaviour of people, human action which may be analysed. What is missing is an analysis of violence as action – not just as acts of violence, or the cause of its effects, but as the actions of people in relation to other people and beings or things.

Feminist critique, as well as other political critiques, has analysed the preconditions of violence, the unequal power relations which enable it to take place. However, under the pressure of mainstream science and a sociological perspective which increasingly dominates our thinking, it is becoming standard to argue as if it were these power relations which cause the violence. Underlying is a behaviourist model which prefers to see human action as the exclusive product of circumstances, ignoring the personal decision of the agent to act, implying in turn that circumstances virtually dictate certain forms of behaviour. Even though we would probably not underwrite these propositions in their crass form, there is nevertheless a growing tendency, not just in social science, to explain violent behaviour by its circumstances. (Compare the question, ‘Does pornography cause violence?’) The circumstances identified may differ according to the politics of the explainers, but the method of explanation remains the same.

While consideration of mitigating circumstances has its rightful place in a court of law trying (and defending) an offender, this does not automatically make it an adequate or sufficient practice for political analysis. It begs the question, in particular, ‘What is considered to be part of the circumstances (and by whom)?’ Thus in the case of sexual offenders, there is a routine search – on the part of the tabloid press or the professionals of violence – for experiences of violence in the offender’s own past, an understanding which is rapidly solidifying in the scientific model of a ‘cycle of violence’. That is, the relevant factors are sought in the distant past and in other contexts of action, while a crucial factor in the present context is ignored, namely the agent’s decision to act as he did.

Even politically oppositional groups are not immune to this mainstream sociologizing. Some left groups have tried to explain men’s sexual violence as the result of class oppression, while some Black theoreticians have explained the violence of Black men as the result of racist oppression. The ostensible aim of these arguments may be to draw attention to the pervasive and structural violence of classism and racism, yet they not only fail to combat such inequality, they actively contribute to it. Although such oppression is a very real part of an agent’s life context, these ‘explanations’ ignore the fact that not everyone experiencing the same oppression uses violence, that is, that these circumstances do not ‘cause’ violent behaviour. They overlook, in other words, that the perpetrator has decided to violate, even if this decision was made in circumstances of limited choice.

To overlook this decision, however, is itself a political decision, serving particular interests. In the first instance it serves to exonerate the perpetrators, whose responsibility is thus transferred to circumstances and a history for which other people (who remain beyond reach) are responsible. Moreover, it helps to stigmatize all those living in poverty and oppression; because they are obvious victims of violence and oppression, they are held to be potential perpetrators themselves.1 This slanders all the women who have experienced sexual violence, yet do not use violence against others, and libels those experiencing racist and class oppression, yet do not necessarily act out violence. Far from supporting those oppressed by classist, racist or sexist oppression, it sells out these entire groups in the interest of exonerating individual members. It is a version of collective victim-blaming, of stigmatizing entire social strata as potential hotbeds of violence, which rests on and perpetuates the mainstream division of society into so-called marginal groups – the classic clienteles of social work and care politics (and of police repression) – and an implied ‘centre’ to which all the speakers, explainers, researchers and carers themselves belong, and which we are to assume to be a zone of non-violence.

Explaining people’s violent behaviour by their circumstances also has the advantage of implying that the ‘solution’ lies in a change of circumstances. Thus it has become fashionable among socially minded politicians and intellectuals in Germany to argue that the rising neo-Nazi violence of young people (men), especially in former East Germany, needs to be countered by combating poverty and unemployment in these areas. Likewise anti-racist groups like the Anti-Racist Alliance or the Anti-Nazi League in Britain argue that ‘the causes of racism, like poverty and unemployment, should be tackled’ and that it is ‘problems like unemployment and bad housing which lead to racism’.2 Besides being no explanation at all of why (white) poverty and unemployment should lead specifically to racist violence (and what would explain middle- and upper-class racism), it is more than questionable to combat poverty only (but precisely) when and where violence is exercised. It not only legitimates the violence (by ‘explaining’ it), but constitutes an incentive to violence, confirming that social problems will be taken seriously when and where ‘they’ attract attention by means of violence – just as the most unruly children in schools (mostly boys) tend to get more attention from teachers than well-behaved and quiet children (mostly girls). Thus if German neo-Nazi youths and youth groups, since their murderous assaults on refugees and migrants in Hoyerswerda, Rostock, Dresden etc., are treated to special youth projects and social care measures (to the tune of DM 20 million per year), including ‘educative’ trips to Morocco and Israel,3 this is an unmistakable signal to society that racist violence does indeed ‘pay off’.

If we nevertheless continue to explain violence by its ‘circumstances’ and attempt to counter it by changing these circumstances, it is also because in this way we stay in command of the problem. In particular, we do not complicate the problem by any suggestion that it might be people who need to change. Instead, we turn the perpetrators of violence into the victims of circumstances, who as victims by definition cannot act sensibly (but in changed circumstances will behave differently). ‘We’, on the other hand, are the subjects able to take in hand the task of changing the circumstances. Even if changing the circumstances – combating poverty, unemployment, injustice etc. – may not be easy, it nevertheless remains within ‘our’ scope, at least theoretically and by means of state power. Changing people, on the other hand, is neither within our power nor, it seems, ultimately in our interest: we prefer to keep certain people under control, putting limits on their violent behaviour, but we apparently have no interest in a politics that presupposes people’s ability to change and aims at changing attitudes and behaviour. For changing (as opposed to restricting) other people’s behaviour is beyond the range and influence of our own power; only they themselves can change it. It requires their will to change, their will not to abuse power and not to use violence.

A politics aiming at a change in people’s behaviour would require political work that is very much more cumbersome and very much less promising of success than is the use of state power and social control. It would require political consciousness-raising – politicizing the way we think – which cannot be imposed on others by force or compulsory educational measures. It would require a view of people which takes seriously and reckons with their will, both their will to violence or their will to change. To take seriously the will of others however would mean recognizing one’s own, and putting people’s will, including our own, at the centre of political reflection.

A political analysis of violence needs to recognize this will, the personal decision in favour of violence – not just to describe acts of violence, or the conditions which enable them to take place, but also to capture the moment of decision which is the real impetus for violent action. For without this decision there will be no violent act, not even in circumstances which potentially permit it. It is the decision to violate, not just the act itself, which makes a person a perpetrator of violence – just as it is the decision not to do so which makes people not act violently and not abuse their power in a situation which would nevertheless permit it. This moment of decision, therefore, is also the locus of potential resistance to violence. To understand the structures of thinking and the criteria by which such decisions are reached, but above all to regard this decision as an act of choice, seems to me a necessary precondition for any political struggle against violence and for a non-violent society.

My focus, then, is on the decision to violate – not just in circumstances where violence is conspicuous by its damage, but in every situation where the choice to violate presents itself. This means a change from the accustomed perspective on violence to the context where decisions for actions are being made, as it were ‘before’ their consequences become apparent, and which we may not recognize as contexts of violence. Our political analyses of sexual or racist violence have necessarily concentrated on situations where the power disequilibrium between perpetrator and victim is extreme, where, in particular, it is supported by social power structures such as male and/or white supremacy, so that not only is the violence unlikely to receive sanctions, but on the contrary, the perpetrator will find support rather than the victim. Violence, however, is a possibility wherever there is freedom of action, however limited. Such violence may ‘look’ different, not least because the possibilities for resistance may also be greater in situations where there is relative freedom of action also on the part of the other agent, that is, the violator’s envisaged victim.

The feminist critique of sexism, together with our early recognition of the necessity of raising our own consciousness, constitutes an understanding that ideology itself is a site of power and the abuse of power – that is, that our own thinking and, by extension, our own behaviour are already a primary area for a liberatory politics. Moreover, a politics aiming at social equality and relations between equals should make it its central concern to reflect upon the structure of such relations – what it means to relate to others as equals. We have analysed and made a critique of abusive behaviour, where men choose to treat women as unequals, or whites to treat Black people as unequals, being able to do so with sanctioned impunity. This would imply an analysis also of action and behaviour which by contrast is based on choosing equality – in particular, choosing to grant equality to others, choosing not to violate others in situations which permit that choice, all the more so as it is our conviction that it is not people who are (by virtue of their ‘identity’) unequal, whom we then necessarily relate to as ‘unequals’, but that inequality is a matter of treating and being treated unequally. Conversely, we cannot assume that if there are two ‘equals’, their relations will necessarily be (or remain) equal. Rather, we should investigate how relationships of potential equality may, through the action of one or the other or both agents involved, be restructured into relations of dominance and submission. Action – and especially the will to power and violence – is a vital factor in the continually changing ‘structure’ of a relationship, combining with those factors we normally consider to constitute the structural context of the relation.

This means engaging also with the discourses which construct violence as a phenomenon but obliterate the agent’s decision to violate. Our unwillingness to recognize the will of those who act violently as their will to act violently, our readiness to exonerate violent behaviour by means of spurious explanations, not only betrays our primary identification with the subjects of violence and our lack of solidarity with the victims. It is itself an act of violence: the exercise of ideological violence, of the power of a discourse which legitimates violence, stigmatizes the victims, and treats people not as the agents of their own actions but as material for (‘our’) social policy. Ideology, however, is not just made by others; we are all of us subjects of ideology – as the producers of our own thinking and as the recipients of other people’s discourse – unless we resist such ideological structures of thought and discourse in a continual critique of ideology itself.

A decision to violate is not necessarily synonymous with a decision to be ‘bad’ or to commit an injustice. Rather, we have at our disposal structures of thought and argumentation which make such a decision appear rational, justified or even necessary. These structures of thought are deeply rooted in our everyday thinking: they are part of the dominant ideology. We use them in our daily decisions for action – actions which are not necessarily acts of bodily injury and murder, of arson and larceny, and which do not necessarily unleash a major war, but which none the less are acts of violence: violation of the rights and integrity of other people, violation of their dignity and personhood, suppression of their freedom of choice and their self-determination, acts of objectification and of exploitation at every conceivable level – in other words, war, on a small scale and against our nearest if not our dearest.

What is remarkable is that this everyday behaviour, in so far as it does not fall within the competence of criminal law, is hardly the subject of a serious theoretical discussion.4 Neither does it attract explicit legitimation; rather, the violence of everyday behaviour draws its legitimacy from the ubiquity of such behaviour in our society and the social consensus about its relative ‘harmlessness’ compared with other, that is, recognized forms of violence. That is to say, everyday behaviour takes its orientation from the tradition of social practice, reproducing itself through recourse to the status quo. It is so naturalized, in fact, that it is not violent action which attracts attention, but any resistance to it: leaving a violent relationship or situations of violence, resisting bullying, pressure and blackmail, refusing to fight back.

Even a discourse on ethics which we might expect to address this issue increasingly addresses problems of a collective social responsibility – leading indeed to enlightened guidelines for social policy, yet leaving the question of personal responsibility unanswered. For an analysis of collective social responsibility tends not to differentiate between the respective responsibility of the members of that collective according to their diverse situations. Yet the single person has to act, has to decide how to act, even if this does not cause a war or change the world at one stroke. It is these decisions for action within the range of competence of persons which are the topic of this book.

This does not mean that I deem the obvious and systematic forms of violence – from the violence of men against women and children, the racist violence of whites against Black people and people of the Third World, to the violence of the state and its military forces, or violence against animals and nature (which is hardly even discussed in the context of violence) – a less urgent problem than individual behaviour. Rather, the obvious importance and magnitude of ‘social’ problems of violence cannot be the pretext for considering apparently ‘lesser’ or more ‘harmless’ forms of ‘personal’ violence (our own) a matter for postponement until the major problems have been solved. Violence cannot be measured as larger or smaller, more or less, even if the consequences of violence differ enormously. The consequences differ, however, neither in their measurable size as ‘damage’ nor in the size or measure of the violence which caused them, but in terms of the means used on the one hand, and in their specificity, uniqueness and incomparability as experience on the other. Violence as the structure of action is neither greater nor lesser: it either is or is not violence.

Moreover, personal behaviour is no alternative to ‘political’ action; there is no question of either/or. My concern, on the contrary, is the connection between these recognized forms of violence and the forms of everyday behaviour which we consider ‘normal’ but which betray our own will to violence – the connection, in other words, between our own actions and those acts of violence which are normally the focus of our political critiques. Precisely because there is no choice between dedicating oneself either to ‘political issues’ or to ‘personal behaviour’, the question of the politics of personal behaviour has (also) to be moved into the centre of our politics and our critique.

Violence – what we usually recognize as such – is no exception to the rules, no deviation from the normal and nothing out of the ordinary, in a society in which exploitation and oppression are the norm, the ordinary and the rule. It is no misbehaviour of a minority amid good behaviour by the majority, nor the deeds of inhuman monsters amid humane humans, in a society in which there is no equality, in which people divide others according to race, class, sex and many other factors in order to rule, exploit, use, objectify, enslave, sell, torture and kill them, in which millions of animals are tortured, genetically manipulated, enslaved and slaughtered daily for ‘harmless’ consumption by humans. It is no error of judgement, no moral lapse and no transgression against the customs of a culture which is thoroughly steeped in the values of profit and desire, of self-realization, expansion and progress. Violence as we usually perceive it is ‘simply’ a specific – and to us still visible – form of violence, the consistent and logical application of the principles of our culture and everyday life.

War does not suddenly break out in a peaceful society; sexual violence is not the disturbance of otherwise equal gender relations. Racist attacks do not shoot like lightning out of a non-racist sky, and the sexual exploitation of children is no solitary problem in a world otherwise just to children. The violence of our most commonsense everyday thinking, and especially our personal will to violence, constitute the conceptual preparation, the ideological armament and the intellectual mobilization which make the ‘outbreak’ of war, of sexual violence, of racist attacks, of murder and destruction possible at all.

‘We are the war’, writes Slavenka Drakulić at the end of her existential analysis of the question, ‘what is war?’:

I do not know what war is, I want to tell [my friend], but I see it everywhere. It is in the blood-soaked street in Sarajevo, after 20 people have been killed while they queued for bread. But it is also in your non-comprehension, in my unconscious cruelty towards you, in the fact that you have a yellow form [for refugees] and I don’t, in the way in which it grows inside ourselves and changes our feelings, relationships, values – in short: us. We are the war … And I am afraid that we cannot hold anyone else responsible. We make this war possible, we permit it to happen.5

‘We are the war’ – and we also ‘are’ the sexual violence, the racist violence, the exploitation and the will to violence in all its manifestations in a society in so-called ‘peacetime’, for we make them possible and we permit them to happen.

‘We are the war’ does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society – which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of ‘collective irresponsibility’, where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal.6 On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective ‘assumption’ of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our own sphere of competence, our own power and our own responsibility – leading to the well-known illusion of our apparent ‘powerlessness’ and its accompanying phenomenon, our so-called political disillusionment. Single citizens – even more so those of other nations – have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina or Somalia – since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere.

Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgement, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls ‘organized irresponsibility’, upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot ‘do’ anything, say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of ‘What would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?’ Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as ‘virtually no possibilities’: what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN – finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like ‘I want to stop this war’, ‘I want military intervention’, ‘I want to stop this backlash’, or ‘I want a moral revolution.’7

‘We are this war’, however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulić says, in our ‘non-comprehension’: our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we ‘are’ the war in our ‘unconscious cruelty towards you’, our tolerance of the ‘fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don’t’ – our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the ‘others’. We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape ‘our feelings, our relationships, our values’ according to the structures and the values of war and violence.

So if we move beyond the usual frame of violence, towards the structures of thought employed in decisions to act, this also means making an analysis of action. This seems all the more urgent as action seems barely to be perceived any longer. There is talk of the government doing ‘nothing’, of its ‘inaction’, of the need for action, the time for action, the need for strategies, our inability to act as well as our desire to become ‘active’ again. We seem to deem ourselves in a kind of action vacuum which, like the cosmic black hole, tends to consume any renewed effort only to increase its size. Hence this is also an attempt to shift the focus again to the fact that we are continually acting and doing, and that there is no such thing as not acting or doing nothing.

Rather, the binary opposition of ‘action’ and ‘no action’ seems to serve the simple evaluation of the good and the bad. We speak of being ‘active’ or wanting to be active again, where being active in its simple vacuity is ‘good’, ‘doing nothing’ is rather bad, and where the quality of the action seems secondary to the fact of action as such. Quite the reverse, however, if we analyse the past: there, having ‘done’ anything bears the danger of it having been bad, since the results are available for analysis. Consequently, analyses of the past tend to feature an abundance of victims, who as victims cannot by definition have done anything, and therefore cannot either be ‘guilty’. While descriptions of our future actions are thus distinguished by their vacuity – saying nothing about the kind of activity and explaining nothing about its purpose – the past on the contrary seems to cry out for the writing of histories that explain everything. In these rewritings of history as justification, the mark of distinction for personal identity is no longer to have ‘been active’, but on the contrary, to have been the passive victim – if not of actual deeds by others, at least of circumstances. In other words, in the past we tend to have been passive, while in the future we may become active. The present, however, is the eternal present in which we inhabit states of being, our identity.

The feminist critique of sexual violence has not only analysed patriarchal power relations as the conditions which make violence possible, it also sees the abuser’s will to abuse, his choosing to act violently, as the real ‘cause’ of violence. This, together with the feminist insight that the personal is political, should mean that for feminists the politics of personal behaviour is a central issue. Yet it is barely considered a serious theoretical issue outside the context of sexual violence: personal behaviour (our own) is criticized at most as a side-effect of political practice, an inadequacy of performance in relation to the competence of political ideals. In particular, the opinion seems to be gaining ground that what really matters is the explicit articulation of intention – what I SAY that I want and mean – less what I actually do and in doing express as my will. The emphasis is on the ‘content’ of politics and political discourse, less on political practice – so that politics is increasingly becoming a matter of the articulation of good intentions.

The rise of cultural identity politics in particular has contributed to the view that violence is exclusively a matter of social power relations. What feminist analysis has identified as the dialectic between social power structures and the actions of individuals in specific situations is in danger of becoming conflated in the simple transfer of social power structures to the identity of individuals. Far from supporting members of oppressed groups in the consciousness of their right to equality, identity politics tends to inscribe power and inequality, or victim status, respectively in the identity of persons. The analysis of the behaviour of individuals thus tends to lose in importance in favour of an (exclusive) analysis of social relations and the identification of our place in the social power hierarchy.

An analysis of power relations without an analysis of the politics of personal behaviour, however, leads to the classic ‘solutions’ to political problems: we reach (at least mentally) for the classic mechanisms of social control – state power and legislation – in order to sketch our visions of a future egalitarian society and to ensure its future stability. In the certain knowledge of the nobility of our ends, we give little thought to the significance of means and our own readiness to deploy social control. Since the chance of realizing our political visions appears so remote, we seem to think that we can afford to prioritize the question of aims over the question of means.

The recent involvement of Western feminists and peace activists in the reality of the war in former Yugoslavia, however, has shown that the readiness to deploy violent means does not dissolve in the face of prospective realization, but on the contrary even increases. Thus the German peace activist and Euro MP Eva Quistorp and the journalist Alexandra Stiglmayer vehemently argued for military intervention by the UN to end the war.8 Swiss women peace activists returning from a trip to Zagreb declared that they were rethinking their commitment to non-violence or giving up their pacifism, now that women in Bosnia were demanding arms.9 German feminists and women activists again decided to hold an international ‘tribunal’ in Zagreb, despite protests from women from all the republics of former Yugoslavia concerning the choice and accessibility of Zagreb as a meeting-place.10 This confirms that for these women politics, even feminist politics and peace politics, are clearly confined to the ‘content’ of the immediate political aims but do not include the means. And it shows that where it is apparently a matter of a politics of means – pacifism or a commitment to non-violence – such politics have been chosen without any expectation of ever having to prove them in actual situations; that on the contrary, in the face of a real situation, these political principles immediately collapse, or rather are dropped.

This readiness to engage in violence – which rests on the well-known principle that holy ends justify unholy means – shows at the very least a lack of understanding about the relationship between means and ends, theory and practice, not to say cause and effect. Yet neither the means nor their ends make any sense without considering the point of departure, that is, an analysis of the real situation whose change is our aim, and out of which the means have to be developed. More importantly, however, this readiness to employ violence proves our own will to power: the will to enforce my aims whatever the cost, and in realizing them to use whatever means are expedient.

Although it must certainly be the aim of any liberation politics to dismantle the social power structure and thus to decrease the possibilities for systematic violence and abuse, this does not spare us the question of a politics of behaviour in a world which has not yet been rid of these power structures. Nor does it suffice simply to wish for a future society in which power may no longer be exercised. Here lies the crucial difference between a utopia or vision on the one hand, and a politics of change whose aims, however utopian they may seem, are derived from a political analysis and critique of reality on the other. For a utopia or ‘vision’ is the idealist sketch of a future state of society that remains silent about how this state can be reached (or maintained). Its focus is on the happy future, jumping the analysis of the present and the particular problems which will need to be solved on the way to the future. It means not only to abandon any responsibility for the present, but to build this non-responsibility into the future, since personal responsibility is given up in favour of a superior, even if invisible, institution and authority: the abolished power structure. For in the future utopia there will be no abuse of power because there will be no power to abuse, and no violence because it will be impossible to act violently – because, in other words, not only the traditional offenders but also we ourselves would simply be prevented from behaving violently. Not only is it a vision of perfect unfreedom – of being forced to be ‘good’, it is also a fallacy to believe that if there were no social power structures there would no longer be any opportunities for being violent.

A vision, moreover, is the sketch of a society to which that society itself has nothing to say. It originates in the fantasy of a subject which is superordinated to society, society becoming the material in the creation of a world after the creative subject’s pleasure and will. It is a power fantasy par excellence, whether it is the vision of a general or a revolutionary. All the more remarkable that talk of visions and utopias is becoming more prevalent in the women’s movement, threatening to replace the political analysis of reality and the discussion of aims and means.

A realist politics – that is, a politics which refers to reality – has to start from the present conditions and their changeability. It is the critical analysis of present conditions, rather than any utopian vision of the future, which will indicate the direction and the possibilities of change. This would mean a politics, however, which goes beyond being ‘for’ or ‘against’ something, and a comprehension of reality that is gained from analysis rather than an automatic (ideological) perception of it. If politicians and the media increasingly offer ‘analyses’ conforming to the scheme of a folk tale or Hollywood western, with their figures of good and bad guys, this is no reason for a critical opposition to use the same scheme with at most an inverted cast. Rather, we should aim to expose the ideological construction of these narratives and mythologies and analyse their influence also on our own thinking.

If anything, however, the trend is going in the opposite direction: not only are critiques of ideology and ideological structures becoming rare and unfashionable, but the thinking of individuals increasingly resembles that of official discourse; institutional ‘public’ discourse shapes ‘private’ thinking. If George Bush represents the Gulf War of 1991 as the simple story of a courageous good guy who set out to deliver the world from the evil doings of the villain Saddam, ‘private individuals’ increasingly have recourse to similar narratives to construct an understanding of their own lives. The aim, of politicians and ‘private individuals’ alike, is less to analyse a situation or to understand a history than to construct a story and to reconstruct history. Hence political struggle, like the struggle to come to terms with one’s life, takes place less on the level of actual events than on the level of their representation – as a battle of representation. Thus politicians today offer not so much solutions to current political problems as, in the most literal sense of these formulations, ‘answers’ to the burning political ‘questions’ of the day. These answers usually consist in a reformulation of the question as less of a problem than we originally might have thought.

Scientific discourse, too, which is one of the major instruments of cultural and ideological power, certainly is no longer the prerogative of those who rule and administer society according to their will and interests. A comparable pseudo-scientific standpoint, abstracted from any specificity of the actual situation, increasingly characterizes the discourse of individuals – including that of a critical opposition – who then regard the ‘problems of the world’ from a similarly lofty and lordly view, arriving at similar solutions. So-called standpointlessness, the objectifying look from ‘above’ and ‘outside’, and its concomitant subjectless speech are the trademark of any discursively constructed authority. And since it is a speciality of scientific discourse to abstract action from its agents, representing it as (agentless) acts, it is only logical that this action too, this production of knowledgeable scientific speech, is presented as an act without an agent, a discourse without an author, a monological speech product without a producer.

Just as public discourse is the market-place of industrially published discursive products, so-called private communication increasingly takes the form of an exchange of personal speech products, with individuals fighting each other by means of rivalling representations in preference to reaching a common understanding. Many a political meeting, seminar or conversation among several people bears testimony to the fact that, however small this public arena, it is seen and used as an opportunity for putting one’s own products on offer and achieving a victory for one’s own representation – over any reality to be analysed and any people involved in analysing it.

Science, of course, is less concerned with the question of people’s responsible action in the world than professedly with the principle of cause and effect in the reality which is the object of its study – ‘nature’ in the case of the original natural sciences, long since joined by ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as the objects of the social sciences. Causes are the objectified impetuses of actions (‘events’ or ‘processes’), presented without regard to these as actions, while effects are the objectified consequences of these. The changing continuity of action (or a process or event) is separated into its apparent beginning and end, a point of departure and a final outcome, between which a connection, a causal relationship, is then inferred. A rational morality, if any, derives from the evaluation of effects, which are judged as good or bad, useful or harmful, desirable or undesirable – leaving aside for the moment by whom and in whose interests.

A political morality could also be derived from the consequences of action, in terms of the agents’ responsibility for the consequences of their actions. However, the scientific representation of the consequences of action as mere states of affairs – as factual effects – serves to evade such responsibility as effectively as once did mythological representations of destiny as preordained. For if we detach the act from the person acting and regard its consequences as an effect, personal responsibility is no longer an issue. On the contrary, this effect now calls for the scientific investigation of its cause. The cause, as we have already seen and shall see again and again, is never found in the responsibility of consciously acting people, but in an array of correlating factors and contributing circumstances which make identifying any personal responsibility virtually impossible. What is of advantage to the ruling interests of society, however, also has its attraction for individuals, who thus similarly seek to evade their personal responsibility by means of a scientific representation of their own actions as the effect of a most complicated set of causes.

In the possibility of representing reality, in the access to the role of the speaking or thinking subject, lies the power of representation – on the level of big politics as much as on the level of one’s own thinking and communication. This power implies a responsibility: the question how we are going to use it. Are we going to abuse it in our own interest, enlarging and consolidating our power, and are we willing to do violence to reality, including the reality of other people? Or are we going to use it in the interests of community and communication, that is, in the common interest of understanding and action? Do we try to analyse and understand reality, or to represent it in such a way that it turns out most advantageous to ourselves, enabling decisions which seem justifiable and normal, yet which we would regard differently if starting from a different representation of reality? It is a position of power which everyone has access to – at least as the subjects of our own thinking and where we have the chance to speak. And it is a position of power for which, in determining our actions, we are answerable, in terms of our responsibility for the consequences of our thinking and our actions. It is a sphere of action, moreover, in relation to which an increasing number of women in the West also inhabit positions of structural power and privilege, participating in the production of knowledge and public opinion.

There cannot therefore in the context of specific women’s actions be continued and undifferentiated talk of ‘women’s powerlessness’ – viewed simply in relation to men, the state, the power of leading capitalists or any other more powerful groups which can always be found. The discussion about power relations among women or within the women’s movement should have once and for all dispelled the simplistic view of women as powerless, impotent or ‘victims’. On the contrary, we are trying to gain an understanding of the position each of us has in a variety of power structures, where we are sometimes on the side of the oppressed, sometimes of the oppressors, in a complex network of relative power relations which have to be specifically analysed in each situation and cannot be determined simply in terms of social ‘identities’.

Moreover, feminism has produced an analysis – if not of action generally, at any rate of sexual violence – which not only emphasizes the abuser’s will and choice of action, but also uniquely recognizes the survivor’s action of resisting, and in this her will to resist. While violence constitutes precisely the violator’s attempt to reduce his victim’s freedom of action to nought – where the ultimate consequence is indeed her total victimization in death – the survivor’s survival means that she has recognized and made use of her remaining, even if minimal, scope for action. Feminist analysis sees in the survivor not a passive victim, but a person and agent who has successfully sought to resist. This means recognizing even in her virtual powerlessness the still existing potential for action. Resistance by definition means acting in situations of violence and oppression where our freedom of action is severely limited and circumscribed. All the more vital that we recognize what scope for action there is. All the more vital, also, that we recognize how much greater is our scope of action and resistance most of the time, compared to the extremity of victimization in experiences of life-threatening violence and enslavement – which we invoke metaphorically and all too lightly by claiming victim status on account of oppression.

The question which poses itself, then, is rather how we act in situations in which we do have (relative) power, not only the space to reach our own understanding of the situation, but also a choice, even if it is a limited choice, of action. To ask this question is not to shift from the political to the personal, from the social to the individual or even psychological. Rather, it concerns the most crucial moment of our political commitment, the point where we ourselves are in a position to initiate and effect change. Moreover, it also largely determines in what manner and by what means we think that our political aim of a non-violent egalitarian society will be reached. It implies a conception of politics which sees the process of social change here and now and everywhere, and thus also in our decisions here and now to act in the interests of our political aims.

Political action, in this view, is not something which will take place only in a more propitious future when circumstances have changed so much, or a revolution is already so far under way that it can take its course, and we as the ‘politically active’ people can join it. Nor can political action mean something we engage in only on condition that there will be enough others, or better, masses of them, who think as I do, and do what I want to do. Political action does not necessarily imply public mass actions whose massiveness will guarantee their success. For such individual conceptions of political mass action reflect the power thinking of generals commanding the troops of the ‘masses’ to suit their own strategies. Nor does it help to wish for the masses voluntarily to think as I do and to want what I want – that they be like-minded (like me), thus helping to fulfil my dream of a mass action. Even this has happened in the history of generals. My dream remains the dream of a commander who has like-minded masses of volunteer troops at his disposal.

Instead, we could consider that even our thinking is an opportunity for action, that it can be determined in this way or that, that it is the first opportunity, the first political situation, in which to exercise political choice. ‘We make the war possible, we allow it to happen’, says Drakulić. ‘We only have one weak protection against it, our consciousness. There are no them and us, there are no grand categories, abstract numbers, black-and-white truths, simple facts. There is only us – and, yes, we are responsible for each other.’11 And if we find this too minimal to satisfy our aspirations for political action and change, why don’t we do it anyway, for a start?

So I begin from the assumption that all of us, regardless of our relative positions within the social power structure, do permanently have to decide how we are going to act in a given situation. We have described in some considerable detail the many limitations on our freedom of action – it is the first thing (and often the only one) that occurs to us in justifying our actions. But each situation, save that of the absolute and ultimate violence of our destruction, leaves scope for action, however minimal, which permits the decision to consent to violence or to resist. The question remains how we use the opportunities for action we have, and how we deal with the relative advantages which offer themselves. Here we face the decision to (ab)use our power in our own interests and to our own advantage, or not to; here we face the choice to do violence to others, or not to. It is a most political question, and a most political decision.

A note on ‘We’

Much has been said about the use of ‘we’ and the problem of whom it includes and excludes. On the one hand, feminist authors have deliberately developed a linguistic practice of including ‘ourselves’ (as opposed to ‘themselves’) in concepts like ‘women’, ‘feminists’ (or ‘feminist authors’) etc., thus positioning ‘ourselves’ explicitly within our discourse as well as including ourselves in the subject of our speech, in contrast to the academic practice of avoiding all personal pronouns, especially those positioning the author. In turn, there has been discussion in the women’s movement concerning an unreflected use of ‘we’ or ‘us women’ which betrays a conceptualization of ‘us’ or of ‘women’ that does not include women universally, but only the narrow interest-group of the speaker, for instance white and/or middle-class women. So that, contrary to its apparent universal significance, ‘we’ often excludes many women and their interests from its designation. It is a critique on which I build in the chapters that follow.

However, there have been many misunderstandings arising from this critique – or rather, its reception. Our response cannot be henceforth to avoid using the pronoun ‘we’ in the hope of avoiding problems arising from it, and in particular, of escaping any reproach that we are practising exclusion. A conception of ‘us’ is already implied in how the speaker structures her speech, in particular, in her assumption of whom she envisages to be her addressees, whether or not she names them explicitly. Our critique of the apparent neutrality and impersonality of scientific or academic discourse is not that there is no ‘I’ and ‘you’, but that it constructs them implicitly, and as it were surreptitiously, on problematical assumptions. The point is to make structure and assumptions explicit so that we can analyse, reflect on and, where necessary, change them.

Similarly, the critique of the use of ‘we’, say, in situations where it is meant to designate ‘all women’ but in fact applies exclusively to a few, is less the use of the word ‘we’ than a form of thinking, conscious or unconscious, which is exclusionary – racist, classist, nationalist or in other ways discriminatory – constructing an alleged ‘universality’ of women on the basis of the interests and living conditions of but a few. The meaning of the critique is to make us conscious of this practice and to open it up for scrutiny as to who exactly is ‘us’ in any given speech context and whether we mean it to be so. The consequence is neither that we should avoid the words ‘we’ and ‘us’, nor speak of ‘us’ only universally and all-inclusively. While the former would return us to the feigned neutrality of scientific discourse, which simply hides the discursive structuring, the latter would allow us to speak only of a future utopia of universal equality, where all are included in an egalitarian community of ‘us’. Instead, the critique points us towards a conscious and responsible use of the pronoun ‘we’.

It is a responsibility of author and reader alike: ‘we’ is not the name of a group whose members we recognize by the sheer mention of the label. It is what linguists call a ‘shifter’ which, like ‘this’ or ‘that’, may be used to designate ever-changing referents, in this case groups in which you and I may (or may not) be joined by inclusion. If you are a feminist, you will feel included in my use of ‘we’ in the context of ‘we feminists’; if not, you will recognize that I include myself in that group and am speaking to you from that position. My use of ‘we’ however does not always designate ‘feminists’ or the particular position of feminism which I argue for; I also include myself, and many, even if diverse ones of you, in groupings which according to the context may be ‘women’, ‘white women’, ‘Western women’, ‘humans’, ‘speakers’, or those who engage in a particular practice I am describing.

However, I am speaking less of particular people like you (of whose specific activities I know nothing). Rather, my ‘we’ usually refers to the subject position of a dominant discourse which divides us into ‘us’ and ‘them’ without our having consciously chosen or assented to it. If we speak of ‘foreigners’, for example, a ‘we’ is already implied: though we may never say it, ‘we’ are the citizens of the state, those ‘legitimately at home’ ‘here’, those belonging to the nation.

Discourses, language habits, the way we express ourselves, structure the world, and ourselves in it, in specific ways. It is precisely the subject positions of ‘we’ constructed by dominant discourses which socialize not only men, but also women into an androcentric, sexist subject position, or people growing up in the West or through Western education systems to assume a Eurocentric view, whatever their personal social identity may be. Much more problematical than any spelt-out ‘we’ are the many verbal constructions which simultaneously imply and disguise the subject position. My aim is to make these structures as explicit as possible, to make visible that there is a subject – a subject in relation to a verb, an activity – that is, that there are people (us) responsible for our actions. This means that I use ‘we’ much more often, saying for instance ‘when we exclude other women’ rather than ‘the exclusion of other women’ etc. The point is to see ourselves in our responsibility of deciding how we act and to ask ourselves whether we do indeed want to act in this way and to constitute ourselves – in relation to every respective discursive ‘us’ – in this manner and through this practice as a community of ‘us’.

Finally, I use the pronoun ‘we’ because I consider myself to be participating in a process of collective self-criticism and hence dialogue, a process which may precisely involve a change in how ‘I’ or ‘we’ conceptualize ourselves as ‘we’. In saying ‘we’, I neither speak for a designated group, nor do I always speak about you; I am engaged in a dialogue with ‘you’, who will know, or will have to decide according to the context, whether you are included, or include yourselves, in my respective ‘we’ or not. Nor will you always be unhappy if you are excluded: discursive ‘exclusion’ is not just an act of injustice, but one of analysis. If we talk about structures of power and oppression, there is no all-inclusive ‘we’ about which we could speak: there are oppressors and oppressed, in either the one or the other of which I and my respective readers will have to include ourselves according to the situation, our own social determinants and, most importantly, our politics. So long as we need to deal with power and inequality, we will have to deal with categories describing the divisions that exist among us; the responsibility, as I see it, lies in deploying these categories in the interests of a political analysis and a politics which aim at the abolition of power and inequality.

Reading what kind of ‘we’ is constructed in each context, and deciding whether you belong to it, or wish to continue to belong to