Violence (On Benjamin and Arendt):

In Western historical thought, violence is generally regarded as a manifestation of power with severity, such relation of forces and its resulting harm can only be measured in the dimension of the moral. This means, violence is most of the time condemned, but it is considered either bad or necessary as it relates to principles of justice. For some thinkers, violence is always instrumental, as a means to an ends, while others have suggested that violence can sometimes lack apparent instrumental reason, which would be, pure rage.

The materialist approach of Walter Benjamin (1921) considers violence as a product of history. He regards it in relation to law and justice, distinguishing between 3 forms of violence. First, law-instating violence, which means the creation of power through law. For example, at the conclusion of a revolution, new laws are set and power relations are reconfigured, if I understand correctly, for him, the creation of law is itself the creation of violence since it establishes that everything outside that frame will be definitely violent. Second, law-preserving violence, as a means of control, is maintained by institutions and forces like the military and police. And third, what he calls divine violence (law-destroying), which could be conceived as pure destruction without instrumentality or means that can be understood in a political dimension, it, therefore, exists outside of the logic of legality. 

There is a lot of debate of what ‘divine violence’ actually means, for me, he is trying to make sense in a theological reason of violence as a manifestation of force that is total, pure, and irrational, just “as-God’s-will”. 

In modern terms, I like to think of divine violence as when the hooligans or sports fanatics flip cars on the streets for celebration. Another example can be found in Drill rap or any gang-related music, which are violent statements that often materialize into real violence. The same way one hooligan gang agrees on an encounter with a rival team gang only for the sake of violence and virility, in music, the cult and exercise of violence becomes a liberating force while it calls for a radical organization of power that cannot be contained within the margins of legality, it is just self-expression, and persues no political project to turn the illegal into legal, since in such contexts illegality has proven a more natural system of power and self-governance.

 ‘Power is indeed of the essence of all government, but violence is not. Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything.’ Arendt, in Crises of the Republic (1972)

Hannah Arendt has a distinct view of violence. While she also holds that violence is instrumental, meaning that it can be justified by ends that relate to politics (Finlay, 2009), but key point is that she opposes the idea of violence as a manifestation of power, for her, violence is the opposite of power. A state of power requires no violence, if we consider power as a collective enterprise, the institution is the political materialization of power, but institutions need to be supported by people, when it lacks the support of the power of the people, it needs to exercise violence. For her then power and violence have a negative relation, absolute power gives no space to violence and vice versa.

Liberal Public Sphere (Jürgen Habermas):

The concept of the ‘liberal public sphere’ is commonly attributed to Jürgen Habermas’ conceptualization of the ‘public sphere’. For him, the ideal scenario for human political organization is allowed by the fact that people have the capacity to get together and exchange views, ideas, and interests in order to achieve deliberatively fair consensus in decision-making (policy making). This logic is what sets the basis for democracy, which is why his conception of public sphere is regarded as ‘liberal’. For Habermas, communicative rationality is essentially democracy. 

Let’s consider that the public sphere Habermas describes has its beginning in a period of time prior to mass media (mass society), thus thinking about ‘collective thought’ was difficult, indeed, there was no need for collective consensus since it was the Kings that ruled through absolute power. It is with the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment that we start to even consider the collective body as a matter of interest for politics, as power was shifted from the sole command of the monarch to a more rational group of leaders (politicians). It is precisely Enlightenment political philosophers that regard the public, it is the main idea that the people replace the king as the source of legitimate authority (Then & Now, 2019) . The elites (newly created bourgeoisie) had to start listening to the people, or at least, control them.

It is this type of sphere of intellectuals, businessmen, and politicians that represent the first public sphere. Now when we talk about the ‘Liberal’ public sphere, we are referring to this specific model of deliberative democracy that Habermas identifies.

Representation:

To bring into the sensible what is not there. Something that is not physically present can thus be represented as a symbol or a sign through the use of language. We make sense of the world through representation, we do so by Language: signs and images is what represent things. 

Stuart Hall (1997) distinguishes 3 dimensions of representation.

First is the reflective: Language reflects directly what the object is. Language as a mirror of reality. Good contemporary examples could be a catalogue, an instructive, or a photograph and its description. Take the following photograph for example: 

Here both the photograph and its description are meant to represent what is there.

Next, the intentional: This is the notion that language expresses solely what the messenger aims to say. ‘Words mean what the author intends they should mean‘, says Hall (p.25)

A good example of this is to look at Facebook’s court defence, in which Zuckerberg argues that his company is a ‘technology company‘ and not a ‘media company’. Facebook operations and its effects are the same regardless of how it is framed, yet there is an intention to shift the perception of people and the law in regard to the social responsibilities of the company by imposing a specific meaning to it.

Third, the constructionist: the idea that meaning–and thus our sense of the world–is entirely constructed in/by language. This means, “meaning” do not exist as a given thing, we construct it by making use of representational systems. For this I like to think also of the legislative system but more profoundly on how it shapes our understanding of morality, civility, and the evil, serving as a moral and disciplinary guide in which the societies organize the material conditions of the world.

Decolonization:

Decoloniality is a school of thought that aims to study and ultimately dismantle the power relations of Coloniality. Coloniality being the power metric of Colonialism, is what allows the material conditions for Modernity (in Europe) and the maintenance of its hegemonic rhetoric. Coloniality is itself a decolonial concept because it makes evident that the colonial rule is one of domination and underdevelopment. 

This acknowledgement is born in the Third World, particularly in Latin America. Walter Mignolo & Catherine E. Walsh Walsh (2018) attribute the introduction of such dichotomy Coloniality/Decoloniality and the junction Coloniality-Modernity to the Peruvian philosopher Aníbal Quijano in the ’90s. His essay ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America‘ (2000) published at the end of the decade, provided a very solid ground for the material and intellectual project of Decoloniality to kickstart in Latin America (Gandarilla Salgado et al., 2021), expanding onto many other regions and intersectional fields of study such as Feminism, Migration Studies, and so on. The goal of Epistemological Decolonization is the destruction of the coloniality of world power (Quijano, 2007), the theory and practice of such a project is what we call ‘Decolonization’.