The Theater of Violence

This is the first in a series of dialogues with philosophers on the question of violence that I am conducting for The Stone. We begin with this conversation with Simon Critchley, a professor of philosophy at The New School, and the moderator of The Stone. — Brad Evans

Brad Evans: I want to start the discussion by raising a seemingly basic yet elusive question: What actually is violence? In terms of media spectacles and popular culture, violence seems ubiquitous in liberal societies. Yet the very term “violence” continually escapes meaningful definition and critique. What do you understand by the term?

Simon Critchley: It is true, “violence” can be used in a very wide and somewhat vague manner. So let me try and restrict our discussion to physical violence of a rather direct form. Let’s say that violence is behavior that uses physical force in order to cause damage, harm or death to some living thing, whether human or not. It is pretty clear that we are not all going to be able to agree on a definition of violence, but let’s see where this idea of it takes us.

First, violence cannot be reduced to an isolated act that could be justified with reference to some conception or principle of justice. Here I borrow a line of thought from the historian and cultural theorist Robert Young when he writes that violence “is a phenomenon that has a history.” Violence is not so much a question of a single act that breaks a supposed continuum of nonviolence or peace. Rather, violence is best understood as a historical cycle of violence and counterviolence. In other words, violence is not one but two. It is a double act that traps human beings in a repetitive pattern from which it is very hard to escape. Violence, especially political violence, is usually a pattern of aggression and counteraggression that has a history and which stretches back deep into time.

This is how I would understand the patterns involving race and racialized violence that have taken on added urgency of late. Violence is not an abstract concept for those subjected to it, but a lived reality which has a concrete history. To try and judge the racial violence that defines current life in the United States without an understanding of the history of violence that stretches back to colonization, the forced transport of Africans to the colonies of the Americas and the implementation of plantation slavery is largely pointless. We have to understand the history of violence from which we emerge.

B.E.: In that respect, as your colleague Richard Bernstein has argued, even massive historical events like the Sept. 11 attacks don’t necessarily provoke serious thinking on the problem of violence.

S.C.: One way of looking at 9/11 — let’s call it the standard way — is that the United States was at peace with the world and then terror came from the sky and the twin towers tumbled. On that view, 9/11 was a single act that required a justified reaction, namely war in the Middle East, the infinite detention of suspected “terrorists” in places like Guantánamo Bay and the construction of the vast institutional apparatus of Homeland Security.

But another way of looking at 9/11 is looking at what Osama bin Laden said about the matter. In a 2004 video called “The Towers of Lebanon,” where he first accepted responsibility for Al Qaeda’s role in the 9/11 attacks, he justifies the attacks by claiming that they were a reaction to the persistent violation of Arab lands by the United States, especially the use of Saudi Arabia as a base during the first Gulf War. Bin Laden even adds that the idea of 9/11 came to him as a visual memory of watching TV footage of the Israeli bombardment of West Beirut’s high-rise tower blocks in 1982. If the “Zionist-Crusaders,” as he pejoratively puts it, could put missiles into towers, then so could Al Qaeda. Thus the idea for 9/11 was born.

The point is that if we are to understand violence concretely, then we have to grasp it historically as part of a cycle of action and reaction, violence and counterviolence, that always stretches back further than one thinks. If one doesn’t do this, then one ends up like Donald Trump, emptily promising to flatten ISIS with bombs. It’s in this light that we might also consider the Theater of Trump that has exploded with truly disturbing and racially coded violence in recent days.

B.E.: If violence shouldn’t be theorized in the abstract, as you rightly insist, we must pay attention to how it is enacted. In this, the importance of theater, which is a recurring theme throughout your work, is often overlooked. What do you think theater has to offer here?

S.C.: We live in a world framed by violence, where justice seems to be endlessly divided between claim and counterclaim, right and left, freedom fighter and terrorist, believer and nonbeliever, and so on. Each side appears to believe unswervingly in the rightness of its position and the wrongness, or indeed “evil,” of the opposition. Such belief legitimates violence and unleashes counterviolence in return. We seem to be trapped in deep historical cycles of violence where justice is usually simply understood as vengeance or revenge.

This is where theater can help, especially tragedy (but I think this is also true of the best movies and TV dramas).

It is useful to consider the Greeks. The history of Greek tragedy is the history of violence and war, from the war with the Persians in the early fifth century B.C. to the Peloponnesian Wars that run until that century’s end; from the emergence of Athenian imperial hegemony to its dissolution and humiliation at the hands of Sparta. In 472 B.C., in the oldest extant play we possess, “The Persians,” Aeschylus deals with the aftermath of the Battle of Salamis in 480. It was therefore somewhat closer to the Athenians than 9/11 is to us. More than half of our surviving Greek tragedies were composed after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian Wars in 431. “Oedipus the King” was first performed in 429, two years after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, during a time of plague that is estimated to have killed one-quarter of the Athenian population. The plague that established the entire environment of Sophocles’ play is not some idle musing. It was very real indeed. It killed Pericles, the leader of Athens, that very same year. The frame of tragedy is war and its devastating effects on human life.

Greek tragedy, particularly with its obsessive focus on the aftermath of the Trojan War, is largely about combat veterans. But it was also performed by combat veterans. Actors were not flimsy thespians or the Athenian version of Hollywood stars, but soldiers who had seen combat, like Aeschylus himself. They knew firsthand what violence was. Tragedy was played before an audience that either participated directly in war or who were indirectly implicated in war. All were traumatized by it and everyone felt its effects. War was the life of the city and its pride, as Pericles argued. But war was also the city’s fall and undoing.

How might we respond in a similar way to the contemporary situation of violence and war? It might seem that the easiest and noblest thing to do is to speak of peace. Yet, as Raymond Williams says in his still hugely relevant 1966 book, “Modern Tragedy”: “To say peace when there is no peace is to say nothing.” The danger of easy pacifism is that it is inert and self-regarding. It is always too pleased with itself. But the alternative is not a justification of war. It is rather the attempt to understand the deep history and tragic complexity of political situations.

The great virtue of ancient tragedy is that it allowed the Greeks to see their role in a history of violence and war that was to some extent of their own making. It also allowed them to imagine a suspension of that cycle of violence. And this suspension, the kind of thing that happens in the trial at the end of Aeschylus’ “Oresteia,” was not based on a fanciful idealism, but on a realistic and concrete grasp of a historical situation, which was something the Greeks did by focusing history through the lens of myth.

The slim slither of hope I have is that the same could be true of us. To see the bloody events of the contemporary world in a tragic light exposes us to a disorder which is not just someone else’s disorder. It is our disorder, and theater at its best asks us to take the time to reflect on this and to imagine what a world where violence is suspended might look like.

B.E.: With that in mind, I’d like now to turn to Shakespeare. In “Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine” you show how Shakespearean figures are relevant for understanding the ways in which deeply tragic questions concerning life, death and love are embodied today. What is it about Shakespeare that still captures the violence of the times?

S.C.: From the beginning to the end, Shakespeare’s drama is a meditation on political violence. Whether one thinks of the wild excesses of “Titus Andronicus,” the vast majestic sweep of the history plays, or the great tragedies, Shakespeare had a tight and commanding grip on the nature of political power and its relation to violence and the claims and counterclaims of justice. What is most powerful about Shakespeare is the way in which his historically coded reflections on the politics of his time are combined with intense and immense psychological intimacy. Shakespeare, like no one before or since, binds together the political and the psychological.

To take the play that I know best, “Hamlet,” it is not just that this play is a drama of violence in a surveillance state where power is constituted through acts of murder (the Castle of Elsinore and the state of Denmark is clearly some kind of allegory for the late Elizabethan court and police state), but also that we feel an awful proximity to the effects of violence on the mind of the young Danish prince, and the way in which it drives his feigned madness into something more real and frightening, as when he confronts his mother with terrifying psychical violence (Act 3, Scene iv).

What answer does “Hamlet” give that helps us understand our current political situation? Simply put, the play counsels us that time is out of joint. What people often forget is that Hamlet’s father, before he was himself murdered, killed Fortinbras’s father. And therefore it is fitting that “Hamlet” ends not just with the prince’s death, but with the military occupation of Denmark by the forces of young Fortinbras, who is Hamlet’s twin, insofar as they are both the sons of murdered fathers, one by the other.

So the point of Shakespeare is not to give us simple answers or reassuring humanistic moral responses to violence, but to get us to confront the violence of our own histories. “Hamlet” gives us many warnings, but perhaps the most salient is the following: If we imagine that justice is based on vengeance against others, then we are truly undone.

B.E.: How can we connect insights such as this to the historic and evidently prescient contemporary relationship between violence and sport? Are sporting arenas perhaps the real theaters of our times? Are they inevitably bound up with the problem of violence in both its glorified and its vilified forms?

S.C.: Ah, now you’re talking. Sport is obviously the continuation of war by other means. And sports stadiums are undoubtedly the closest thing to ancient theaters that we have, especially in terms of scale (nearly 15,000 people sat in the Theater of Dionysos in Athens). It’s fascinating to me that when Bertolt Brecht was trying to imagine the ideal audience for the kind of epic theatre he was developing in the 1920s, he pictured a sports crowd. That is, a crowd that is relaxed and not anxious, sitting under lights rather than in the dark, and that has knowledge of what is happening and a passion for it, rather than people either looking perplexed or quietly taking a nap, as usually happens in New York theaters. I think there is a lot to Brecht’s idea.

Sport is obviously violent, and it is violence that we want to see. We want to see people putting their bodies on the line for their team and leaving their bodies on the field. This is why the whole debate about concussions in the N.F.L. is so hypocritical, to my mind. Sport is a place where bodies break. If you don’t agree with it, then don’t watch it.

But sports is not just some gladiatorial spectacle of violence. It is violence honed into skill and masterful expertise, what psychoanalysts would call “sublimation.” It is violence refined and elevated. And sporting drama is only made possible through an elaborate set of rules, which have to be observed and with which all parties agree.

But what is in the background of the rule-governed physical violence of sport is something more complex, something closer to what the ancients called fate. This is particularly the case with the sport that I take it that you and I hold dearest, what our American pals call soccer. For the real fan, what is at stake in a soccer match is a sense of profound attachment to place, whether town, city or nation, a sense of identity which is almost tribal and which is often organized around social class, ethnicity, dialect or language. But what is driving the whole activity is something closer to destiny. This is usually experienced when one’s team loses, as one has the sinking feeling that England must when playing Germany and the game has to end with penalty shots.

But the key phenomenon of sport in relation to violence is that although sport can and does spill over into actual violence (whether through hooliganism or ethnic or racist violence), this usually doesn’t happen. As a fan, one follows the physical, violent intensity of the game with a mixture of intense passion and expert knowledge of what is happening, and then the game ends and one goes home, often a little disappointed. I think sport, especially soccer, is a wonderful example of how violence can be both made spectacular and harnessed for nonviolent ends. At its best, one accepts defeat, respects the opponent and moves on eagerly to the next game.

B.E.: The subtlety of the potential for nonviolence you express here seems crucial. In particular how might we develop the necessary intellectual tools adequate to these deeply violent and politically fraught times?

S.C.: My response is very simple: Art. I think that art at its most resonant and powerful can give us an account of the history of violence from which we emerge and can also offer us the possibility of a suspension of that violence. Art can provide an image for our age.

For me, this happens most powerfully in popular music. For me, as for many others, one of the most coherent and powerful responses to the racialized violence of the past year or so was Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly.” With dazzling linguistic inventiveness, steeped in intense inward knowledge of traditions of jazz, soul and funk, Lamar does not provide easy solutions or empty moral platitudes, but confronts us aesthetically with the deep history of racialized violence. You hear this very clearly on a track like “Alright.” It is what Public Enemy, Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye did so powerfully in previous generations.

Some days I am inclined to agree with Nietzsche when he said that without music life would be error. Music like Lamar’s doesn’t give us the answers, but it allows us to ask the right questions, and it does this with a historical and political sensibility suffused with intelligence, wit and verve. Great music can give us a picture of the violence of our time more powerfully than any news report. It can also offer, for the time that we listen, a momentary respite from the seemingly unending cycles of violence and imagine some other way of being, something less violent, less vengeful and less stupid.

Brad Evans is a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Bristol in England. He is the founder and director of the Histories of Violence project (@histofviolence), dedicated to critiquing the problem of violence in the 21st century. His most recent books include “ Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle” (with Henry Giroux) & “Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously” (with Julian Reid).

Now in print: “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” An anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.