<nettime> The Claim to Violence (in pandemic time)

[Siraj Izhar | publiclife <s-i@publiclife.org>]

A delayed post for corona Mayday, but I had written this to elaborate on 
the thought that exists in a million minds now by as many ways - could 
this pandemic time be a time for revolution? As it's on a difficult 
unavoidable subject, Violence, I approached it through a reading of 
Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence for our times. I also acknowledge 
the post has benefited from input/criticism from fellow activists and 
comrades in a re-edit but it needs a further post.
The online version is at: 
http://amplife.org/blog/claim_to_violence_covid_pandemic


The Claim to Violence
(in pandemic time)
The purpose of this writing is to make a clearing in the time of this 
pandemic, a space for a clarity of confrontation between the claims to 
violence in it. The claim between natural violence and state violence – 
or between the divine violence of nature and mythic violence of law as 
Walter Benjamin puts it in his Critique of Violence. Reading between the 
claims through Benjamin's essay of 1921 show how they force us onto a 
new understanding between natural agency and human agency. Where another 
claim, of revolutionary violence, becomes a part of this pandemic.

The challenge in the time of a killer pandemic is of maintaining 
violence within its predicates: as much the violence of the virus in its 
claim to human life as the state's claim to a monopoly of violence 
become absolutist. If the pandemic undermines that by its force of 
violence, in its response the state's claim becomes the spectre. On that 
Giorgio Agamben's warning to us on the state's use of emergencies could 
not be more warranted. But from the Critique of Violence two lines serve 
as sirens for our time:
All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving. If it 
lays claim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits all validity.

If the danger is of the state violating these means, there is another 
dimension, a converse, to the pandemic. That the parameters between 
natural agency and human agency can equally no longer be negotiated 
through rights ordained by law. The pandemic in fact pushes us onto a 
space that requires fundamentally new conjugations of violence, rule and 
justice. Let us understand that it is against this space that the state 
acts through its use of emergencies. By this, Benjamin’s assertion that 
only revolutionary violence, like divine violence uncorrupted by law, 
with its capacity to address the question of justice becomes 
indispensable to the pandemic.

In any correlation between violence and justice, we are mistaken if we 
see the pandemic solely as an agent of nature. Instead as Frank Snowden 
argues in How Pandemics Change History (The New Yorker), they implicate 
us, reflect our orders: epidemics “hold up the mirror to human beings as 
to who we really are”, “reflect our moral relationships”; that, they are 
“ordered events” which expand selectively.
By this, the spread of Covid-19 may be read as a form of karmic violence 
or retributive violence. Along these lines, the violence of the pandemic 
becomes reparative violence, the violence that creates the space for 
nature to heal. To shield nature from human activity. We could say the 
longer the pandemic keeps its hold, or the longer we are inactive, the 
greater this reparation. But at the same time, the violence against the 
human lifeworld spreads along the faultlines of its inequalities. By its 
timing and with great devastation, the pandemic has shown the inverse 
relation we have constituted with nature, with its unaccounted violence.

Bruno Latour in his essay on the pandemic in Critical Inquiry shows the 
state's incapacity to address this: as ecological harm, social 
inequality, economic imbalance etc. - the interlinked generators of 
violence the pandemic thrives on. It is simply as Latour says, “this 
state is not the state of the twenty-first century and ecological 
change; it is the state of the nineteenth century and so-called 
biopower”. Thus the state's remit is to manage the pandemic as a health 
crisis under the banner of its protection. So that individual health 
equals collective health by its force. The state's entire theatre of 
power is consumed by that. Latour writes of the originality of the 
situation this brings upon us - “remaining trapped at home while outside 
there is only the extension of police powers and the din of ambulances, ….”.

For a reading on violence there are two points of note here. First, that 
by enforced self-enclosure, in its necessity, the state isn't merely 
protecting us. It also enacting its monopoly on violence using a 
pandemic. The monopoly of the state as “the sole grantor of the 'right' 
to physical force" just as Max Weber defined it in 1919. The greater the 
incapacity of the state to address a reality in question (the pandemic) 
the more state reins in its means and ends of violence through law, for 
its own protection.
Second, that the state changes the terms of its own violence in response 
to the pandemic. Through emergency powers, as Benjamin would diagnose, 
the state suspends the separation between law-making violence, 
"mythical, lawmaking violence, which we may call executive" and 
law-preserving violence, the "administrative violence that serves it". 
Whilst on surface the use of police powers may be benign, the state's 
claim to violence is emancipated from its predicates. By that all other 
claims are removed from its horizon.

The question then is not only to what ends in current times this serves, 
but by what means in a time to come? To address this by way of Latour's 
essay, behind the state's entrapment in the formula of biopolitics, "the 
sovereign power to make live and let die", Joshua Glover in his A 
response to Latour calls out the 'real sovereign' subject in protection:
“We need to stop fucking around with theory and say, without hesitation, 
that capitalism, with its industrial body and crown of finance, is 
sovereign; that carbon emissions are the sovereign breathing; that make 
work and let buy must be annihilated; that there is no survival while 
the sovereign lives.”

Sovereignty in a single dictatorship of capitalism provides a clear 
target but brings its complexities outside capitalist logic - in 
nationalisms, essentialisms and archaic relationalities. Look at three 
revealing examples:
The airlifting of Romanian labour to work in agricultural fields in 
wealthier states (including Brexit Britain) outside of Covid-19 
quarantine regulations, whilst barring travel to their own citizens (CNN).
The scale of containment of a reserve army of largely low-caste migrant 
labour in India through government intervention to cancel trains home, 
denying them the means of return to their villages – the transparency of 
status as beasts of burdens (scroll.in).
The social demarcations of those who have to work on the frontline of 
exposure in Britain. Kept outside the bailout subsidies and how this 
reflects colonial relationalities. Why specific ethnicities (Guardian) 
are twice more likely to die in Britain from Covid-19.
Yes the mobilisation of the biopolitical state machinery to protect the 
health of capitalism could not be more blatantly obvious. Yet it's also 
clear that emergency power acts selectively, that the state of 
protection openly creates a state of un-protection. The 'hiatus' of the 
pandemic, a coincidental Lent, a Ramadan forced on us by a microbe (as 
Latour describes it) is in fact a generator of new logics (of the 
conversion of violence into rules) that extend use of state power for a 
post-covid time. And the longer this extends in pandemic time, by the 
state's relation with capitalism, the more erratic the violence of 
protection becomes. As we can note from Benjamin's critique, “the modern 
economy, seen as a whole, resembles much less a machine that stands idle 
when abandoned by its stoker than a beast that goes berserk as soon as 
its tamer turns his back,..”.

Image: Komunal Mayday Ljubljana Slovenia 2020 
http://komunal.org/video/protesti/559-1-maj-brez-zice-vojske-in-ograj

The question that begs to be asked in this moment is: is it possible to 
use the time of this pandemic interruption to other ends? That would 
open it up to the converse space. A space that is closed off (as 
revolutionary violence) by the same rational as our protection.
One way to look outside of the enclosure in a pandemic lock-down would 
be through Antonio Negri's Time for Revolution (2003). The book examines 
the time when capitalism's project of subsumption of all life and 
activity is complete: the 'zero time' of capital's own revolution.
Through Negri's theory, we can see pandemic time in three-ways: time of 
capitalism's recaptures for its 'zero time', the 'dead time' of our 
compulsory service to it, and then, a 'now-time' or Jetzt-Zeit, a 
rupture of time with its transformative possibilities. 'now-time' is a 
mutation that has broken out from the pattern of time, the flow of dead 
time in its ceaseless continuum. The idea comes from Benjamin's Thesis 
(1940), writings on the concept of history. In 'now-time' dead time 
comes alive with potential that needs human agency to fulfil itself.

We could say each of the pandemic time(s) is animated by a specific 
force of violence. If for 'now-time' this is violence as revolution, the 
'revolutionary dilemma' of 'zero time' lies in that we can not attack 
capitalism's capacity to reproduce itself without attacking ourselves. 
Whilst the usefulness of the dilemma to capitalism becomes too apparent, 
equally self-evident is the challenge it poses to the idea of 
revolutionary praxis. This expresses itself in Negri's time for 
revolution, by mutations of insurrection where-by Negri by revolution 
does not mean (in his words) the “Jacobin path of revolution” with its 
“Enlightenment-terrorism”. Instead Negri situates revolution in a new 
“being-in-the-world” by who the factor of love becomes a protagonist. In 
the context of Negri's prior writing, revolution comes through a 
'being-for' of resistance (as love and community) from within a 
biopolitical multitude, the multitude of global commoners.
We may recognise this 'being for' in our pandemic time by the necessity 
now for a new politics of care outside the subsumed biopolitical state. 
A commons of care in or against the atomised consumerism that secures 
capitalism's health.

What matters here is the need to read the 'now-time' of this pandemic 
outside of its state emergency. Because emergency uses the pandemic to 
partition common space - as of necessity in new ways under the edict of 
health. Between domestic space, social space and global space.
Isolation in domestic space now mirrors the isolation of the state, each 
in its lock-in. Within closed borders, we see how the biopolitical state 
has set upon the biopolitical multitude. What comes to surface, as seen 
above, are the invisibles of each state in particular who does its work 
on the ground. It shows the extent to which global biopower remains 
rooted in class, ethnic and colonial demarcation. It recalls Frantz 
Fanon's observation about capitalism's irrationalities. In the Wretched 
of the Earth (1961) Fanon writes that when race pre-determines society, 
“the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the 
consequence”. Against it, Fanonian revolution also sought a 
metamorphosis of the human: Fanon's concept of the “new man” (sic) - us 
or the human as the site of decolonisation.

Capitalism as colonialism and vice versa presents itself in this 
pandemic as a renewed question through nature. For that is where virus 
Covid-19 comes from: the sites of capital's extraction and expansion. 
Where today the process of capital's subsumption is most unrelenting. 
Where yesterday the basis of modern law came through the neutralisation 
of nature and objectification (into nature) of peoples. These have 
become our unaccounted violence.

If we see the pandemic as a rupture in our pattern of time for a 
revolutionary shift, its 'now-time' can emerge to address what the state 
does not address. The unaccounted violence that the pandemic exposes on 
which the authority of law has nothing to say. The realisation that the 
biopolitical Emperor has no clothes but still claims a monopoly on 
violence. For its and our protection.
It's for these reasons that Benjamin in the final passages of Critique 
of Violence wrote:
If the rule of myth is broken occasionally in the present age, the 
coming age is not so unimaginably remote that an attack on law is 
altogether futile. But if the existence of violence outside the law, as 
pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes the proof that 
revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence 
by man, is possible, and by what means.

This leads to the question in the mind of millions (in a million ways) 
in this pandemic: is this time for a revolution? By the interactions of 
violence shown here, between the strands of this pandemic time we know 
this depends on how the claim to time, its time, is attached to the 
claim to violence.

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