Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism,
and virulent imaginative geographies
Simon Springer*
Department of Geography, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand
Keywords:
Culture
Imaginative geographies
Neoliberalism
Orientalism
Place
Violence
a b s t r a c t
Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs,
the notion that violence is ‘irrational’ marks particular cultures as ‘Other’. Neoliberalism exploits such
imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer
of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to
ostensibly ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that
binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its
manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is
reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity,
separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated
through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place
fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression
as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding
process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.
Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
“Imagine all the people,
Living life in peace”
- John Lennon, Imagine
Introduction
The idea that violence might be integral to cultural practice is
difficult to accept. In concert with the abuse that the concept of
culture has been subjected to as of late, where in keeping with
geopolitical hegemony (see Harrison & Huntington, 2000), or
perhaps more surprisingly in an attempt to argue against such
hegemonic might (see Roberts, 2001), some cultures, particularly
‘Asian’, ‘African’, or ‘Islamic’ cultures, are conferred with a supposedly
inherent predilection towards violence. Yet the relationship
between culture and violence is also axiomatic, since violence is
part of human activity. Thus, it is not the call for violence to be
understood as a social process informed by culture that is problematic;
rather it is the potential to colonize this observation with
imaginative geographies that distort it in such a fashion that
deliberately or inadvertently enable particular geostrategic aims to
gain validity. The principal method of distortion is Orientalism,
which as ‘a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic,
scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts’,
is ‘an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction’ but
a whole series of ‘interests’ which create, maintain, and have the
intention to understand, control, manipulate, and incorporate that
which is manifestly different through a discourse that is produced
and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power:
political, intellectual, cultural, and moral (Said, 2003: 12). At base,
Orientalism is a form of paranoia that feeds on cartographies of fear
by producing ‘our’ world negatively through the construction of
a perverse ‘Other’. This is precisely the discourse colonialism
mobilized to construct its exploitative authority in the past. In the
current context, a relatively new geostrategic aim appeals to the
same discursive principles for valorization in its quest to impose an
econometric version of global sovereignty (Hart, 2006; Pieterse,
2004; Sparke, 2004). Neoliberalism is on the move, and in the
context of the global south, Orientalism is its latitude inasmuch as it
affords neoliberalism a powerful discursive space to manuver.
This paper has two interrelated central aims. First, building on
the work of Arturo Escobar (2001) and Doreen Massey (2005), I
contribute to re-theorizations of place as a relational assemblage,
rather than as an isolated container, by calling into question the
relationship between place and violence. Second, informed by an
* Tel.: þ64 3 479 8771.
E-mail address: simonspringer@gmail.com.
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Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
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doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.01.004
Political Geography 30 (2011) 90e98
understanding of Orientalism as performative (Said, 2003), and
power/knowledge as productive (Foucault, 1977), I set out to
challenge how neoliberalism discursively assigns violence to
particular peoples and cultures through its employment of the
problematic notions of place that I dispute. I argue that Orientalism
maintains an underlying assumption that violence sits in places,
and as an affect and effect of discourse, this Orientalist view is
enabled because the production of space and place is largely
a discursive enterprise (Bachelard, 1964; Lefebvre, 1991). But while
violence can bind itself to our somatic geographies and lived
experiences of place, in the same way that culture is not confined to
any particular place, so too do violent geographies stretch inwards
and outwards to reveal the inherent dynamism of space as multiple
sites are repeatedly entwined by violence. Thus, following Michel
Foucault’s (1977, 1980) insights on power, I am not interested in
the why of violence, but rather the how and where of violence.
A culturally sensitive critical political economy approach alerts us
to the power/knowledge-geometries at play (Hart, 2002; Peet,
2000; Sayer, 2001), so that while violence is clearly mediated
through and informed by local cultural norms, it is equally
enmeshed in the logic of globalized capital.
In the setting of the global south, where and upon which the
global north’s caricatural vision of violence repeatedly turns,
authoritarian leaders may appropriate neoliberal concerns for
market security as a rationale for their violent and repressive
actions (Canterbury, 2005; Springer, 2009c). At the same time,
because of the performative nature of Orientalism, an exasperated
populace may follow their ‘scripted’ roles and resort to violent
means in their attempts to cope with the festering poverty and
mounting inequality wrought by their state’s deepening neoliberalization
(Uvin, 2003). Far from being a symptom of an innate
cultural proclivity for violence, state-sponsored violence and
systemic social strife can be seen as outcomes of both a state
made ‘differently powerful’ via the ongoing ‘roll-out’ of neoliberal
reforms (Peck, 2001: 447), and the discourses that support this
process (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2001; Springer, 2010b). Thus,
when applied to the context of ‘the Other’, neoliberalism maintains
e in the double sense of both incessant reproduction and
the construction of alterity e a ‘Self’-perpetuating logic. Through
the circulation of a discourse that posits violence as an exclusive
cultural preserve, and by inextricably linking itself to democracy,
neoliberalism presents itself as the harbinger of rationality and
the only guarantor of peace. Yet neoliberalism’s structural effects
of poverty and inequality often (re)produce violence (Escobar,
2004; Springer, 2008), and as such, neoliberalism perpetually
renews its own license by suggesting it will cure that which
neoliberalization ails.
To be clear from the outset, this paper is decidedly theoretical.
While writing about violence directly in empirical terms is
a worthwhile endeavor to be sure, it is one that e without significant
attention and attachment to social theory e risks lending
itself to problematic and even Orientalist readings of place. Thus,
the purpose here is to critique the limitations of a placed-based
approach to violence that merely catalogs in situ, rather than
appropriately recognizing the relational geographies of both
violence and place. Accordingly, I do not offer empirical accounts of
particular places, as my intention is to call such particularized
interpretations of ‘place’ into question. The punctuation in the title
is very much purposeful in this regard. While violence sits in places
in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as
a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged
when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. This
re-theorization opens up the supposed fixity, separation, and
immutability of place to recognize it instead as always co-constituted
by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider
experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally
transforms the way we understand violence. No longer
confined to its material expression as an isolated ‘event’ or localized
‘thing’, violence can more appropriately be understood as an
unfolding process, arising from the broader geographical
phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world. In short,
through such a reinterpretation of place, geographers are much
better positioned to dismiss Orientalist accounts that bind violence
to particular peoples, cultures, and places, as was the mandate of
colonial geography. We can instead initiate a more emancipatory
geography that challenges such colonial imaginings by questioning
how seemingly local expressions of violence are instead always
imbricated within wider socio-spatial and political economic
patterns. This allows geographers to recognize with more theoretical
force how ongoing (neo)colonial frameworks, like neoliberalism,
are woven between, within, and across places in ways that
facilitate and (re)produce violence.
Following this introduction, I begin by establishing why an
exploration of the discursive contours of Orientalism, neoliberalism,
and violence, and their intersections with space and place
necessitates a theoretical analysis. I argue that the confounding
experience of violence makes it a difficult phenomenon to write
about using a direct empirical prose. This does not negate that there
are instances where we should attempt to do so, as I have done in
my other work (see Springer, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2010a, 2010b),
but the purpose of this article is to focus explicitly on theory so that
a more critical approach to understanding the relationship between
violence and place might be devised. The following section draws
on Massey’s (2005) re-conceptualization of space and place to
argue that, although violence is experienced through the ontological
priority of place, these experiences are inseparable from the
relational characteristic of space as a unitary and indivisible whole.
This renders accounts of violence as the exclusive preserve of
particular cultures untenable, a point that is expanded upon in the
next section where I argue that all violence is rational because of the
cultural meaning it evokes. The notion that violence is ever ‘irrational’
is an ascription applied to individuals and cultures in an
attempt to mark them as ‘Other’, which is effected through the
invocation of very specific kinds of imaginative geographies. The
section that follows shifts the focus to neoliberalism and its relationship
with Orientalism. Here I contend that neoliberalism came
to prominence out of a concern for violence in the wake of the two
world wars, and based on its call for a return to the principles of the
Enlightenment, neoliberalism was able to construct itself as the sole
providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of ‘reason’ and
‘civilization’ in our world. Before concluding, I tease out some of the
spatial and temporal fallacies underscoring neoliberalism and its
intersections with Orientalism. In particular, I examine how the
fictions of neoliberalism position it as a ‘divine’ salvation to ‘backwards’
peoples, thereby obscuring both the structural and ‘mythic’
violence neoliberalism is premised upon. The conclusion reminds
readers that despite their relationship, Orientalism and neoliberalism
do not presuppose each other. However, because neoliberalism
can be understood as a contemporary incarnation of ‘empire’
(Hardt & Negri, 2000; Hart, 2006; Pieterse, 2004; Sparke, 2005),
and since Orientalism is at base an imperial endeavor (Said, 1993;
Gregory, 2004a), recognizing their convergence is vital to
conceiving an emancipatory politics of refusal. My overarching
concern in this paper is for the ways that neoliberal ideology
employs Orientalist discourses to tie violence to specific cultures
and particular places. Thus, I conclude by proposing that, while the
interactions of violence with space and place are of course material,
they are also very much imaginative. Out of this understanding, I
suggest that perhaps peace is, as the late John Lennon once intuitively
sang, something we must imagine.
S. Springer / Political Geography 30 (2011) 90e98 91
Poetry after Auschwitz: the problem of representing violence
A perennial complication of discussions about human suffering
is the awareness of cultural differences. In the wake of the damage
wrought by Samuel Huntington (1993), some might contend that
the concept of culture is beyond reclamation (Mitchell, 1995),
especially with respect to discussions of violence. There is,
however, still a great deal of resonance to the concept that can, and
perhaps must be salvaged if we are to ever make sense of violence.
If culture is defined as a historically transmitted form of symbolization
upon which a social order is constructed (Geertz, 1973; Peet,
2000), then understanding any act, violent or otherwise, is never
achieved solely in terms of its physicality and invariably includes
the meaning it is afforded by culture (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois,
2004). An account of the cultural dimensions of violence is perhaps
even vital, as focusing exclusively on the physical aspects of
violence transforms the project into a clinical or literary exercise,
which runs the risk of degenerating into a ‘pornography of violence’
(Bourgois, 2001) where voyeuristic impulses subvert the larger
project of witnessing, critiquing, and writing against violence.
While violence in its most fundamental form entails pain, dismemberment,
and death, people do not engage in or avoid violence
simply because of these tangible consequences, nor are these
corporeal outcomes the reason why we attempt to write or talk
about violence. Violence as a mere fact is largely meaningless. It
takes on and gathers meaning because of its affective and cultural
content, where violence is felt as meaningful (Nordstrom, 2004).
‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, Theodor Adorno
(1981: 34) once famously wrote. Confounded by the atrocities
that had occurred under the Nazis, he failed to understand how
a humanity capable of causing such catastrophic ruin could then
relate such an unfathomable tale. Although struck by the emotional
weight of violence, Adorno was wrong, as it is not poetry that is
impossible after Auschwitz, but rather prose:
Realistic prose fails, where the poetic evocation of the unbearable
atmosphere of a camp succeeds. That is to say, when
Adorno declares poetry impossible (or, rather, barbaric) after
Auschwitz, this impossibility is an enabling impossibility:
poetry is always ‘about’ something that cannot be addressed
directly, only alluded to (Zizek, 2008: 4e5).
For victims, any retelling of violence is necessarily riddled with
inconsistency and confusion. The inability to convey agony and
humiliation with any sense of clarity is part of the trauma of
a violent event. Indeed, ‘physical pain does not simply resist
language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate
reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries
a human being makes before language is learned’ (Scarry, 1985: 4).
As such, the chaotic bewilderment of experiencing violence makes
understanding it an unusually mystifying endeavor. Thus, what can
we say about violence without being overwhelmed by its unnerving
horror and incapacitated by the fear it instills? How can we
represent violence without becoming so removed from and
apathetic towards its magnitude that we no longer feel a sense of
anguish or distress? And in what ways can we raise the question of
violence in relation to victims, perpetrators, and even entire
cultures, without reducing our accounts to caricature, where
violence itself becomes the defining, quintessential feature of
subjectivity? To quote Adorno (1981: 34) once more, ‘Even the most
extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle
chatter’.
The confounding effects of violence ensure that it is
a phenomena shot through with a certain perceptual blindness. In
his monumental essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin (1986)
exposed our unremitting tendency to obscure violence in its
institutionalized forms, and because of this opacity, our inclination
to regard violence exclusively as something we can see through its
direct expression. Yet the structural violence resulting from our
political and economic systems (Farmer, 2004; Galtung, 1969), and
the symbolic violence born of our discourses (Bourdieu 2001;
Jiwani, 2006), are something like the dark matter of physics,
‘[they] may be invisible, but [they have] to be taken into account if
one is to make sense of what might otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’
explosions of subjective [or direct] violence’ (Zizek, 2008: 2). These
seemingly invisible geographies of violence e including the hidden
fist of the market itself e have both ‘nonillusory effects’ (Springer,
2008) and pathogenic affects in afflicting human bodies that
create suffering (Farmer, 2003), which can be seen if one cares to
look critically enough. Yet, because of their sheer pervasiveness,
systematization, and banality we are all too frequently blinded
from seeing that which is perhaps most obvious. This itself marks
an epistemological downward spiral, as ‘the economic’ in particular
is evermore abstracted and its ‘real world’ implications are
increasingly erased from collective consciousness (Hart, 2008). ‘The
clearest available example of such epistemic violence’, Gayatri
Spivak (1988: 24e25) contends, ‘is the remotely orchestrated, farflung,
and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject
as Other’, and it is here that the relationship between Orientalism
and neoliberalism is revealed.
Since Orientalism is a discourse that functions precisely due to
its ability to conceal an underlying symbolic violence (Tuastad,
2003), and because the structural violence of poverty and
inequality that stems from the political economies of neoliberalism
is cast as illusory (Springer, 2008), my reflections on neoliberalism,
Orientalism, and their resultant imaginative and material violent
geographies are, as presented here, purposefully theoretical. As
Derek Gregory (1993: 275) passionately argues, ‘human geographers
have to work with social theory. Empiricism is not an
option, if it ever was, because the “facts” do not (and never will)
“speak for themselves”, no matter how closely. we listen’.
Although the ‘facts’ of violence can be assembled, tallied, and
categorized, the cultural scope and emotional weight of violence
can never be entirely captured through empirical analysis. After
Auschwitz, and now after 9/11, casting a sideways glance at
violence through the poetic abstractions of theory must be
considered as an enabling possibility. This is particularly the case
with respect to understanding the geographies of violence, as our
understandings of space and place are also largely poetic
(Bachelard, 1964; Kong, 2001).
Imaginative bindings of space: geography and narrative
Despite the attention space and place receive in contemporary
human geography, Massey (2005) has convincingly argued that
there is a prevailing theoretical myopia concerning their conceptualization.
Space and place are typically thought to counterpose, as
there exists an implicit imagination of different theoretical ‘levels’:
space as the abstract versus the everydayness of place. Place,
however, is not ‘the Other’ of space, it is not a pure construct of the
local or a bounded realm of the particular in opposition to an
overbearing, universal, and absolute global space (Escobar, 2001).
What if, Massey (2005: 6) muses, we refuse this distinction,
‘between place (as meaningful, lived and everyday) and space (as
what? the outside? the abstract? the meaningless?).’ By enshrining
space as universal, theorists have assumed that places are mere
subdivisions of a ubiquitous and homogeneous space that is
‘dissociated from the bodies that occupy it and from the particularities
that these bodies len[d] to the places they inhabit’ (Escobar,
2001: 143). Such disregard is peculiar since it is not the absoluteness
of space, but our inescapable immersion in place via embodied
S. Springer / Political Geography 30 (2011) 90e9892
perception that is the ontological priority of our lived experience.
Edward Casey (1996: 18) eloquently captures this notion in stating
that, ‘To live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the
places one is in.’ The inseparability of space and time entails
a further recognition that places should be thought of as moments,
where amalgamations of things, ideas, and memories coalesce out
of our embodied experiences and the physical environments in
which they occur to form the contours of place. As such, Massey
(2005) encourages us to view space as the simultaneity of storiesso-far,
and place as collections of these stories, articulations within
the wider power-geometries of space. The production of space and
place is accordingly the unremitting and forever unfinished
product of competing discourses over what constitutes them
(Lefebvre, 1991).
Violence is one of the most profound ongoing stories influencing
the (re)production of space. Similarly, individual and embodied
narratives of violence woven out of a more expansive spatial logic
may become acute, forming constellations that delineate and
associate place. Accordingly, it may be useful to begin to think
about ‘violent narratives’, not simply as stories about violence, but
rather as a spatial metaphor analogous to violent geographies and
in direct reference to Massey’s (2005) re-conceptualization of space
and place. Allen Feldman (1991: 1) looks to bodily, spatial, and
violent practices as configuring a unified language of material
signification, compelling him to ‘treat the political subject, particularly
the body, as the locus of manifold material practices.’ To
Feldman approaching violence from its site of effect and generation
(agency) is to examine where it takes place, thereby embedding
violence in the situated practices of agents. Violence is bound up
within the production of social space (Bourdieu, 1989), and
because, by virtue of spatiality, social space and somatic place
continually predicate each other, the recognition of violence having
a direct bearing on those bodies implies a geography of violence.
Foucault (1980: 98) has argued that ‘individuals are the vehicles of
power, not its points of application’, and this is precisely how power
and violence depart, as individuals are at once both the vehicles of
violence and its points of application. In the end, because the body
is where all violence finds its influence e be it direct and thus
obvious to the entangled actors, or structural and thus temporally
and spatially diffused before reaching its final destination at and
upon the embodied geographies of human beings e place is the site
where violence is most visible and easily discerned. Yet violence is
only one facet of the multiple, variegated, and protean contours of
place. So while violence bites down on our lived experiences by
affixing itself to our everyday geographies and by colonizing our
bodies, violence itself, much like culture, is by no means restricted
to place, nor is place static. Thus, the place-based dynamics of
violence that seemingly make it possible to conceive a ‘culture of
violence’ actually render this notion untenable precisely because of
place’s relationality and proteanism.
The embodied geographies of experience (including violence)
that exist in places stretch their accounts out through other places,
linking together a matrix of narratives in forming the mutable
landscapes of human existence (Tilley, 1994). This porosity of
boundaries is essential to place, and it reveals how local specificities
of culture are comprised by a complex interplay of internal
constructions and external exchange. In the face of such permeability
an enculturation of violence is certainly conceivable. All
forms of violence are not produced by the frenzied depravity of
savage or pathological minds, but are instead cultural performances
whose poetics derive from the sociocultural histories and relational
geographies of the locale (Whitehead, 2004). Violence has
a culturally informed logic, and it thereby follows that because
culture sits in places (Basso, 1996; Escobar, 2001), so too does
violence. Yet the grounds on which some insist on affixing and
bounding violence so firmly to particular places in articulating
a ‘culture of violence’ argument are inherently unstable.1
The
shifting, kaleidoscopic nature of space-time demonstrates the
sheer impossibility of such attempts. So while it is important to
highlight the emplacement of all cultural practices (including
violence), whereby culture is carried into places by bodies engaged
in practices that are at once both encultured and enculturing
(Escobar, 2001), it is only through a geographical imagination
constructed on a parochial agenda, rooted in colonial modes of
thought, and dislocated from the dynamic material underpinnings
of place that a culture itself can be caricatured as violent. In short,
while violence forms a part of any given culture, it is never the sole
defining feature.
The rationality of violence: power, knowledge, and ‘truth’
That violence has meaning, albeit multiple, complex, and often
contradictory (Stanko, 2003), infers that so too does it have
a particular sense of rationality. Contra what we typically hear
about violence in the media, sadly most violence is not ‘senseless’ at
all (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004). According to Foucault
(1996: 299) all human behavior is scheduled and programmed
through rationality, where violence is no exception,
What is most dangerous in violence is its rationality. Of course
violence itself is terrible. But the deepest root of violence and its
permanence come out of the form of rationality we use. The idea
had been that if we live in the world of reason, we can get rid of
violence. This is quite wrong. Between violence and rationality
there is no incompatibility.
Sanctioning certain acts of violence as ‘rational’, while condemning
others as ‘irrational’ can be discerned as a primary
instrument of power insofar as perceived rationality becomes
misconstrued with legitimacy. Equally problematic is that such
a dichotomy becomes a dividing line between ‘civilization’ and
‘barbarism’, one that is given spatial license through imaginative
geographies (Said, 2003). The power to represent and imagine
geography and its subjects like this rather than like that, is thus at
once both a process of articulation and valorization (Gregory,
2004b).
Drawing on Foucault’s (1972) recognition that the exercise of
power and the sanction of particular knowledges are coterminous,
Edward Said (2003) identifies imaginative geographies as
constructions that fuse distance and difference together through
a series of spatializations. They operate by demarcating conceptual
partitions and enclosures between ‘the same’ and ‘the Other’,
which configure ‘our’ space of the familiar as separate and distinct
from ‘their’ unfamiliar space that lies beyond. Gregory (2004a)
interprets this division e wherein ‘they’ are seen to lack the positive
characteristics that distinguish ‘us’ e as forming the blackened
foundations of the ‘architectures of enmity’. Informed by Gregory’s
understandings, I use the descriptor ‘virulent’ to mean three things
in qualifying particular imaginative geographies. First, I seek to
emphasize those imaginative geographies that invoke a profound
sense of hostility and malice, which may thereby produce
tremendously harmful effects for those individuals cast within
them. Second, through the simplicity of the essentialisms they
render, some imaginative geographies may be readily and uncritically
accepted, thus making them highly infectious and easily
communicable among individuals subjected to their distinct brand
of ‘commonsense’, and in this way they operate as symbolic
violence.2
Finally, the etymology of the Latin word for ‘virulence’
(virulentus) is derived from the word man (vir), and as related
concept metaphors in contemporary English, ‘virulence’ and
‘virility’ are informed by masculinist modes of response and
S. Springer / Political Geography 30 (2011) 90e98 93
engagement. The cultural coding of places as sites of violence is
thus imbricated in gendered ideas about mastery, colonial control,
and e drawing on the Orientalist ‘mature west/juvenile east’
trope e boyish resistance. Although a detailed inquiry into the
various activations of Orientalist projections of violence on to
groups of ‘Oriental’ males is beyond the scope of this paper, it is
imperative to recognize how virulent imaginative geographies
employ a sense of ‘virility’ to code ‘Oriental’ males as pre-oedipal
and/or feminine. Such discursive emasculation, which is itself
a form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 2001), renders ‘Others’
incapable of managing violence with ‘patriarchal reason’, and here
again, neoliberal rationalism becomes the salve. In short, virulent
imaginative geographies are those geographical imaginations that
are premised upon and recapitulate extremely negative, racially
derogatory, and gender-laden pejorative assumptions, where the
notion of a ‘culture of violence’ represents a paradigmatic case in
point (see Springer, 2009a).
Through virulent imaginative geographies, the primary tonality
‘they’ are seen to lack is rationality, which is a claim to truth that is
mounted through the production, accumulation, circulation, and
functioning of a discourse (Foucault, 1980) that declares irrationality
as the sine qua non of ‘their’ cultures, and is in turn used to
explain why ‘they’ are violent. Such allusions, sanctioned by the
accretions of Orientalism, are performative. In a substantial sense,
the categories, codes, and conventions of Orientalism produce the
effects that they name (Gregory, 2004a). So if violence is said to be
the ‘truth’ of a particular culture, and ipso facto the places in which
that culture sits, then power decorates this truth by ensuring its
ongoing recapitulation in the virulent imaginative geographies it
has created. In a very real sense then, violent geographies are often
(re)produced and sustained by a cruel and violent Orientalism.
Space is endowed with an imaginative or figurative value that
we can name and feel, acquiring ‘emotional and even rational sense
by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous
reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here’ (Said,
2003: 55). Places are accordingly transformed through fabrications
where narratives inform us of meaning through the inflective
topographies of desire, fantasy, and anxiety (Gregory, 1995). Thus,
whether we recognize a place as ‘home-like’ or ‘prison-like’,
a ‘utopia’ or a ‘killing field’, is dependent upon the stories-so-far to
which we have participated in forming that place, but equally, and
indeed wholly for places we have never visited, the imaginings that
have been circulated, rendered, and internalized or rejected in
forming our cartographic understandings. The experience, threat,
or fear of violence in a particular place is perhaps the single most
influential factor in our pronouncements of space (Pain, 1997),
bringing a visceral and emotional charge to our ontological and
epistemological interpretations. Likewise our attitudes towards
particular geographies frequently fold back onto the people who
comprise them. For example, if domestic violence is part of an
individual’s lived experience or resonant memory, that person’s
geographical imagination of her or his objective house (its corners,
corridors, rooms) is transformed from a place of sanctuary, to
a place of terror (see Meth, 2003). It is the actors who live in and
thereby (re)produce that place who have facilitated this poetic shift
in meaning, and as such they are imbricated in the reformulated
geographical imaginings.
Similarly, the fear of ‘Other’ spaces is not based on an abstract
geometry. Rather, such apprehension is embedded in the meanings
that have been attached to those spaces through a knowledge of
‘the Other’ that is premised on the bodies that draw breath there,
and importantly, how those bodies fall outside a typical understanding
of ‘Self’, or what Foucault (1978: 304) referred to as
‘normalizing power’. We are ‘subjected to the production of truth
through power, and we cannot exercise power except through the
production of truth’ (Foucault, 1980: 93), but the discourse of
Orientalism claims that the truth about ‘ourselves’ is vastly
different from the truth of ‘the Other’. This knowledge is productive
in the sense that ‘it produces reality; it produces domains of objects
and rituals of truth’ (Foucault, 1977: 194) concerning the supposed
aberrance of ‘the Other’, and Orientalism functions to validate our
anxieties (and fantasies and desires). Of course this knowledge is an
imagined partitioning of space, as the feared constellations of
violence that swell in any one place are never constructed in
isolation from other sites of violence. Instead, violent narratives are
collected from a wider matrix of the stories-so-far of space. So
while it may seem intuitive to associate particular violent geographies
with individual or even cultural actors, as they are the agents
that manifest, embody, and localize violence, it is an Orientalist
imagining of these geographies as isolated, exclusive, and partitioned
that makes possible the articulation of discourses like the
‘culture of violence’ thesis.
Forming reason or fomenting Orientalism? Neoliberalism
and its discontents
Classical liberalism is comprised of a trinity of beliefs that
together assert that the degree to which a society allows an individual
to pursue pleasure is its highest virtue. The first of these is
the intense focus on the individual, viewed as the most qualified to
articulate her or his needs and desires, so society should be structured
on reducing barriers to the realization of this goal. Second,
unfettered markets are considered the most efficient and effective
means for encouraging individual autonomy, whereby individuals
pursue their requirements and desires through the mechanism of
price. And finally, there is a conviction for a non-interventionist
state that focuses on the maintenance of competitive markets and
the guarantee of individual rights fashioned primarily around
a property regime (Hackworth, 2007; Plehwe & Walpen, 2006).
Drawing on classical liberalism’s conception of an immutable desire
for pleasure, in ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, Sigmund Freud
(1930/1962) identified an insatiable sexual desire alongside an
element of sadism arising from what he viewed as a primitive
biological instinct for aggression. He established the notion that the
Enlightenment saw ‘our’ culture overcome its cruel impulses, the
achievement of which came primarily via the reason of liberalism,
its laws, and its ‘civilizing’ effects. Rendered as such, violence was
located beyond the boundaries of ‘civilization’, lodged in ‘barbarian’
geographies of pathological places and savage spaces. Civilization,
nonetheless, was argued to have made for a perpetual feeling of
discontent, which to Freud (1930/1962) was entropically evidenced
by Europe’s relapse into brutality during the First World War.
In the wake of the Second World War, the Mont Pelerin Society e
the original neoliberal think-tank (Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009) e
resurrected classical liberalism’s three basic principles, largely in
response to the atrocities of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the
Soviet Union, and a belief that government intervention to the peril
of personal freedoms was responsible for the carnage. Out of this
geohistorical context, the origins of neoliberalism as a political
ideology can be seen as reactionary to violence, which it theorized
could be suppressed and channeled into more productive outlets by
a return to the foundations of the Enlightenment and its acknowledgement
of the merits of individualism. Democracy was equally
imbricated in this revival, as the apocalyptic outcomes of authoritarianism
during the war years allowed neoliberalism to be constructed
as the sole providence of freedom and hailed as an
economic prescription for development. Those states that refused to
conform became regarded as ‘rogue’, ‘failed’, or were ‘condemned to
economic backwardness in which democracy must be imposed by
sanctions and/or military force. by the global community of free
S. Springer / Political Geography 30 (2011) 90e9894
nations’ (Canterbury, 2005: 2). Following proxy wars employing
rhetorical appeals to democracy in Korea in the 1950s, and Vietnam
in the 1960s and early 1970s, Keynesian political and economic
forces began to unravel in the late 1970s and early 1980s, allowing
neoliberalism to gain momentum as it became increasingly regarded
as a salve for the global economic crisis (Brenner & Theodore,
2002; Hackworth, 2007).
Neoliberalism’s hegemonic rise and current political influence is
owed to the ‘rule of experts’, or technocratic knowledge-elites
(Mitchell, 2002) and their attempts to (re)constitute class power
(Harvey, 2005). Such ascendency comes attendant to American
geostrategic aims operationalized via a series of crises or ‘shocks’ e
either natural or manufactured e used to pry national economies
open to market logic (Klein, 2007). This political economic reading
also meshes with the poststructuralist view that knowledge and
power are inseparable. Foucault (1980) recognized that power/
knowledge must be analyzed as something that circulates, functions
in the form of a chain, and is employed through a matrix.
Thus, it was at least partially the successful organization of
neoliberal knowledge-elites into a global network of think-tanks
that aggrandized neoliberalism to orthodoxy, whereby the power
of knowledge-elites and the power of elitist knowledge became
mutually reinforcing (Scholler & Groh-Samberg, 2006). Neoliberalism-as-ideology
gave way to neoliberalism-as-governmentality
via the entrenchment of what Stephen Gill (1995) refers to as
‘market civilization’, or the transformative practices through which
capitalist expansion became tied to a legitimating neoliberal
discourse of progress and development.3
Neoliberalism then is an
assemblage of rationalities, strategies, technologies, and techniques
concerning the mentality of rule that facilitate ‘governance at
a distance’ (Barry et al., 1996; Larner, 2000) by delineating
a discursive field in which the exercise of power is ‘rationalized’
(Lemke, 2001), thereby encouraging both institutions and individuals
to conform to the norms of the market. Neoliberalism’s
penetration at the level of the subject, or what Foucault (1988)
called subjectivation, whereby one memorizes the truth claims
that one has heard and converts this into rules of conduct is, in the
context of the global south, colonialism’s second coming. The
‘white man’s burden’ and its salvationary discourse of modernization
are resuscitated and mounted anew through the rationalization
of market-mediated social relations as ‘the only
alternative’, which has become integral to commonsense understandings
of development.
Neoliberal salvation? From mythic to divine violence
The neoliberal doctrine conceives itself as upholding a new liberal
internationalism based on visions of a single human race peacefully
united by a common code of conduct featuring deregulated markets,
free trade, and shared legal norms among states that promote civic
liberties, electoral processes, and representative institutions
(Gowen, 2001). More cynical accounts have questioned the ‘peacefulness’
of neoliberalism’s advance, suggesting it more closely
resembles a ‘new imperialism’ that conditions the use of violence to
maintain the interests of an internationalized global elite (Harvey,
2003; Hart, 2006). This is an emerging sovereign that operates at
times through direct military conquest, as in Iraq, but also through
governmentality, subjectivation to particular norms (Larner, 2000;
Lemke, 2001), and by regulating mayhem via financial means
where the ‘global economy comes to be supported by a global
organization of violence and vice versa’ (Escobar, 2004: 18). Either
way, neoliberalism is premised on a ‘one size fits all’ model of policy
implementation, assuming ‘identical results will follow the imposition
of market-oriented reforms, rather than recognizing the
extraordinary variations that arise as neoliberal reform initiatives are
imposed within contextually specific institutional landscapes and
policy environments’ (Brenner & Theodore, 2002: 353). Neoliberalism
is thus a spatio-temporal fiction. In a gesture that parodies
divinity, neoliberal discourse contends that its prescriptions will
remake ‘the Other’ in ‘our’ image through the logic bestowed upon
them by unrestricted markets, while simultaneously believing
the contextually embedded historical geographies to be quite
inconsequential to its effective implementation and functioning. Put
differently, neoliberal discourse produces a unified vision of history,
which relegates ‘Others’ to a traditional past by presenting modernity
as an inescapable trajectory, where inherited structures either
yield to or resist the new, but can never produce it themselves. This
occurs, James Clifford (1988: 5) argues, ‘whenever marginal peoples
come into a historical or ethnographic space that has been defined by
the Western imagination. “Entering the modern world,” their
distinct histories quickly vanish. Swept up in a destiny dominated by
the capitalist West. these suddenly “backward” peoples no longer
invent local futures’.
Neoliberal ideology assumes that with the conferment of reason
via modernity’s supposedly infallible grip, the ‘irrationality’ of
‘Oriental’ cultures of violence will be quieted by a market rationality
that recalls classical liberalism’s pleasure principle and
channels gratification e both sadistic and carnal e into consumerism
and the pursuit of material rewards. Such an assumption is
fantasy. The power of the neoliberal order consists not of being
right in its view of politics, but in its ability to claim the authority of
scientific truth based on ‘economic science’ when and where
political goals are being defined. Neoliberal reforms are legitimized
through a purported econometric supremacy, whereby the public
comes to accept the supposed wisdom of knowledge-elites
(Scholler & Groh-Samberg, 2006). It is the fetishism of place, the
mobilization of popular geographical prejudices, and the supposed
provision of rationality in the face of ‘irrational’ violence that gives
neoliberalism its license to (re)direct public policy. Proponents
never acknowledge that violence, inequality, and poverty are
wrought by neoliberal reform. Instead, if conditions in the global
south or among the lower classes have deteriorated under neoliberalism,
it is said to be an outcome of personal and/or cultural
failures to enhance their own human capital (Harvey, 2005). Dag
Tuastad (2003) has called this the ‘new barbarism’ thesis, which
explains violence through the omission of political and economic
interests and contexts in its descriptions, and presents violence as
a result of traits embedded in local cultures. Here again, violence
sits in places; only in this case, through a grotesque representation
of ‘the Other’, the virulent imaginative geographies of neoliberal
discourse erase the contingency, fluidity, and interconnectedness of
the spaces in which all violent narratives are formed. In other
words, violence is problematically framed as though it is particular
to a specific place/culture, rather than acknowledging the complex
relational geographies that give rise to its formation and
expression.
By recognizing that the structural violence of neoliberalism is
everywhere (Farmer 2004; Uvin 2003), ‘local’ experiences of
violence that seemingly occur in isolation from the wider matrix of
space are in fact tied to the ‘global’, which renders violence
somewhat ‘everyday’. This very mundanity, however, is what is of
primary importance in understanding the power of neoliberal
violence, as this ordinary character marks it as ‘mythic’. In ‘Critique
of Violence’, Benjamin’s (1986) primary distinction is one between
a negatively pronounced ‘mythic violence’ and its positive other,
which he called ‘divine violence’. Mythic violence is equated with
law, as it is both law-positing and law-preserving, and as such it is
also the creator and the protector of the prevailing political and
legal order. In contrast, rather than being positively defined, divine
violence can only be delineated by what it is not, as it ‘is simply
S. Springer / Political Geography 30 (2011) 90e98 95
destructive of the given order without promising anything except
the promise of the new itself’ (Rasch, 2004: 86). Benjamin
condemns the juridico-political order, finding the mythic violence
that constitutes it ‘executive’ and ‘administrative’, and thus utterly
deplorable and in need of elimination. Divine violence, as a ‘pure
immediate violence’, is thus charged with opposing and even
annihilating mythic violence and the order it has established:
Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythic violence is
confronted by the divine. And the latter constitutes the antithesis
in all respects. If mythic violence is law-making, divine
violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the
latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at
once guilt and retribution, divine [violence] only expiates; if the
former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the
latter is lethal without spilling blood (Benjamin, 1986: 297)
In spite of the religious phrasing, mythic violence simply
reproduces the existing structures of power and violence, whereas
by being essentially anarchic, divine violence is thought to wipe the
slate clean and thus holds within it the promise of a new order,
removed from the perpetuation of legal or any other form of force
(Rasch, 2004; Zizek, 2008).
Mythic violence produces guilt through its appeal to legal and
other forms of normativity, where the production of such guilt
under neoliberalism occurs through the simple fact of being ‘Other’.
Deliverance, in neoliberal terms, comes through ‘rationalization’,
‘civilization’, and the final realization of transitioning to its particular
juridico-political order. But to the marginalized, this does not
expiate guilt; instead it simply compounds and intensifies it, and
this is precisely where Benjamin would suggest that divine violence
steps in on the side of the disaffected. Divine violence ‘comes as if
from the outside to limit the space of the political, indeed, to mark
that space for demolition. .it assumes that the perplexing knot of
asymmetry at the source of the political can be cut by a single,
simple act of violence that will “found a new historical age”’ (Rasch,
2004: 94). Thus, although premised on notions of utopian salvation,
neoliberalism is not divine, and neither is its violence. Neoliberalism
and its structural violence are mythic, premised upon the
geotemporal fiction of a flat, static, and planar matrix (Hart, 2006;
Sparke, 2005) and the construction of a political, economic, and
legal ‘order’ (Springer, 2009c). And while neoliberalism promotes
the idea that it will dissolve direct violence, it often reinforces the
structural violence that generates the very phenomenon it suggests
it is attempting to nullify. It is this very ontological disjuncture that
will inevitably shatter the neoliberal order’s validity as it is inexorably
placed at the merciless threat of subaltern divine violence.
Conclusion
The movement of neoliberalism towards economic orthodoxy,
and its eventual capture of such hegemony, was not only achieved
through dissemination of its class project geographically through
‘shocks’ or otherwise, but also by spreading its worldviews across
various discursive fields (Plehwe & Walpen, 2006). Through this
merger of discourse and an imperative for spatial diffusion,
neoliberalism has constructed virulent imaginative geographies
that appeal to commonsense rhetorics of freedom, peace, and
democracy through the destructive principles of Orientalism, and
in particular by proposing a static and isolated place-based ‘culture
of violence’ thesis in the context of ‘the Other’. These representations
of space and place ‘are never merely mirrors held up to
somehow reflect or represent the world but instead enter directly
into its constitution (and destruction). Images and words release
enormous power, and their dissemination. can have the most
acutely material consequences’ (Gregory & Pred, 2007: 2).
Neoliberalism is a discourse, and words do damage as actors
perform their ‘scripted’ roles. But neoliberalism is also a practice
that has ‘actually existing’ circumstances (Brenner & Theodore,
2002) where new violences are created. Thus, the global south
has become ‘the theater of a multiplicity of cruel little wars that,
rather than barbaric throwbacks, are linked to the current global
logic’ (Escobar, 2004: 18).
Yet there is nothing quintessentially ‘neoliberal’ about Orientalism.
Its entanglement with the neoliberal doctrine is very much
dependent upon the context in which neoliberalization occurs.
Initially conceived during the Enlightenment, and later revived in
the postwar era, neoliberalism had a ‘western’ birth, radiating
outwards across the globe as the sun was setting on Keynesian
economics. Orientalism is, however, entangled in the project of
imperialism, which is ‘supported and perhaps even impelled by
impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain
territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as
forms of knowledge affiliated with domination’ (Said, 1993: 9). As
the latest incarnation of ‘empire’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000; Pieterse,
2004), the principles, practices, theories, and attitudes of a particular
class-based faction maintaining economic control over various
territories remains intact under neoliberalism and so we should not
be too surprised to discover that the pernicious discourses that
support such ‘resurgent imperialism’ similarly remain unchanged
(Hart, 2006).
If, as Richard Peet (2000: 1222) argues, ‘economic rationality is
a symbolic logic formed as part of social imaginaries, formed that is
in culture’, then like the project of colonialism, and indeed in
keeping with the ‘Self’-expanding logic of capital and its fundamental
drive to capture new sites for (re)production (Harvey,
2005), neoliberalism is intimately bound up in articulating and
valorizing cultural change. Yet in order for such change to be seen
as necessary, the ‘irrationality’ of ‘the Other’ must be discursively
constructed and imagined. This is precisely where neoliberalism
and Orientalism converge. Neoliberalization proceeds as a ‘civilizing’
enterprise; it is the confirmation of reason on ‘barbarians’
who dwell beyond. Reason, like truth, is an effect of power, and its
language developed out of the Enlightenment as an antithetical
response to ‘madness’, or the outward performances of those seen
as having lost what made them human (Foucault, 1965). Reason as
such, triumphs at the expense of the non-conformist, the unusual,
‘the Other’. As a consequence, neoliberal ideas are proselytized to
rescind the ostensible irrationality and deviance of ‘the Other’.
A closely related second reason for evangelism relates to the
purported ‘wisdom’ of neoliberalism, which repeatedly informs us
that ‘we’ have never had it as good as we do right now, and thus
‘Others’ are in need of similar salvation. If ‘they’ are to be ruled,
whether by might or by markets, they must become like ‘us’.
This theology of neoliberalism maintains a sense of rationalism
precisely because it looks to reason rather than experience as the
foundation of certainty in knowledge. As Neil Brenner and Nik
Theodore (2002: 353) argue, ‘the manifold disjunctures that have
accompanied the worldwide imposition of neoliberalismebetween
ideology and practice; doctrine and reality; vision and consequenceeare
not merely accidental side effects of this disciplinary
project. Rather, they are among its most essential features.’ In
other words, the effects of neoliberalization (poverty, inequality,
and mythic violence) are ignored (Springer, 2008), and in their
place a commonsense utopianism is fabricated (Bourdieu, 1998).
And so we stand at ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992), or at least
so we are told, wherein the monotheistic imperative of one God
gives way to one market and one globe. Yet the certainty of such
absolutist spatio-temporality is in every respect chimerical. Space
and time are always becoming, invariably under construction. The
future is open, and to suggest otherwise is to conceptualize space as
S. Springer / Political Geography 30 (2011) 90e9896
a vast lacuna. There are always new stories yet to be told, new
connections yet to be made, new contestations yet to erupt, and
new imaginings yet to blossom (Massey, 2005). As Said (1993: 7)
argued, ‘Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none
of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That
struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about
soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about
images and imaginings’. This sentiment applies as much to the
geographies of neoliberalism as it does to violent geographies.
If so much of the world’s violence is made possible through virulent
imaginings, then perhaps the first step towards peace is a collective
imagining of nonviolence. Undoubtedly, this is an exercise made
possible though culture via human agency because, ‘[i]f violence ‘has
meaning’, then those meanings can be challenged’ (Stanko, 2003: 13).
Yet conceiving peace is every bit as much a geographic project.
Violence sits in places in a very material sense, we experience the
world though our emplacement in it, where violence offers no
exception to this cardinal rule of embodiment. But there is no predetermined
plot to the stories-so-far of space, the horizons of place
are forever mercurial, and geographies can always be re-imagined.
Geography is not destiny any more than culture is, and as such the
possibility of violence being bound in place is only accomplished
through the fearful and malicious imaginings of circulating
discourses. Put differently, it is the performative effects of Orientalism
and other forms of malevolent knowledge that allow violence to curl
up and make itself comfortable in particular places. What can emerge
from such understandings is a ‘principled refusal to exclude others
from the sphere of the human’ and an appreciation of how ‘violence
compresses the sometimes forbiddingly abstract spaces of geopolitics
and geo-economics into the intimacies of everyday life and the
innermost recesses of the human body’ (Gregory & Pred, 2007: 6).
Violence is not the exclusive preserve of ‘the Other’ rooted in the
supposed determinism of either biology or culture; it populates the
central structures of all societies. The capacity for violence exists
within the entirety of humanity, but so too does its opposite, the
rejection of violence. There are choices to be made each moment of
every day, and to imagine peace is to actively refuse the exploitative
structures, virulent ideologies, and geographies of death that
cultivate and are sown by violence. This emancipatory potential
entails challenging the discourses that support mythic violence
through a critical negation of the circuits it promotes, and nonviolent
engagement in the sites e both material and abstract e that it
seeks to subjugate. It requires a deep and committed sense of ‘Self’reflection
to be able to recognize the circuitous pathways of
violence when it becomes banal, systematic, and symbolic. And it
involves the articulation of new imaginative geographies rooted
not in the ‘architectures of enmity’ (Gregory, 2004a), but in the
foundations of mutual admiration, respect, and an introspective
sense of humility. By doing so, we engage in a politics that reclaims
the somatic as a space to be nurtured, reproduces familiar and not
so familiar geographies through networks of solidarity built on
genuine compassion, and rewrites local constellations of experience
with the poetics of peace.
Acknowledgements
I extend my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and Pauliina
Raento in her editorial role for their keen engagement with my
work and the insightful challenges they each presented. Philippe Le
Billon, Jamie Peck, James Sidaway, Derek Gregory, Jim Glassman,
Catherine Nolin, Matt Sparke, Sarah de Leeuw, Juanita Sundberg,
Abidin Kusno, Rusla Anne Springer, Anssi Paasi, and Carl GrundyWarr
offered critical feedback and encouragement. I would also like
to thank the organizers and participants of the Fourth Oceanic
Conference in International Studies (OCIS IV) at the University of
Auckland where this research was first presented. The usual
disclaimers apply.
Endnotes
1
Nonetheless, the literature is rife with examples where the phrase ‘culture of
violence’ has been employed (see Curle, 1999; Jackson, 2004; Rupesinghe & Rubio,
1994). What these accounts have in common is that they either refuse to offer
a definition, suggesting that both the concept itself and the lack of consensus on
significance do not allow for one, or they fail to offer systematic attention to the
presumed functioning of it dynamics. All that is certain about this confused term is
its capacity to qualify particular peoples and places as inherently violent.
2
‘Commonsense’, as David Harvey (2005: 39) argues, ‘is constructed out of longstanding
practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national
traditions. It is not the same as the ‘good sense’ that can be constructed out of
critical engagement with the issues of the day. Commonsense can, therefore, be
profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural
prejudices’.
3
This is an oversimplified summary of neoliberalism’s rise, as there were a number
of struggles and setbacks before what started as a marginalized sense of idealism
became a dominant global orthodoxy. While Harvey’s (2005) ‘brief history’ offers
an authoritative overview of how this ideational project was transformed into
programmes of socioeconomic and state transformation beginning in the late
1970s, Peck (2008: 3) has gone further back to account for the ‘prehistories’ of
‘protoneoliberalism’, demonstrating that the neoliberal project was never inevitable,
but one of ‘[d]issipated efforts, diversions and deadends’.
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