The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [21]
Violence and Philosophy
When philosophers of the past have discussed violence, their approaches may seem naïve, faced with events like those at Altamont. Plato held that violence is one among many results of the failure of human reason to control passion. Viewed in this way, violence is exceptional, a sort of sporadic aberration that can, in principle at least, be remedied by more determined exertions on the part of reason. Directly opposed to this is an older attitude, already present in Greek mythology, Homer, and some pre-Socratic philosophers and revived in modern times by such figures as Goethe, Hegel, and Nietzsche. This line of thought takes violence to be a fundamental and ineliminable aspect of the universe or, for later thinkers, of the unfolding of human history. A third view, characteristic of Enlightenment thought, is that nature’s violence is an ‘inconvenience’ (to borrow Locke’s term) which can be controlled and perhaps even eliminated through a combination of political legislation, the institutions of civil society (especially ‘moral education’), and economic progress.
Do any of these approaches help to make sense of Altamont and my puzzle about Mick Jagger? It’s pretty clear, I think, that they don’t. But in more recent times, beginning with Marx and Freud, and throughout the (itself very violent!) twentieth century, violence has emerged as a central philosophical theme. Especially valuable is the work of Slavoj Žižek, himself something like a rock star in philosophy who draws crowds wherever he goes (see the movie Žižek! from 2005, and Žižek’s book Violence from 2010).
In Violence, Žižek borrows a fundamental idea from the French philosopher Jacques Lacan that our experience of the world and the relationships in it can be organized into three “orders.” First, there is “the imaginary” order, which has to be understood literally: it is that dimension of our experience that involves images that picture or represent things, qualities of things, other people, and even ourselves. It includes sensations, perceptions, memories, and thoughts (which may equally be ‘true’ or ‘false,’ ‘actual’ or ‘imagined’ in the more ordinary senses of these terms) such as my memories of Mick as the person with whom I had dinner and conversation. It follows from this that the Imaginary is, in a sense, always subjective, private, and personal, since only I have full and direct access to my own impressions, perceptions, and memories.
Then there is the “Symbolic” order of language, symbols, and the culture in which they circulate. Unlike the “imaginary,” the Symbolic order is public, shared, and ‘intersubjective’. For instance, my preconceived idea of ‘Mick Jagger the Rock Star’ was a product of intersecting symbols I had seen in magazine articles, album covers, concert films, and conversations I’d had about Mick and The Stones.
The Imaginary and Symbolic interact and work with each other. Most of my story about meeting Mick, even though I was describing my personal experience, is a complex product of my subjective images and the public, intersubjective codes that you and I have learned to employ beginning in early childhood. This combination of the Imaginary and the Symbolic orders is what makes it possible for me to tell my story in terms that you and I understand.
Equally important, what you and I understand in the Imaginary and Symbolic realms, whether we’re talking about Mick or anything else, is never ‘the full story’. This is where Lacan’s third order, “the Real,” comes in. The Real is literally the ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unsayable’—that which is excluded by the Symbolic order and its codes. It might seem strange to call what we don’t know and talk about more “real” than what we do, but as we’ll see this is how Žižek’s explanation of violence, which is very “real,” is going to work. The idea is that although ‘the Real’ can never present itself directly, either in experience or language, we