Symbolic Violence

According to The Other Wiki

This definition leaves me very perplexed, especially "Symbolic power maintains its effect through the mis-recognition of power relations situated in the social matrix of a given field." Can someone please translate that from post-modernese?

So... I still don't quite get it. I feel there's something huge, in this concept. Something that underlies a lot of fiction and reality. The trappings of power. What makes us acknowledge others as dominant, what makes us accept unfair situations as fair and normal and okay. But... how do we go from there to the first context I heard the expression in, which is regarding Male Gaze and pieces such as "Blurred Lines"? I feel like I would benefit from learning about that.

I think Male Gaze and "Blurred Lines" are only linked by a very small nod to the whole spectrum of Bourdieu's definition.

He alludes to the fact that the cultural forces are (or at least can be) more powerful than economical ones. For example, there's the fact that a good chunk of the US soft power was partly established through cultural mediums and products (the Hollywood films, for example).

The predominance of the Western cultural values tend to reconfigure plenty of cultural elements around the world, because they are appealing. Hence why capitalism is appealing for reasons that Engels and others have stated to the majority of people.

Now, as for gender and symbolic choice/violence:

While patriarchy is partly to blame for some of the choices and ways of thinking and feeling that women accept, we must also take into account other factors: socio-economical class, culture, education, race, religion, being part of mainstream or alternative cultures and sub-cultures. Symbolic power tends to establish positions of dominance in terms of all these (and other) factors.

In cultural and general terms, symbolic violence tends to serve as a conditioning agent of sorts and/or a regulator of societal and economical elements that form part of who the individual is.

The hierarchies of power also allow for the implementation and maintenance of status quo, which means that many personal-professional relations between people can become increasingly difficult to resist, unless there's a better power that can appeal to different people an challenge the current status.

You know, Quag, that feel where the professor's just explained something crucial on the blackboard and you have no idea what they just said and are afraid to raise your finger because when he asks you "what part did you not understand" you'll have no choice but to make a vague, all-encompassing, defeated gesture and venture, in a trembling voice "...all of it?"

That's how I feel right now.

Maybe... how about you use Example As Thesis? Work from concrete examples and parables and move upwards towards generalizations and abstractions from there? I find that I'm much better at induction than deduction.

edited 25th Dec '13 8:01:54 AM by TheHandle

Demarquis is here to help. This reads as more than just a dispassionate description of objective phenomena- he wants to prove it exists and denounce it all at once. So expect a lot of loaded assumptions.

"Symbolic power maintains its effect through the mis-recognition of power relations situated in the social matrix of a given field."

In other words, soft power is real power because it keeps people down, but it's based on lies, a "social matrix" being a set of social relationships, and the "field" being the weighted connections between the parties involved. The "mis-recognition" part means one party is telling another party that they are relatively powerless and inferior, which is not inherently true.

I will get back and translate the rest of it later.

Sorry. I'll elaborate on some examples. Just give me a few minutes.

Symbolic Violence and Social Media.

A forum post about education as "symbolic violence" (US examples). Don't know if the OP's post is entirely reliable, since he gets into it a bit too personal.

Challenging Symbolic Violence and the Naturalization of Power Relations - check the bit about Neo-Liberalism.

Maybe these examples should help you out. Sorry for not elaborating on them right now, but I can do it in a few hours.

edited 25th Dec '13 8:40:22 AM by Quag15

Thank you.

TL/DR: "Symbolic Violence" is when one party in a social relationship uses their power advantage to persuade another party to accept the power imbalance as legitimate.

It's poorly named: there is no symbolic violence going on. The idea, I think, is that power is traditionally perpetuated via violence, but other symbolic methods are just as effective, if not more so.

Hm, would you say that this is a parody of that?

And, speaking of Nineteen Eighty Four, there seems to be a very exaggerated demonstration of this going on; the Party dictates reality itself, and you are to surrender to them inconditionally, body and mind.

I'm also reminded of bullying situations at school, especially when violence does not enter into the equation, and the Pecking Order becomes purely a matter of Consensus Reality. Attempting to escape the role one was placed in, like going on holiday and obtaining nice clothes and a makeover, results in the violence redoubling in order to crush what little spirit of rebellion was shown. Stephen King, as a high school teacher, witnessed just such a story, which inspired him to write Carrie.

In other words, does this all amount to "Know Your Place!" and its flip side, "Acknowledge My Status!"?

While the opening poster here presents an interesting perspective, his insistence on labeling legitimate complaints as "leftist hogwash" struck me as very irritating. It's like he believes social egalitarianism is inherently bad or something. But I find his perspective interesting because many of the values he complains were "jammed down his throat" at school were invisible to me; my education at home and in my consumption of fiction made me treat things like "political correctness" or "altruism" as a matter of course.

"Equality, even at the expense of penalizing the best to match the worst." is the one I genuinely noticed in person, as I was what you'd call a "gifted" child and found school to be unchallenging and unstimulating to the point of being maddening, yet I was stuck with having to follow the same pace as everyone else, jump through the same hoops as everyone else. Other posters in that same link describe similarly absurd experiences.

When does Egalitarianism stop being about giving an equal starting chance to everyone, and becomes instead about Tall Poppy Syndrome? When does Altruism stop being about freely sharing happiness or helping those in need and becomes about being treated like you owe the world every ounce of your person while the world owes you nothing in return, not even symbolically?

And how does this tie into the current topic? How can a system that favours the privileged, the people with the right accent and the right values and the right wealth and the right connections, also be a system that puts those who are faster or better than others down? Or is this somehow all part of the same phenomenon?

edited 25th Dec '13 10:49:09 AM by TheHandle

Well, yes, but it doesn't have to be as extreme and obvious as your examples. In fact, there is a very strong implication that all power differences are a result of social violence, and that, say, someone deferring to the opinion of a mod on an internet forum because in addition to having the power to impose rules on others, they also represent a more experienced, mature opinion than most other posters is just as much a form of social violence. As I read it, I am finding that there is a general lack of a distinction between different types and intensities of social beliefs that have implications for the distribution of power.

edited 25th Dec '13 10:54:33 AM by demarquis

Then I don't think "violence" is the right word, here, is it? Wouldn't "power" be more correct? Not all exertion of power is violence, now, is it? Or is this precisely the point? That "coertion" to which the target agent submits willingly is, in fact, still coercion? But how far does that go? When someone spontaneously and umpromptedly tips their hat to you in deference to your apparent status, has any "coercion" been exerted?

Yes, to all that. It's a wild exaggeration that is based upon a genuine insight.

edited 25th Dec '13 10:56:44 AM by demarquis

I just read through what's been said so far, and it definitely is an interesting dynamic to discuss.

To maybe play devils advocate a little bit, and in some sense to be a bit of a representative of "the established order of things" in some ways, I did have a little tidbit I kind of wanted to throw in the ring too though.

All the points here are good ones, but as with anything, they can be taken to an extreme. Too much egalitarianism becomes Tall Poppy Syndrome, enforcing standards and the status quo too much breeds a culture of alienation and victimization.

That being said, hierarchies and pecking orders, to an extent, are an unavoidable and natural consequence of group interaction. If you have 12 people on a team or in a group, those 12 people are not going to have the exact same opinions, values, and talents. By our very nature, we are all different in many ways, some better and some worse. The more things a group have in common, the better they will get along most of the time, but there always is some form of social pecking order.

I guess I'll take my own experiences from boot camp here to kind of illustrate the value of a social pecking order(this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the military itself, but more about what happens when you make 60 boys aged 18-26 live in the same room for a while) When we started out, there was a good deal of in-fighting. Personalities clashed, ego got in the way, and interests overlapped where not everybody could have the same things or do the same things. Eventually as time went on, we developed a pecking order. Everyone sort of figured out and assigned to each other a sort of "social value". In our group of 60, everybody had a "place" and most of us figured that out. It wasn't that a specific small group of people were making those decisions for us, it was more of a subconscious evolution that I think we do on our own, naturally. We all started to get to know each other, preferred social groups and friendships occurred based on overlapping interests and temperments, and certain groups were allowed to be more dominant because they were more assertive and wanted to step up and lead.

The point I'm trying to make is that on some level, this peer pressure system of how groups of people form an established order is, to a degree, self-enforced by all of us at the subconscious level, and in some ways very necessary. If taken too far in either direction, either the entire group suffers, or some particular groups or individuals suffer. As with anything, there is a balance that needs to be maintained. There will be some sort of pecking order, some sort of social value assigned to people or groups, because it's the way that we as social creatures reconcile the fact that we have differences and different interests which can come into conflict with each other.

I can definitely agree to that, as long as no-one is treated unfairly. Like, someone very low on the pecking order being treated like they're invisible, or worse, their suggestions being explicitly given the Glad I Thought of It treatment. People taking their frustrations out on them because they know there won't be consequences. People generally treating them like shit. Or, worse yet, people actively going after them and doing their damned best to make them suffer.

So, yeah, ostracism might be tolerable if we're talking about the kind of sociopath that will take any opportunity to hurt others. But victimization just isn't. Especially the kind brought about by the victim being weak or clueless or off-beat or weird, rather than being, you know, a bad person, someone whose usefulness to the group is negative.

edited 26th Dec '13 7:20:24 AM by TheHandle

To be fair, ostracization isn't always necessarily bad treatment. Surprise surprise, but sometimes people just don't like eachother, or a group doesn't particularly like being around a specific person. Even if said group are good people, they don't really want to make nice or hang out, it's just the way it is.

If someone who is weird makes some people feel uncomfortable, acting cold to them or like they are invisible is the softest way to basically say "We don't like you, please go away."

That's soft in the same way that stepping on a hot turd feels soft. It's fucking disgusting and makes your entire skin crawl. Especially when you have no choice but to stay with the people who give you the cold shoulder, like, for instance, when you share a class. Really, what's so hard about telling someone what you dislike about them, and agreeing with them on a policy of what to do about each other? Just, you know, so that one doesn't feel like a ghost.

Because that requires a greater expenditure of time, energy and interpersonal risk that could seem disproportionate to the personal reward involved. People living in a particular community do not need to protect, care for or preserve every member of that community, provided that enough people survive and flourish that they can live and work comfortably with each other, then if a few oddballs are sacrificed it wont matter in a larger sense.

That may sound cynical or bitter, but the attitude exists.

I was always sort of in the middle, and I still sort of am as an adult. I don't really have a clique that I belong to, and I didn't in grade school either. I was an individual who had friends scattered all over, but no particular group I belonged to. I've just always sort of floated around and did my thing.

Remember, "Ostracism Is Evil" is Geek Social Fallacy #1. It comes from a good place but has bad results, primarily in that people who behave really badly and most of a group can't stand are not called out or excluded. This causes the group as a whole to suffer, and sometimes leads to active hurt to individual members who are subjected to the obnoxious one.

I suspect it's behind a lot of sexual harassment in nerdy circles, for instance; the in-crowd knows who the creepers are, but doesn't take steps to exclude them, and vulnerable people end up being victimized, because the group is so scared of conflict and ostracism.

Again, the creepers actually did something to deserve being ostracized. And the first step before doing so would be to admonish and warn them: a summation. Plus, groups refusing to ostracize deviant members isn't so much a function of how much they think they can afford to lose people, so much as of how they value the deviation; sexually harassing the girls can count for less than, say, supporting the wrong football team, or being boring, or being of the wrong political colour, depending on the local Overton Window of acceptable behaviour; I guess what I'm saying is, there's something seriously wrong with a group of people if they won't give an ultimatum to someone who indulges in even the slightest bit of sexist abuse. The point is to not have shallow or stupid standards, not not to have any standards at all, for God's sake!

edited 26th Dec '13 1:14:25 PM by TheHandle

You have actually experienced a group somewhere that was afraid to exclude people?

I have. Several times. One group stopped having a group activity that many members really enjoyed rather than confront one person who made virtually all of the others distinctly uncomfortable. Literally. They decided as a group to give up an activity they all enjoyed rather than tell one person, "Look, you act really skeezy and we don't want to be around you."

Well I guess they didn't feel comfortable being the 'white knight'.

Fraternities on ever college campus I attended were absolutely horrible about this.

I wish I could say that it was simple, but both universities had problems with frats doing everything from covering up to flat out encouraging rape, drug use, and other illicit activities.

I was once in a group that would not exclude me, but would not welcome me either. That would answer me when I addressed them, but would not address me of their own volition. I've also been in another group, a political one, that made a point of being "open to all", but who treated me rather ostracizingly, but which I didn't quit because I shared their political goals and wanted to help. As a kid, most groups I've been in have most emphatically not been afraid to kick me out or void me of any support at key points.

I suppose in my case it comes down to me being systematically excentric and outside-the-boxy; I tend to unwittingly ignore unspoken rules, and, when I disagree with a rule, I don't hesitate to openly trample it as long as I think I can get away with it. As my "audience" aged my status has moved from "freak" to "weird guy" to "cool and interesting fellow", but I've been mostly the same dude throughout (well, more sophisticated, but that came from lots and lots of reading—and posting!).

I've actually lost social status for standing for people they were making fun of in their absence. It's actually one of the reasons people never involve me in gossip; I tend to systematically and painstakingly rain on their parade whenever I feel they're treating someone unfairly, if only by asking innocent questions. Worse, I don't even express disapproval, I just keep asking questions and pointing out the inconvenient stuff.

edited 26th Dec '13 2:04:23 PM by TheHandle