Political theorist Adrian Pabst, for instance, in an essay on “The Resurgence of the Civic,” examines the movement’s “glocal dynamic”:

The fusion of the global with the local is equally evident in relation to the specific objects of protest and the goals of the individual Occupiers. On the one hand, those activists who had previously been involved in international campaigns have recognized the need to engage with the concerns of the local community on whose territory they are now encamped. But on the other hand, as participants in a global protest movement, the Occupiers cannot be concerned with local issues alone. Protests, in order to be effective, must have a specific local object that nevertheless has global resonance: Tahrir Square exemplifies resistance against political oppression; los Indignados (the outraged) in Madrid and the demonstrators in Athens have mobilized against the austerity policy of debt-deflation; Occupy Wall Street and the St. Paul’s camp express a deep-seated anger about the impact of global finance on the local, real economy, which is shared by ordinary people and certain elites alike.

Another essay, Saskia Sassen’s “The Global Street Comes to Wall Street,” focuses on the role of streets themselves.

In addition to actual print books, the Possible Futures project’s website is divided into three sections: Essays (reflection and analysis), Dispatches (reports from the field) and Digest (commentary and news from other sites). Roam around!

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

He highlights four “catastrophes” that King was going to name in the sermon he was planning to preach the Sunday after his death:

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

West ends with nonviolent fighting words:

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.

I recently had the chance to speak with Talal Asad, one of the leading anthropologists alive today, about the experience of being in Cairo earlier this year as the revolution unfolded around him. Our conversation appears this week at The Immanent Frame. What stuck out for him, and which he was still trying to find the words for, was a subtle but utterly pervasive kind of suspicion, one that often ran in direct contradiction to the facts on the ground.

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?

TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.

NS: Impossible, that is, without the control of the state and the police?

TA: Exactly. There are elements in Egypt that were quite happy to circulate stories of unrest. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces talked again and again about the fact that we must have stability, which is then linked ominously to questions about the state of the economy. Since the economy suffers from the political instability in the country, they say, we shouldn’t have more demonstrations or strikes. But one of the things that emerged for me there, and which I’m trying to make sense of, was the constant flow of speculation, of suspicion, about who’s saying and who’s doing what. Why are they doing this? Are they really doing it for good reasons? Is it the army? The Muslim Brothers? Is their presence or absence significant? Do they mean what they say?—You know, that sort of thing. I can’t claim to have made good sense of it yet, but, to me, this seems very important.

We also discussed the transition from violent to nonviolent resistance, blasphemy laws, and even the end of the world. Particularly choice, too, is this passage, where he describes a conversation about colonialism with the great literary theorist Edward Said, whose successor Asad arguably has become:

I remember talking once a long time ago with Edward Said about empire and how it might be defeated. We were just sitting and having coffee, and at one point I responded to some of his suggestions by saying, “No, no, this won’t work. You can’t resist these forces.” So he demanded a little irritably: “What should one do? What would you do?” So I said, “Well, all one can do is to try and make them uncomfortable.” Which was really a very feeble reply, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

The United States Air Force has been citing Christian teachings in its missile officer training sessions by referencing passages from the New Testament, according to recently released documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Reports show the mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare session, which takes place during a missile officer’s first week in training, is led by Air Force chaplains and includes a discussion on St. Augustine’s Christian “Just War Theory.” Also included in the PowerPoint presentation is a slide containing a passage from the Book of Revelation that attempts to explain how Jesus Christ, as the “mighty warrior,” believed war to be “just.”

The presentation goes on to say that there are “many examples of believers [who] engaged in wars in [the] Old Testament” in a “righteous way” and notes there is “no pacifistic sentiment in mainstream Jewish history.”

The CFI’s concern, of course, is that religious materials are being used in an obligatory military training course. Of course this is hardly the first time such a thing has happened; the US military makes quite a habit of infusing its literature and culture with religious tropes—to the point, in some cases, of creating a hostile environment for people of faiths other than the one being promoted.

But perhaps the more pressing concern is the way that these religious resources are being used to assuage trainees’ consciences about the work they are learning to carry out. If there is any good news about this document at all, it is its recognition that people will generally come with moral and religious qualms with launching nuclear weapons in the first place, and have to be trained otherwise. That’s a start.

First, on the matter of Augustine and just-war theory, I’m reminded of a passage from an interview I did with Andrea Bartoli, a leader of the Catholic organization Sant’Egidio. He’s a defender of just-war theory—the weight of Catholic teaching leans toward it—but he reminded me that the real essence of the theory is not to justify war, but to restrain it, to contain it, and to end it:

Augustine discusses peace about 2,500 times and war a couple of dozen. Everybody discusses what Augustine said about just war, but they usually fail to recognize that he speaks about just peace much more. Sant’Egidio focuses on the parts of Augustine that focus on peace. War is a possibility. War is a human choice. But from our perspective, the Christian position cannot be but a peaceful one, both in terms of being peaceful ourselves and in terms of being peacemakers. We don’t begin with theories. We work for peace because, to the poor, war is the worst of all conditions—Andrea Riccardi called it “the mother of all poverty.”

I don’t think the claim that Jesus was a “mighty warrior” requires much comment. Where the Air Force got that idea is beyond me.

There is, undeniably, warfare in the Hebrew Bible. Christians generally see the revelation of Christ as abrogating that history, to some extent. See the Sermon on the Mount. For Jews, witness the centuries upon centuries of peaceful, courageous persistance by Jewish communities living in often hostile lands. Today, witness examples like Albert Einstein and Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Jewish Peace Fellowship. Witness Israeli conscientious objectors.

None of the document’s distortions, however, should be surprising. If you’re out to get people to incinerate each other by the thousands and millions, no sophisticated religion or philosophy in the world—undistorted—will leave you with a clean conscience.

The protests that swept through Spain last week, highlighted by the ongoing sit-in at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, have not surprisingly led some commentators to say that the Arab Spring has arrived in Europe. While the timing should not be ignored, neither should Spain’s unique set of political circumstances, history and culture—which differ greatly from the autocratic regimes of the Middle East.

There’s a reason peaceful protests involving tens of thousands of people erupted in over a hundred Spanish towns and cities for nearly a week to the point where the word “revolution” was being tossed around—however yet premature it may be. Record-high unemployment among young people, much like in Tunisia, may have been the reason most cited, but without the oppression of a dictatorial regime to generate a greater sense of urgency, it clearly took something more to get people talking about revolution. That something may have been a creative vision for a more egalitarian and participatory society forwarded by many of the young artist-types at the head of the organizing.

To better understand this phenomenon, Waging Nonviolence spoke with Angel Borrego Cubero, an architect who works on creating alternatives to public space and housing. He also teaches at The Superior Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, which has been a breeding ground for many of the young activists. Cubero has assisted and observed the Puerta del Sol protests and in this interview lends his deep understanding of Spanish culture to a discussion on the embrace of nonviolent methods by protesters, the evolution beyond France 1968-style dissent, and the inspirational role of architecture.

Waging Nonviolence: What’s the appropriate name for this movement? We’ve seen 15-M, Real Democracy Now, and most boldly: the Spanish Revolution.

Angel Borrego Cubero: One of the more interesting features of the protests has been the amount of care put into avoiding a single name, a tag, a label that would serve to give it a simple image, but also to excessively frame it. It also has to do with the lack of ideology behind them, the drive to inclusiveness. Most of the names being thrown around sound good enough, but there’s no single correct one for it. Among the ones you put forth, Real Democracy Now is in fact the name of just one of the organizing groups behind the protests. Perhaps the more appropriate or generic names for it are 15M, Spanish Revolution, Take the Street, Take the Square. A caveat has to be made here: Although a part of it is particularly Spanish, many of the fighting points are shared with many other countries, particularly the “Western democracy” model, as blurrily defined by the European Union, United Nations, and any other labeling body.

WNV: A lot has been made about the peacefulness of the protests, as compared to France in 1968. But we have not seen a good explanation as to why. What do you think? Why did the protesters choose peaceful means of expression?

ABC: I think many reasons can be given for this. Some come from the “Spanish Revolution” idiosyncrasies, some from properly understanding the past, in particular May ’68. There’s a wide consensus in Spanish society against violence. Spanish society takes violence against people badly. Having endured a violent separatist movement, ETA [the armed Basque separatist group], that has used terror to pursue its agenda for the entire duration of democracy after Franco, political violence has lost any legitimacy it ever had in any social groups or movements. In that way, political violence has become, thus, something really despised in political and social discussions. It’s a sure fire way to be sidelined from any serious discussion.

Furthermore, protesters in Spain do not want to overthrow a dictatorial government—as is the case in some Islamic states recently—or overhaul the system completely—as was the case of the last serious Western model (May ’68). They instead want profound amendments to what is already there and to make, in fact, a “more perfect” or deeper democracy—one that is more representative of the people, regardless of their ideology: be it liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, or socialist. In that respect, it would be pointless to resort to any kind of violence: what against?

One of the beauties of these protests now is the great distance that they have with May’68 without even thinking about it. These protests now are, in more than one way, the formalization of a change of paradigm in society, a society that has grown more mature and sophisticated than the one May’68 constructed.

WNV: There is oftentimes a distinction made between peace and nonviolence. The former implies passivity, while the latter implies confrontation. Clearly there was a shift toward the latter after May 15. What happened? It apparently took three months to plan the demonstration on May 15 in Madrid. But afterward, and in only a few days, wide-spread massive sit-ins were taking place. How did such mobilization take off? Obviously the Internet played a role, but what transformed people’s attitudes and energy?

ABC: Peace and nonviolence are both almost default options of Spanish society. I agree with your distinction and I think you have it spot on in this case of 15-M. There is a case for confrontation against a political status quo that has become somewhat non-representative. But there was extreme care taken to distance the demonstrations completely from one instance of street violence outside Madrid Courthouse at Plaza de Castilla. This care, along with the care taken to keep the demonstrations non partisan and also not anti-system—like the anti-globalization protests of the late 90′s early 00′s that were, in some ways, still in the tradition of May ’68—has made them very popular with society at large. So much so that they have become a place where a young protester can actually meet his or her possibly more conservative parents, who may be just visiting on their own to see what is going on and show sympathy for it.

Of course, the Internet, social networks, both digital and physical, have played a big role. Digital communication has allowed many of the organizers to agree and work on issues sometimes more coolly, without knowing each other, focusing on general issues. It has, so far, only worked in favor of it, releasing the movement from the strain of personal relations, and the need to like each other. The rapid nature of the organization has also prevented it from having a definite face, which in turn has allowed the greater numbers to feel represented, or at least not alienated by a definite representation they might not agree with.

WNV: How what effect did the protests have on the election results?

ABC: We do not really know what would have happened without 15-M, so it is difficult to ascertain what influence it has had. It is more important to see what influence will it have after the elections, and work towards ensuring that it has some positive influence in the near future. It is important to understand that this is not in any way comparable to the Madrid train bombing massacre of 2004, perpetrated three days before the general elections, probably was intended to—and did—have a definite political impact. In this case, it was clear from the start that there was going to be a municipal and regional vote, that it would go ahead regardless, and that this was intended as a wake-up call to the political class. And there was the agreement not to ask for any particular result out of the elections.

WNV: The main criticism of the protesters so far seems to be that the movement doesn’t have a direction or clear objective. Do you think that’s accurate? What do the protesters need to do to keep momentum going?

ABC: It may be so. I do not think it is easy. There’s the dilemma between being too concrete or being too general and it needs to be solved. So far it has gone good. But the dangers are going to become greater very soon. It is a very difficult position to be in. The Spanish Revolution needs to clarify its more general aims and propose a way to achieve those, while at the same time support and give a channel to concrete, easy and well thought out proposals that might be too fast, fresh, radical or difficult to propose and pursue from the established political system. But this is a very difficult question to even try to answer.

WNV: El Pais identified Jon Aguirre Such, a 26-year-old architecture student, as the spokesperson for Real Democracy Now. Is he a colleague of yours? Either way, what connection do you see between architecture and this movement to make Spain a more democratic society?

ABC: I do not know him personally, but Jon Aguirre Such is a recent graduate from my School of Architecture, ETSAM. He is related to Paisaje Transversal, which is a digital repository of ideas and research on architecture and urbanism, and there’s very bright students related to that group—a group also associated to one of the few good urban planners there are. One has to be aware that urban planning has been one of the worse tools invented in the last century, responsible of huge economic and social costs. But this is probably another story.

In this interview, Butler stressed a theme that is actually the starting point for the discussion of nonviolence in her recent book Frames of War: the co-implication of violence and nonviolence, where neither can quite escape the other. I pushed back a bit, and so did she.

NS: Do these popular uprisings affect how we should think about power and sovereignty, as armed dictators are being coerced by nonviolent movements?

JB: I understand the desire to come up with theoretical generalizations. I spend a good deal of my time doing precisely that. But even though nonviolent practices have been important in some of these uprisings, we are also seeing new ways of interpreting nonviolence, and new ways of justifying violence when protestors are under attack from the military. The events in Libya are clearly violent, and so I think we are probably left with new quandaries about whether the line between violent and nonviolent resistance ever can be absolutely clear.

NS: Where in particular do you see that line blurring?

JB: We have to be careful to distinguish between nonviolence as a moral position that applies to all individuals and groups, and nonviolence as a political option that articulates a certain refusal to be intimidated or coerced. These are very different discourses, since most of the moral positions tend to eliminate all reference to power, and the political ones tend to affirm nonviolence as a mode of resistance but leave open the possibility that it might have to be exchanged for a more overtly aggressive one. I am not sure we can ever evacuate the political frame. Moreover, it is important to think about how one understands violence. If one puts one’s body on the line, in the way of a truck or a tank, is one not entering into a violent encounter? This is different from waging a unilateral attack or even starting a violent series, but I am not sure that it is outside the orbit of violence altogether.

NS: President Obama sometimes seems to be policing that distinction in his rhetoric about these uprisings: demanding that protesters and regimes both remain nonviolent, and then bringing U.S. military force to bear in Libya when the state turns to military force. But I would think the difference between how the movements in Egypt and Libya have progressed actually reaffirms that the line between violence and nonviolence is a useful one.

JB: Well, it is interesting that the U.S. affirms that the anti-government forces in Libya are resistance fighters and seeks to provide aerial bombing support to their forces on the ground. So it seems that even liberal public discourse makes room for justified armed resistance. What is most interesting is to figure out when certain forms of violence are considered part of an admirable struggle for freedom, and when, on the contrary, violence is understood as the terrorist activities of non-state actors. Do you have an answer to that?

NS: I certainly can’t think of a consistent rule that would apply to all cases, and probably for good reason. The case of Israel-Palestine comes to mind.

JB: Indeed, it does.

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame.

I began to study and implement appropriate technologies and permaculture. I started a Facebook group called USE HALF NOW to explore the notion that more mindful consumption may be an efficient place for many to begin (at least for those of us living in “overdeveloped” countries). I studied the wildly successful conservation and Victory Garden campaigns introduced in the U.S. and Britain during World War II. Leaders called on citizens to “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” and people ably complied. I wondered, what if a similar campaign could be put forth today? What if people were simply invited to have a stake in creating a healthier, more peaceful world? What if the sense of helplessness, disempowerment, and defeat that seems to pervade our culture could be overcome, simply by suggesting that each of us contribute to the solution in whatever ways make the most sense to us? Perhaps the fastest-acting, most accessible trimtab would not appear as some new magic-bullet “green” technology—instead it might come in the form of a radical  mental shift.

The German artist Joseph Beuys practiced social sculpture, a kind of art-activism that called upon audiences to participate. He believed that everyone, by infusing even the most mundane action with a sense of purpose and creativity, could contribute to ones’ own health and the health of society and the environment at large. By so doing, he proposed that “everyone is an artist” of their chosen vocation. Beuys taught that in order for social transformation to be truly constructive and enduring, methods used to achieve it must be as holistic and inclusive as possible.

21st-century advances in internet technology and network accessibility offer extraordinary new tools for the contemporary social sculptor. Interactive initiatives based on the dissemination and sharing of information have far greater potential than during any other age in history. Inspired by the developing power of virtual networks, the spirit of the 1940’s conservation campaigns, and the Buckminster Fuller Challenge itself, after four years of deep consideration, it finally seemed that an opportune moment to present a formal application to the Challenge had arrived.

My proposal, “The Instant & Efficient Comprehensive & Synergetic Omni-Solution,” is a customizable, interdisciplinary, collaborative, philosophical approach to social change. It’s a conceptual framework within which to investigate our inherent interconnectedness and shared responsibility for the health of one another and our environment. SOS is at once a call to action, a compendium of possible strategies, and a means of describing, documenting, and contributing to do-it-ourselves revolutions currently underway around the world. It draws parallels between simple, emotionally-rewarding, system-defying action—such as line-drying laundry, freecycling, and home-growing food—and more complex, radical measures undertaken by those demanding basic human rights and an end to oppressive regimes. By cultivating a willingness to commit to small actions, one may become psychologically prepared to participate in and initiate larger ones.

Through the Synergetic Omni-Solution website, the SOS Facebook page, interviews with visionaries and activists, interdisciplinary art installations, and happenings such as the weekend of SOS launch events to be hosted by Ballroom Marfa in late April in Marfa, Texas, I plan to compile examples of innovative works in progress by others, connect dots, and gather collaborators. As the project proceeds, data will be collected from those in a wide range of fields—alternative agriculture, music, art, politics, history, philosophy, economics, and social, political, and environmental activism—and condensed into concise, comprehensive, strategic booklets, posters, videos, and multimedia guides to be disseminated digitally and via alternative media outlets.

To carry Beuys’ proposition a bit further, perhaps infusing actions with purpose and personal creativity not only makes us into artists, it makes us into activists as well. Realizing the power we have as individuals to shape the world may be the most efficient, accessible, renewable resource available to us—and also the most often overlooked. By approaching issues that affect us all from the standpoint of how to create the greatest health for the greatest number, through shared information and compassionate action, together we have an opportunity to craft a trimtab that’s more beautiful and efficient than anything any one of us alone could have imagined.

Gallup’s answer: he’s a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business and has a household income of more than $120,000 a year.

This of course raises several questions. First off, is there actually anyone who fits this description? Surprisingly, there is. His name is Alvin Wong and according to the Times, he’s a 5-foot-10, 69-year-old, Chinese-American, Kosher-observing Jew, who’s married with children and lives in Honolulu, where he runs his own health care management business and earns more than $120,000 a year.

Next couple questions: What does this mean for the rest of us non-Asian-American Jews, living in the continental United States and making less than $120,000 a year? Do we have a chance at happiness?

While I’m certain the answer is yes, I’m less certain that the Gallup research is of any help. Happiness is not exclusive to a particular race, gender, body type or income. As Darrin M. McMahon, the author of Happiness, A History, explained in an excellent Yes! Magazine piece last year, it has more to do with how we live our lives.

Happiness has increasingly been thought to be more about getting little infusions of pleasure, about feeling good rather than being good, less about living the well-lived life than about experiencing the well-felt moment…

Indeed, if you think about it, this idea of happiness as a natural state creates a curious problem. What if I’m not happy? Does that mean that I’m unnatural? Am I ill, or bad, or deficient? Is there something wrong with me? Is there something wrong with the society in which I live? These are all symptoms of a condition that I call the unhappiness of not being happy, and it is a peculiarly modern condition.

To cure this condition, we might focus less on our own personal happiness and instead on the happiness of those around us, for relentless focus on one’s own happiness has the potential to be self-defeating.

There is much to be said about the kind of happiness that is generated by focusing more on the needs of others than ourselves—particularly, that it creates something more sustainable.

As a country, the United States ranks pretty low on happiness, according to models like Gross National Happiness—which seek to replace traditional measurements of progress, like GDP. It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to people reading this blog that national wealth has little to do with fostering happiness. It’s the strong human connections in our day-to-day lives, as well as basic economic security and health.

Being that nonviolence thrives on interconnectedness, it’s no wonder that people engaged in nonviolent action seem to have better outlooks on life and the results of their work tend be more positive and long-lasting.

Though the great Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder died in 1997, new writings of his continue to appear in print. Just released (hat tip to Danny Postel) is a new collection of his work on the connections between pacifism and epistemology—the study of knowledge, of how we know, believe, and understand.

The two subjects might appear to have only a tendentious tie. What does nonviolence have to do with knowledge? For the beginning of an answer, one need go no farther than Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, truth-force. Truth, he taught, is the method and medium of nonviolent force. But then further questions arise. What do we mean by truth, and where does it come from? How do we recognize it?

For the rest of an answer, this book seems like an excellent place to start:

In A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder’s Nonviolent Epistemology, editors Christian Early and Ted Grimsrud gather the scattered writings of Yoder on the theme of the relationship between gospel, peace, and human ways of knowing. In them, they find the beginnings of a pacifist theology of knowledge that rejects strategies of empire while at the same time avoids a self-defeating relativism.

Learn more and order the book at Wipf and Stock Publishers. Also check out another Yoder publication from Baylor University Press this year, Nonviolence: A Brief History.

I began my recent dip into Slavoj Zizek’s Violence with a question that he raises but never quite answers: “How can one wholly repudiate violence when struggle and aggression are part of life?” What he offers, instead, is an analysis of the violence that goes unacknowledged simply because we are so accustomed to it, because it is woven into the systemic order of society’s power relationships. But the crucial importance of this question to those of us invested in the theory and practice of nonviolence—forced to notice that it threatens to undermine our entire enterprise—kept me looking for other texts to help me think through it. At the end of that post, I promised a turn to Judith Butler’s Frames of War, which is what I’ll do now.

Butler is, says Cornel West on the dustjacket, “the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today.” A professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, she has played a defining role in the poststructural analysis of gender and sexuality, bringing Hegel, Nietzsche, Levinas, and others to bear on the foundational questions of human identity. I quote West most of all because I’ve mainly encountered Butler on panels alongside him, and their remarkable repartee has conditioned some of the most riveting intellectual experiences of my life. West plays the prophet and Butler the meticulous artificer, whose inventions tread along subtle gears to astonishing results. Together, they give me hope that the disciplined imagination still has something to say to our ever-more technocratic way of doing politics.

Frames of War is a series of essays on the horrific violence of US power during the last Bush administration. The book’s subtitle is When Is Life Grievable?, and it points to the heart of Butler’s argument: the senselessness of this violence stems from an inability (or unwillingness) to grieve for the human beings who fall victim to our weapons. Implicitly, we don’t even seem to consider those people really alive. She calls for “a new bodily ontology” (Butler’s prose is infamously technical) that allows us to recognize how intertwined we are with them. Other human beings are inevitably woven into, as she puts it, the conditions that make life livable for us, and consequently we have obligations to them. Grief would be a start.

What suggested to me the relevance of this text to the issue at hand was the discovery, while perusing it in Bluestockings bookstore, of the problem that orients its final chapter, titled “The Claim of Non-Violence.” It is a restatement of Zizek’s unanswered question:

I was asked by the philosopher Catherine Mills to consider an apparent paradox. Mills points out that there is a violence through which the subject is formed, and that the norms that found the subject are by definition violent. She asks how, then, if this is the case, I can make a call for non-violence.

This dilemma is especially pressing in terms of the analysis of human identity that Butler has explicated over the course of her career. She sees identity as being constituted in and through relationships—many of which we did not choose—with others. There is inevitably a violence in that. I, for instance, am a US citizen very much because my ancestors experienced violent persecution in the countries they came from. That fact of citizenship rests on a legacy of violence, just as readily as it rests on the willingness of other people to recognize today that I am a citizen—a willingness supposedly ensured by my country’s vast military. Such citizenship is not intrinsic to my being; it depends on social arrangements, many of which, in turn, depend on violence. What difference, then, does that claim to citizenship—or any identity I might assert—have with claiming a right to act violently in the present? To put it another way: how can I be nonviolent while still being myself?

Butler’s answer to Mills begins by reminding us that identity formation doesn’t happen only at the beginning. It continues, again and again, through a process of “iteration.” I remain a US citizen because I continue to allow myself to be one. Similarly, and constantly, I am faced with choices that, in themselves, allow me to choose between violence and nonviolence, irrespective of the violence that might have preceded them. She phrases the ongoing dilemma this way: “How do I live the violence of my formation?”

In describing this process, she follows Gandhi’s affirmation—his insistence—that nonviolence is a struggle, not mere passivity. Nonviolence is not simply an absence of justice; Butler phrases it, helpfully, as a claim or a demand that is made upon us—much in the way justice has been understood, from the cries of the Hebrew prophets to the modern courtroom, as a complaint raised by victims of injustice and their spokespeople. Nonviolence has to phrase this claim more perfectly than violence, since it only works if the unjust party hears and is moved. Effective nonviolent action amounts to a “carefully crafted ‘f[**]k you,’” she writes.

Butler departs from Gandhi, however, on just what kind of struggle nonviolence should call us to make, and on how we should think about it. Advocates of nonviolence have long wrestled with how to explain what they do without resorting to negation. Gandhi called his method not the traditional Sanskrit term ahimsa (literally, that which arises in the absence of violence), but satyagraha—truth force. “Truth” was the vital substance in Gandhi’s philosophy, which the struggle for justice must always seek to uphold. One must not kill the enemy because there is truth even in him. Truth meant, for Gandhi, no less than God.

A category like “truth” doesn’t hold the same cache in Butler’s mind, since she understands it to be so profoundly contingent on social relations, on language, and on power. Instead, she looks to the social relations themselves and finds in them—in precisely the profundity of our dependence on them—a call to responsibility not to do violence to one another. “I’m not sure non-violence saves the purity of anyone’s soul,” she writes, evoking a motif of Gandhian spirituality, “but it does avow a social bond.” What calls Butler to nonviolence, thus, is even more basic than truth; it is the very relationships through which truths come to be known.

Butler implies, in the same short final chapter, an additional departure from the Gandhian vision. For decades, feminist philosophers have critiqued the kind of total self-sacrifice so readily demanded by canonical theories of ethics. They speak from the experience of women, for whom self-emptying has traditionally been the default way of life. It is an expectation that they recognize all too well as inviting one’s own victimization. There are few better examples of this demand—what Butler calls “moral sadism”—than Gandhi. (Just ask his wife, a woman who suffered much for his principles without always choosing to do so.) With fasting, beatings, and imprisonment, he invited the violence of the British onto himself and seemed to revel in enduring it. Butler chooses “responsibility” over such total self-emptying; keep the self intact, and through it, glimpse one’s responsibility to act nonviolently toward one’s fellow human beings.

Still, as an active, positive formulation of nonviolence as struggle, and despite these differences, Butler’s approach is fundamentally in line with Gandhi’s.

I should nevertheless note my misgivings about how sufficient it is, ultimately. The social relations that Butler points to seem simply too fluid and too unequal, to provide the basis for nonviolent action oriented toward a truly egalitarian kind of justice. We depend on each other in profoundly unequal ways. This is why, one might argue, US troops went to Iraq in 2003 and not, say, Rwanda in 1994. I find her analysis particularly unsatisfying in the account of reproductive rights (in the book’s introduction), which seem to me even less plausible in her system than in more familiar approaches. Perhaps what she proposes would do well to be combined with Zizek’s reminders in Violence about the systemic violence of apparently peaceful society. Then again, given her past work, I highly doubt Judith Butler needs to be reminded about the violence inscribed in ordinary social relationships. We shouldn’t be surprised that a 20-page chapter about nonviolence falls short of exhaustive.

The account of nonviolence in Frames of War is, if nothing else, a welcome encounter between the rarefied world of social theory and the discourse of active nonviolence stemming from Gandhi. What has always impressed me about Butler is how she orients her thought so that it speaks to the pressing needs of activists. Her call for nonviolence now is a telling reminder of how urgently we must find alternatives to the violence of this century’s first decade, now coming to an ominous close.

Rhetorically, an old question in the theory and practice of nonviolence: “How can one wholly repudiate violence when struggle and aggression are part of life?” (63) It is with that question that I come to Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, a short book published last year by the trendy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (forgive my leaving out the diacritical marks). But I say “rhetorically” above because that is not, principally, his question, and he won’t properly answer it. He doesn’t propose, as we do here, to build a movement devoted to the purgation of violence; he calls, rather, for a subtler analysis of it and, possibly, scandalously, a withdraw—“doing nothing.” Or, in the very preceding sentence, he suggests that the “historical monsters” (Hitler, Stalin, etc.) “were not violent enough” to enact meaningful social change.

Bearing through such apparent self-contradiction is to be expected when wading through Zizek’s books. His “parallax” mode of analysis, combined with a mind and body so frenetic as to seem closer to the pace of a hummingbird than a person, ensures that there will be some coincidence of opposites. Nevertheless there is at least a gist to it all, and, in the thick of it, a great many surprising insights. When reading a Zizek text, one does better not to cling too steadfastly to one’s own starting questions. Follow the odd ways the reasoning goes, or risk missing out on a clever tangent or a good Soviet joke. Unfortunately for me, attempting to summarize it all can’t help rendering one squarer than he.

The basis of Zizek’s analysis in Violence is the identification of a cluster of different forms in which violence appears. The list differs from place to place, but here’s the sense of it: (1) “subjective” violence, the stuff that looks and feels like violence to people and draws attention to itself; (2) “systemic” or “objective” violence, enacted subtly through the structures of society, particularly the capitalist order; and (3) “divine” violence, which fundamentally forms societies, coming as if from the outside and supernatural, radically reorienting power and values. With the first two, Zizek reveals his debts to the dialectics of Marx (ideology/critique) and Lacan (reality/the Real). The third category comes from Walter Benjamin, in part through figures like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, and I won’t dwell on it here.

Like a proper Marxist, Zizek is concerned most of all for the second register, for the ways in which social structures propagate brutality and injustice unnoticed. Why, for instance, do we care about killings in Darfur but not in the Congo? Why do authorities investigate pedophile Catholic priests but not the structures of the church itself? He wants to pull our attention away some from the particular outbreaks of subjective violence that habitually monopolize our anxiety and activity. These are symptoms of the diseased system, but not the disease itself.

Violence is not a direct property of some acts, but is distributed between acts and their context, between activity and inactivity. The same act can count as violent or non-violent, depending on its context; sometimes a polite smile can be more violent than a brutal outburst.” (213)

It is therefore necessary to interpret an act of subjective violence in light of its context; what underlying violence, which we assume is mere nonviolence, does it reveal:

When we perceive something as an act of violence, we measure it by a presupposed standard of what the “normal” non-violent situation is—and the highest form of violence is the imposition of this standard with reference to which some events appear “violent.” (64)

On the whole, this is something well-known in theories of nonviolence. Since Gandhi, nonviolent protest has been fascinated by the performative, by the power of attention. Its purpose is to pose a critique to the attention-grabbing nature of active violence, to dramatize the crises of justice that go overlooked, that become woven into the status quo and mistaken for nonviolence. Zizek’s analysis reminds us not to dwell on the outbursts of violence that are most obvious and flamboyant. We should instead, again, make space for the kind of deep reflection that enables us to see the violence hidden away, beneath the appearance of normalcy.

One of Zizek’s most incisive moments in Violence is the treatment of well-meaning liberals, whom he terms “liberal communists” (and observantly excoriates a la Stuff White People Like). Do-gooding among the affluent in “developed” societies may be impressive and lavish, but it rests on an assumption of horrific systemic violence beneath. He warns against the hypocrisy of perennial calls to “act now!” (or “take action!”) by donating a few cents to charity or sending an email to a congressperson. Or even going to another useless protest. While surely doing something, and certainly being visible, these quasi-actions also give us the illusion of doing good while we return happily and self-satisfied to our lives of perpetuating systemic wrongs. They are nonviolent expressions of terrible violence.

There are no better examples of this hypocrisy, Zizek contends, than people like Bill Gates and George Soros. Such men do a tremendous amount of highly visible good things, but they can do so only because of their fantastical success manipulating capital for their own benefit. They become better known for their philanthropy than their ruthless business practices, yet the former amounts to only a fraction of the effect of the latter. Beneficence, like brutality, is only visible to the extent that we accept everything else as static.

I will finish with Zizek there, my starting question unanswered—yet, so to speak, with some lessons learned. Never fear! I will take my question, before long, to the final chapter of Judith Butler’s Frames of War, which I found, browsing in a bookstore, seems to take up the matter more directly [see the promised post!].

In the meantime, y’all, watch out for number (2).