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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
How to define, and conceptualise, violence? This is a problem the social sciences and humanities have long wrestled with, often framing violence as an abstract, moral, and normative question, which prevented them from capturing its complexity. Violence, we suggest, is a tension force that is constitutive of, and immanent to, social, material, and spatial relations, simultaneously weaving them together and threatening to disrupt them. At the same time, violence cannot be reduced to an epiphenomenon of an overarching process such as Capitalism: it does not simply result from the unfolding of structures and global processes; rather, it takes material existence in the frictional encounter with these very structures and processes. In this article, we build on, and push beyond, recent theorisations on infrastructure and infrastructural violence to introduce the concept of ‘infra-structural violence’ – where the hyphen emphasises the relational, tensional and somatic in-between – as a way to rework symbolic/economic notions of structural violence towards an ontological, epistemological and ethical ‘statics’ of violence, which is attuned to its disrupting, constructive, and preserving quality.
Description
Keywords
infrastructure political theory structure/agency structural violence structural violence symbolic violence
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Pavoni A., Tulumello S. (2024), Infra-structural violence: On the violence that holds us together, Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies – Power, 14(1), 62-85. Doi: 10.3366/soma.2024.0423.