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Talking Across Differences: Networks, Law and the Violence of the Word

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Abstract

In this paper, I propose to use Johan Galtung’s notion of structural violence as aguide for linking society’s problems of processing social meaning to the very idea of law. At the heart of my interest is the discrepancy Galtung sees between real and possible social conditions. I will first focus on the specific character of violence as communication. I will then consider the consequences of the heterogeneity of the languages that law speaks. Law and everyday practice not only refer to actions in different ways, but also constitute different actions through their references. Law thus acquires a double validity: an internal one, based on the consistency of its discourse, and an external one, derived from successful translations of practical certainties. While the former defies the assumption that law can be somehow resonant, the latter paves the way for a critical understanding of law. The final section argues that if practical reason aims to create just conditions, and law is meant to sustain life, its purpose cannot be the mere optimisation of the given. Law must address the totality of possible transformations, exploring contained but not yet realised models.

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Notes

  1. See below, sect. 2.1.1.

  2. “In any case, elements must be regarded as highly complex units in themselves (i.e. not: something simple), which owe their function as a unit to the order through which they are claimed as units for selective relations” [81: 103, n.2].

  3. Of course, this only held true so readily before the arrival of the computer, understood as a system of connected networks of algorithmic computing capabilities, the emergence of new digitalized modes of ‘connectedness’ and the aforementioned economic, political, and social/cultural transformations.

  4. As one reviewer concerned about disciplinary categorisation opined.

  5. Heinrich Popitz, one of the leading figures in post-war German sociology, argues in his theory of power for a narrow concept of violence, understood exclusively as a physical act and as a “resource for everyone”, categorically rejecting “the usual stretching and tugging of the concept”: [113: 48].

  6. Produced by “overt acts” of individuals that “can be recorded on TV-cameras”: [58: 188, n. 13].

  7. As is well known, Habermas’ use of the terms system and communication differs from their meaning in Luhmann’s systems theory. But that is not the point here.

  8. Ibid.—« Mais, dans la lutte pour la production et l’imposition de la vision légitime du monde social, les détenteurs d’une autorité bureaucratique n’obtiennent jamais un monopole absolu, même lorsqu’ils joignent l’autorité de la science, comme les économistes d’État, à l’autorité bureaucratique. En fait, il y a toujours, dans une société, des conflits entre des pouvoirs symboliques qui visent à imposer la vision des divisions légitimes, c’est-à-dire à construire des groupes. Le pouvoir symbolique, en ce sens, est un pouvoir de worldmaking. Worldmaking, la construction du monde, consiste, selon Nelson Goodman, à séparer et à réunir, souvent dans la même opération», à réaliser une décomposition, une analyse, et une composition… Pour changer le monde, il faut changer les manières de faire le monde, c’est-à-dire la vision du monde et les opérations pratiques par lesquelles les groupes sont produits et reproduits»: [22: 163].

  9. Reference here is to Plato’s Gorgias [111: 468e]. For the problematic translation of terms of value such as kakos as “bad”, cf. [138: 853].

  10. Cf. the old expression vitam instituere in Dig. 1.3.2, which also refers to legitimacy. Of course, Rome was never Athens [48].

  11. And human rights or humanitarian discourses must not make us forget that even “the sacralisation of life derives, in fact, from sacrifice: from this point of view, it does no more than abandon bare natural life to its own violence and its own unspeakability, in order to then base every cultural regulation and every language on these. The ethos, man’s ‘proper’, is not an unspeakable, a sacer that must remain unspoken in every practice and every human word. Nor is it a nothingness, whose nullity grounds the arbitrariness and violence of social doing. Rather, it is social practice itself, human speech itself, which has become transparent to itself”: [1: 116].

  12. See [57: 161ff; 14]. The historical antecedent of Benjamin’s and—seemingly inevitable—Agamben’s “bare life” [2] and Foucault's “right to make die and let live” is the Roman idea of vitae necisque potestas, the power constitutive of the father-son relationship. This is power par excellence, primordial power that at the same time establishes the order of the family and the order of the civitas politica: the epitome of a legitimacy in which the political and legal levels are still indistinct. The life of which the formula speaks is not a concept of law, but rather that mere life, detached from the context of any living social form, which must be imagined as its necessary complement by a law that recognises itself as the perfection of a political order only in the constant threat of its violence, cf. [96, 123, 128: 145–47; 121, 126].

  13. The question remains, however, of how far murder is a specifically human act. For “No human being can renounce the foundations of humanity for his own humanity, whatever may be the price for him or for the others”: [77: 12].

  14. From the point of view of the social order, the phenomena that have been referred to here as deseases from the point of view of personal experience can rightly be described as moments of “violent rupture”, which are not aberrations of the world order but, on the contrary, the product of the liberal structuring of the world order, i.e. “pacification”, a reordering of social relations imposed by liberalism [10]. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to this article.

  15. According to Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson punctuation is the “practice of inserting standardized marks or signs in written matter to clarify the meaning and separate structural units” [136, 143: chap. 2].

  16. Cf. Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927) (Brandeis, Concurring opinion, 375–78, at 377).

  17. See [69: chap. 6]. Consequently, those who wish to speak about speech must not be silent about silence. For silence is as unique a human competence as speech, and unlike being mute, only those who are able to speak can be silent—“to each other”.

  18. In common parlance, plausible means worthy of applause and acceptance. In modal logic, plausible means what is logically acceptable, what seems reasonable and convincing without being able to exclude alternatives.

  19. For the term “scientification” as denoting the process “whereby the use of and claim to systematic and certified knowledge produced in the spirit of “truth-seeking” science becomes the chief legitimating source for activity in virtually all other functional subsystems”, cf. [137: 610].

  20. The peculiarity of language is its internal and external pluralism. Linguistic pluralism means that any use of signs subsists on relations with other languages. It has with them relations of translation but also of derivation and mutual completion. Evolving through reciprocal relations, each language originates in the life of another, see [102].

  21. In order to avoid misunderstandings, it should be said that we are not talking about a correct' law ‘above’ positive law, but about the normative system of rules and practices to which positive law owes its meaning and legitimacy; for a discussion see [76: 12–32, especially 27ff.].

  22. See [80: 87-128].

  23. “Kant’s teleology must be understood neither as a natural force nor as a definite institutional proposal. It was a (‘transcendental’) presupposition reasonable humans must make in order to make sense of what they know of the world”. [73: 5].

  24. In his introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant distinguishes two ways of approaching the phenomenon of law: the jurist’s way and the philosopher’s way. The jurist, Kant writes, “can indeed state what is laid down as right (quid sit iuris), that is, what the laws say or have said in a certain place and at a certain time. But whether what these laws prescribe is also right, and what is the universal criterion by which one could recognise right and wrong (iustum et inustum), would remain hidden from him…", cf. [66: 336].

  25. The ergon of something is not only the peculiar activity of a thing, but its “best achievement”. The best achievement of a human being, for example, is—whatever it is—the human good. But note that for something to be “the best achievement” it “takes a whole lifetime; for a swallow does not make a spring, nor a fine day”: For Aristotle's famous ergon argument, see [7: I.6, 1098a; 64]; a new interpretation is given by Baker [8].

  26. Note that the German word ‘Recht’, which is literally translated as right, stands for both law and justice in English.

  27. Thus ergon is also distinguished from poiesis. While poiesis refers to the act of production, ergon can refer to an activity that does not itself produce a product. Finally, ergon is also broader than the concept of action, praxis. While praxis is a genuinely human performance insofar as it is based on decision, non-human living beings also have an ergon idion.

  28. Here again, reference could be made to Kant: his Third Critique discusses a type of (reflective) judgment subject to rational assent or disagreement within a community. In contrast to theoretical or ‘determining’ judgment, where the situation is interpreted as an example of something universal, the reflective judgment derives the rule from the particular [99: 546; 2].

  29. As we know, semiotic theory can understand the idea of contract differently from positive law. According to it, “the contract stands for an agreement between a speaker and a listener to regard the communicative signs they share, that is, to exchange and interpret in the process of transacting meaning, as carrying certain general value, that is, mutually intelligible representations of a mutually shared universe of discourse” [69: 265].

  30. See, for a very useful overview, [126].

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    Claudius Messner

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Messner, C. Talking Across Differences: Networks, Law and the Violence of the Word. Int J Semiot Law (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10081-4

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