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Violence and Shattered Trust: Sociological Considerations

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Abstract

The paper starts from a phenomenology of violence that reconsiders the phenomenal contours of the seemingly opposed concepts of violence, on the one hand physical violence and on the other hand structural violence. We argue that the implied definiteness of their reciprocal separableness is not given. Instead, violence should be understood as the negation of sociality. As such, it is closely related to a basic form of trust in relation to people’s self-awareness, and their relation to others and to the world. It operates as a background assumption that can only be grasped ex negativo. Shattered trust is induced by interpersonal violence. That is why we focus on traumatizing and traumatic experiences and its social implications. We argue that such an analysis is only rarely done within the discipline of sociology and we therefore suggest a systematic heuristic to study the social implications of traumata. Researching those implications in turn helps us to understand the phenomenon of violence and (basic) trust alike.

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Notes

  1. Throughout the paper, translations from German texts are ours. The authors are indebted to Kevin Aho for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

  2. The term (psycho-)trauma is usually not reduced to interpersonal violence. Nevertheless, within psychological trauma research one finds the critique towards trauma as a catch-all term that in the end equates the experience of a car accident with those of a gang rape or torture, experience of an earthquake with those of war (Ehrenreich 2003; Lennertz 2006). Moreover the inflationary use of the term not only in everyday language but also in academic research is widely criticized (Weilnböck 2007).

  3. The current state of sociological research on violence is well documented in Heitmeyer and Hagan (2003), Heitmeyer and Soeffner (2004), Bakonyi and Bliesemann De Guevara (2012), Hamby and Grych (2013).

  4. What we aim at here is first of all an analytic differentiation: we do not claim that there are cases of violence that do not have an impact—to numb oneself to violence and not recognizing it as such is an impact, too. But for a first sketch we want to focus on rather strong reactions on violence.

  5. See among others the papers by Neidhardt (1986), Sofsky (1996), Trotha (1997), Tyrell (1999), Dabag et al. (2000), Latzel (2003), Endress (2004a), Trotha (2004), Nunner-Winkler (2004) and—in parts—Imbusch (2003), Inhetveen (2005), Wieviorka (2009), Staudigl (2007), Collins (2008), Endress (2013).

  6. Bauman uses the concept of ‘cultural violence’ which is to be understood as a direct extension of Galtung’s concept of structural violence, and which he himself introduced in the course of the 1990s as a reaction to the criticism on the exposition of his concept of structural violence.

  7. This would be a relativization of Luhmann’s critique on the historical classification of violence as legitimate and illegitimate, which, as he argues, leads to a reduction of thinking. In our assessment, the principal historicity of any given concept of violence rather motivates to ask about legitimization-analytical implications of a socially consented or successfully established concept of violence.

  8. Accordingly, for Waldenfels (1990: 118), “the core of violence is to disregard the otherness of the other and to refuse to let them bring forward their otherness”.

  9. Such shattering at least in their aggravation, in situations of pure terror, are pointing to the connection between violence and trauma on both sides: on the side of offenders (for instance child soldiers, Vietnam soldiers) as well as on the side of their victims (e.g., concentration camp detainees) (see also Waldenfels 2000: 21).

  10. The term ‘recoverability’ is (for now) put in quotation marks in order to clarify that the intent is neither to completely delete the traumatizing experiences, nor to completely ‘heal’ the operating trust harmed through traumata. The task is always the integration of the experience into one’s own relationship to oneself, the world and to society. And because of this task of integration, the threefold relationship expressed through the concept of operating trust cannot be comprehended identically before and after a traumatizing experience. Therefore, the term ‘recoverability’ can only be used in a figurative sense in this context—as indicated on the textual layer through the use of quotation marks.

  11. The following passages partly are taken from part three of Endress 2012.

  12. Both aspects have to be first seen in their socio-cultural and socio-historical variance and second as related to societal legitimized formations of this relation.

  13. The German original reads as follows: “Wir [sind] immerzu fungierend als Akt-Subjekte, aber nur gelegentlich thematisch gegenständlich”.

  14. See Psathas (1973: 11f., 1989: 12f.) on “the impossibility of full explication”.

  15. This description as “necessarily concomitant” (in German: “notwendig damit einhergehend,” “begleitet werdend”) can be compared with Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant writes: “Das: Ich denke, muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten können” (1781–87/1929: § 16, B 132).

  16. To grasp the exceptionality of the Holocaust for instance, trauma researchers implemented the expression ‘extreme trauma’ (Bettelheim 1943).

  17. This was commented by Eissler (1963) stating: „The murder of how many of one’s children one has to stand symptom free to be considered having a normal constitution?”

  18. This is also related to the fact that one finds similarities in symptoms of trauma as, e.g., listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) by the American Psychiatric Association.

  19. The Psychoanalysts Mohammed Masud Raza Khan (1974) and Hans Keilson (1992) pointed to the significance of “cumulative trauma” and “sequential trauma” respectively.

  20. See Luckmann’s (1986) differentiation between three levels of time: inner, social, and historical time.

  21. For a critical commentary on van der Kolk’s research about trauma memory and its reception, see Lennertz (2006: 13f.).

  22. In addition, there is the debate about (alleged) fault memories (see, for example, Middleton et al. 2005).

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  1. Department of Sociology, Chair of General Sociology, University of Trier, 54286, Trier, Germany

    Martin Endreß & Andrea Pabst

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Endreß, M., Pabst, A. Violence and Shattered Trust: Sociological Considerations. Hum Stud 36, 89–106 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9271-3

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