Description

Seminar Series

Violence, Memory, Networks - interdisciplinary connections.

In the context of the historical evolution from the late XIX century to the first half of the XX century, violence has been notoriously conceived as a multilevel sociological concept and applied to different domains of sociological descriptions, from personal interaction to functionally differentiated social systems, such as politics.

According to its all-encompassing meaning, violence is mentioned in every situation involving asymmetric interpersonal relations, where an observer accesses reports of abuse of power. These reports rely on the personal presence and the psychological elaborations of power relations, partially explaining the mobilization of moral categories and physical notions associated with the exertion of force.

As an interpersonal macro concept, violence is mainly associated with perception, personal memories, and communication channels that evolved to facilitate an oral exchange of messages since it escorts the individual's construction, reproduction, and dissemination of the causal chains of moral deeds. Personal reports on asymmetric exertion of force are the primary sources of information on violent deeds and the discursive bedrock of violence, notwithstanding the further elaborations in different media and the confusion between violence and conflict.

Suffering and trauma are also generally associated with violence or with the outcomes of situations of abuse, even if their meanings denote different semantic constellations of notions and contexts with their complex articulation of personal reports and memories of excess.

In his accounts of pity and resentment, in The Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche gave critical illustrations of the interconnections between moral discourse, violence, and memory that should be reassessed to better understand the contemporary uses of moral categories in moral justifications of political and religious strategies. His criticism of moral discourse is today as relevant as the cult of personality reappeared amidst post-colonial resentments.

In its History, Political Philosophy is intimately connected to the moral grammar of violence, particularly in characterizing political sovereignty as the voluntary source of the state of the political system. In modern Political Philosophy, from Thomas Hobbes to Max Weber, continuing a tradition deeply entrenched in Medieval Theology, a coherent line of thought contributed to the current definition of the State as the “legitimate monopoly of political coercion.” The moral grammar of the interpersonal reports is thus promoted to a political status in the description of the political system. However, a preliminary discussion is essential in knowing if violence is conceptually equivalent to force, power, authority, or conflict.

From a political point of view, the post-revolutionary evolution reveals a new form of questioning society’s foundation on solidarity, democracy, liberalism, and the basis of social peace in friendship. After Karl Marx, in the famous Reflections on Violence (1908), influenced by the modernist atmosphere, Georges Sorel denied that solidarity could be grounded in the economy of the new industrial society. Instead of forming the social system as a system of reciprocal duties, the modern industry produces a break with the Christian values of equality, reciprocity, and cooperation, generalizing the division in classes and class struggle. G. Sorel concluded that industrial society is not based on universal duties and cooperation (universal friendship) but on struggle and agonistic negotiations. Under a strong syndicalist leadership, workers will deserve full recognition of their human dignity as producers and gain a place in History. However, the workers will only achieve their transformative goals through violence, as a lawless, unruled, and creative principle, against the state force and the force of law. The myth of the general strike represents a suspension of the historical time as a bourgeois, liberal, and democratic way of life in favor of those excluded from economic and political decision-making. Sorelianism evolved later into nationalism, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic positions. Still, the cult of collective heroism and the violent expression of the collective will is the standard facet of Sorelianism's right-wing, fascist trend and the initial socialist formulation.

Modernism and its revisionism of the aesthetic values of beauty, ugliness, calm, intemperate emotions, and novelty initiate the artistic and cultural setting of rethinking evil's role in art and human history, notably by evaluating the meanings of moral, political decadence, and anxiety about historical novelty, from Charles Baudelaire to Walter Benjamin.

Today’s reassessment of sorealianism and modernist theses should focus on the transformations of the XX century’s revolutionary activism and social movements. It should shed light on the contemporary mutation of communist-inspired politics into nationalism and populism and on the extreme right calls to insurrection, including a version of post-revolutionary violence.

As a research theme, the connections between violence and memory already have a respectable history in psycho-sociological investigations.

The present project aims to bring together the most relevant outcomes of the rich literature on “violence and memory,” connecting with former work on Memory, Trauma, and Narratives of the Self, including the studies on nets and networks.

We are convinced of the increasing importance of digital networks in reproducing and amplifying hatred in the making of digital crowds and in remediating collective memory through technological means. Indeed, digital networks can be seen as technologies of memory and social networks embedded in algorithms.

Nets are any material media composed of interconnected dots or nodules. Spider webs are examples of natural webs responsible for capturing small insects. In the imaginary landscape of ancient society, the spider web was symbolically depicted in mythopoetic expressions, as in the Aracne myth transmitted by Ovid, stressing the symbolic values of opposite moral and religious polarities, domination, and ruse. Of course, the contemporary uses of the web went beyond Aracne’s myth. They are only entirely understandable after the personal computer and achieve their full potential with artificial intelligence. Still, the conceptual constellation of violence, memory, and connectivity remains. In the new digital conditions, the former context of violence, mainly resorting to oral channels of communication, is no longer a reality. Still, the latest digital telepresence remediating oral communication through technological means did not erase the moral categories of violence from the written messages disseminated through social media. In digital hate speeches, one faces overlapped violence, violence with distinct meaning strata, or one has to face the challenges of an entirely new kind?

Contemporary awareness of the risks of artificial intelligence on digital means of communication explains the use of the new concept of “cyberviolence” in official, normative documents, such as the “Additional Protocol” (2003) to the Budapest Convention (2001). New normative topics related to the social uses of AI, particularly those concerning the values of privacy, fairness, and non-discrimination, are today’s worries for ethic thinkers and lawmakers, who also delve into challenging issues such as accountability and responsibility of artificial agents.

Violence and its correlation to the notions of conflict and war should be addressed, clarifying the connection of conflict with shock, stroke, and retaliation as a form of violence that evolved from a primitive anarchic exertion of force to reflective coercion. The conflict has a reflective, temporal form conveyed in escalation. A feature of violence in conflicts is its transformation by referring to its cycle. War and its development from hunting techniques under the same premises of ambush and capture is politically organized and politically motivated maneuvering of conflicts, consisting in the ultimate stage of conflict escalation.

Here, a primary theme would be a reflection on the possibility of war, adequately defined, without direct or indirect references to some form of political sovereignty. Prima facie, it seems that there is only war where there is a responsibility for transforming an escalated conflict into official opposition, creating the distinction between friend (or allied) and enemy and justifying the orientation of the conflict, mobilizing the collective force with all the possible means of ruse in capturing, immobilizing or annihilating the enemies. Regarding war and escalated conflicts, peace is already a negative concept since peace negates or obstructs the means of war. Thus, the question of the status of peace as a primitive concept makes sense. Classical political virtues applied to the preparation and conduct of war, manifest in the notions of just and unjust wars, have been used to describe peace as a negative concept related to war.

Abbot Saint-Pierre’s proposals of “perpetual peace” (1713) among the Christian European states assume war and peace as political notions entailing political sovereignty. His views belong to a political grammar of conflicts that special administration measures and legal norms should confront. His ideas are mentioned as an inspiration to international organizations such as the UN. However, it was Immanuel Kant’s use of the notion of “perpetual peace,” in the opuscule with the same title (1795), that gave the decisive impulse to the contemporary discussion of the principles of cosmopolitan law as the moral foundation of international law and global organizations with political ambitions in the deterrence of war.

Approaching the 230th anniversary of Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden, we invite devoted scholars and the public to an attentive reading and discussion of Kant’s ideas to better understand the present challenges of cosmopolitanism. We consider their critiques, political realism's replies, and a world of intensive and unavoidable population movements as this scrutiny's complex and contradictory thematic horizon.

Important topics to be addressed include the status of “general will” as the public foundation of law and the state according to juridical (political) imperatives; the idea of a republican constitution and law as the foundation of peace in a future federation of states under the same juridical norms; hospitality and the right to visit in their connections to “commercial society” and the idea of gradual evolution to a global community of peoples; the eventual convergence of “jus gentium” with cosmopolitan law; voluntary or forced migrations and the contemporary meaning of the right to visit.

The Seminar intends to explore these topics across multidisciplinary approaches, offering the public an excellent opportunity to reflect on and discuss critical contemporary issues.

The following are a few topics that serve as general guidelines for elaborating the abstracts and presentations. Please be aware that we intend to publish a selection of the papers submitted to this seminar, so you should be careful when writing your proposals and final texts.

General Themes and Theoretical Questions

* Violence and the intertwinement of discourse, action, and systemic categories.

• Cultural violence, collective memory, and networked interaction.
• Violence, memory, and traumatic collective events.
• Networking violence, crowds of the digital epoch, and informal power.
• Networks, violence, and the normative challenges of artificial agency.
• Artificial intelligence, artificial agency, and new forms of discrimination.
• Violence and revolution.
• Aesthetics of violence.
• The evolution of modern political semantics and the legitimacy of collective coercion.
• International governance and legal instruments for regulating conflicts.
• The media of violence - verbal, audiovisual, and digital.
• From mythologies of war to the ruses of war: ambushing, capturing, hunting.

Particular Subjects and Empirical Areas

* How digital networks remediate hate speech.

• Algorithmic discrimination from case studies.
• Legislation about artificial agents.
• Political violence and politics of memory from case studies.
• Politics of memory in social movements.
• Modernism, fascism, and the cult of violence.
• International conflicts from case studies.
• Migrations, racism, and hate speech.
• State violence and police brutality.
• Terrorism and online radicalization.
• Historical revisionism and collective memory.
• Trauma and memory in post-colonial societies.
• Cyberviolence and online harassment.
• Gender, intimacy, and violence.

The Centre of Interdisciplinary Studies of the University of Coimbra (CEIS20) will hold the seminar series monthly. It is intended to be conducted online on ZOOM. The schedule and format of each monthly session will be disclosed to the participants and the public online in due time.

We recommend organizing your presentation abstract in a Word file of no more than 500 words. We also appreciate the inclusion of a short biography.

We should receive replies to this call for papers with the presentations' abstracts and short biographies by January 25, 2025 (deadline).

Don't hesitate to contact us with any questions (e-mail to: vmn@uc.pt).

The organization demands previous registration for attendance.

Please, enroll at: https://forms.gle/brgNcR6hk6dxf7gu7

The Designers

Edmundo Balsemão Pires (CEIS20/DFCI/FL/UC), Joana Ricarte (CEIS20), Cláudio Carvalho (CEFH – FFCS, UCP Braga).

The Scientific Committee

Edmundo Balsemão Pires (FL/UC, CEIS20), Joana Ricarte (CEIS20), Cláudio Carvalho (CEFH – FFCS, UCP Braga), Giovanni Zanotti (CEIS20).

The Organizing Committee

Giovanni Zanotti (CEIS20), Francisco Espada (FL/UC), Paulo Simões (CEGOT, ISCAC/IPC).