Hosts
William, School of English
Hannah, Communication Studies
...Systematic inequalities that are ultimately backed up by the threat of force can be seen as a form of violence in themselves. Systems of structural violence invariably seem to produce extreme lopsided structures of imaginative identification.
- David Graeber, 2007, Revolution in Reverse (or, on the conflict between political ontologies of violence and political ontologies of the imagination)
For China is so unaccustomed to popular government and has so long been subject to personal rule that it would be useless to expect that the country could at one bound successfully advance to the stage of representative and popular government […] A serious attempt should be made, however, at once to offer to the classes of the people which are conscious of common interests and have intelligent aspirations the opportunity to participate more widely and influentially in the government of the country than they have up to the present time enjoyed. Otherwise the country will continue to be under the blight of absolutism and, so long as it does not have the security which comes from the determination of the question of succession by inheritance in a particular family, will possess probably the worst form of government which has yet been devised-namely a military dictatorship.
- Frank Goodnow, 1915, Reform in China
In the spring of 2024, as I walked through the students and staff rallying and protesting for the liberation of Palestine in the plaza in the middle of campus, my friends and I were also paying a huge cost in time and energy for an activism. About a month later, this activism of ours against sexism ended in silence and threats of symbolic violence, and did not reach the demands we wanted, even an apology. All the while, as the Israeli-Palestinian war escalated, student protests around the world were repressed, with university management attempting to deploy armed police on campus and even taking students to court. In this episode, William and Hannah look back at the silence and symbolic violence we experienced in the movements of spring 2024. These issues are not new, but are universal dilemmas that we have been always facing. They make us reflect on what the power of language really means, how symbolic violence is produced and circumscribes our everyday lives, and why, no matter how strategically language is chosen, the power of language is distorted and powerless in the face of institutional power underpinned by violence.
Materials Mentioned
William's
Debord, G., & Jenkins, Martin. (2012). Society of the spectacle. 2nd ed. Eastbourne: Soul Bay Press.
Graeber, D. (2011). Revolution in reverse. London: Minor Compositions.
Ito, S. (2021). Black box: The memoir that sparked Japan’s# Metoo movement. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY.
Solnit, R. (2014). Men explain things to me. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hannah's
Frank, T. (1997). A Cultural Perpetual Motion Machine: Management Theory and Consumer Revolution in the 1960s. In: The Conquest of Cool Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. University Of Chicago Press, pp.1–33.
Goodnow, F.J. (1915). Reform in China. American Political Science Review, 9(2), pp.209–224. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/1944611.
Kabakov, I. (2018). Art Has No Unloved Children. In: On Art. Chicago ; London: The University Of Chicago Press, pp.218–225.
Kang, J. (2017). Contemporary Korean Political Thought and Park Chung-hee. Rowman & Littlefield.
Li, H. (1973). 學鈍室回憶錄 (Xuedunsi huiyi lu; Memoirs of the Xuedun Study). Zhuanji Wenxue (Biographical Literature).
Roszak, T. (1995). The Making of a Counter Culture : Reflections on the Technocratics Society and Its Youthful Opposition : [with a New introduction]. Berkeley: University of California Press.
BGM
風は吹いている-AKB48
