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Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland
"A sophisticated and persuasive late-modernist political analysis that consistently draws the reader into the narratives of the author and those of the people of violence in Northern Ireland to whom he talked. . . . Simply put, this book is a feast for the intellect"—Thomas M. Wilson, American Anthropologist
"One of the best books to have been written on Northern Ireland. . . . A highly imagination and significant book. Formations of Violence is an important addition to the literature on political violence."—David E. Schmitt, American Political Science Review
"One of the best books to have been written on Northern Ireland. . . . A highly imagination and significant book. Formations of Violence is an important addition to the literature on political violence."—David E. Schmitt, American Political Science Review
327 pages, Paperback
First published August 13, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 6, 2009
One of the paradoxes of Northern Ireland has been the coincidence of extreme violence with a genuine sense - certainly within ethnic groups, but even across the sectarian divide - of good neighbourliness and community. Allen Feldman has written a highly theoretical study dealing with one extreme of this polarity. It deals with some very bloody people and their bloodier activities.
Feldman has engaged in some very dangerous fieldwork, interviewing people and discussing topics that I, as an anthropologist working in adjacent fields, would never have attempted. He has interviewed members of paramilitary organizations, prison officers, hunger-strikers, entering the bleak souls of paramilitary murderers discovering what it is to kill and maim. We also discover how it came about that Republican prisoners came to starve themselves and to soil their cells with their own excrement. With only an American accent and identity as a shield, he has boldly gone where few have gone before.
His approach is heavy with “late modernist” theory derived from Nietzsche, Foucault et al.. As he says, he looks to “bodily, spatial, and violent practices as forming a unified language of material signification, circulating between and formative of antagonistic {social}blocs - - - [treating the body but also geography:] as the locus of manifold material practices.” And actually, with relation to these situations of extreme violence, his approach works very well. His focus is upon urban territory, and the politics of the human body.
Feldman has a fine eye for the subtleties of his subject. We discover that the extremes of the so-called Shankill Butchers, whose killings approached the entirely random, were beyond the pale for most paramilitaries. He notes, for example, the subtlety of doorstep killings: “Paramilitaries could drive up to a household and ask for the resident male. -- - As the victim came to the open the door, he was assassinated. A cruder variation was to kill the first adult to answer the door not matter what the person’s identity, age , or gender. Most paramilitaries conducting this sort of operation had a distaste for actually crossing the threshhold in search of their intended victim”. One can only applaud Feldman’s ability to record such finesse.
He has also a feel for the dynamics of unfolding situations. A good exposition of the politics of the body is his exploration of the hunger-strike and the dirty protest in the prison at Maze. These were an unfolding response to the attempt by the authorities to impose normal prison conditions on inmates. Normal prison discipline had been subverted by the existence of a continuing quasi-military hierarchy among the prisoners. No prisoner would obey a prison officer without the explicit approval of his paramilitary superior. The situation escalated as the prison authorities enforced ever-stricter controls. Prisoners were beaten so regularly that the beatings lost their meaning, eventually disgusting many of the officers themselves before the beatings faded away. The prisoners discovered that, whatever else they might control, the prison officers had little or no control over the intake of food and the outpourings of excreta. Finally, after a bitter campaign, the authorities capitulated and a high degree of paramilitary control over the prison regimes was quickly re-established.
My only real difficulty with Feldman is that his focus on extreme violence and extreme situations is often to the exclusion of the other things that go on in Northern Ireland or anywhere else. For example, several of the people who engaged in extreme violence are now politicians actually in government. Those who gave the violence support financially and otherwise – both locally and in such places as Libya, South Africa and the United States – were, again, not themselves violent people. And indeed, Northern Ireland, throughout the Troubles, continued to have a strong undertow of peaceful behaviour and goodwill. Any theoretical approach that will accommodate violence, therefore, must therefore also accommodate ordinary life including kindliness and good neighbourliness.
For example, there is an interesting discussion of secrecy, which is a feature of paramilitararism. Feldman sees this as “the creation of centres [of power:] in perpheries deprived of stable anchorages”. He says “In a colonized culture, secrecy is an assertion of identity and of symbolic capital”. Of course, it seems appropriate to talk like this about secrecy in the context of murder and torture. But the truth is that all social relationships and institutions - all families, all friendships, all organizations – have shared secrets which are kept from others. It follows that to speak of secrecy in this extreme manner prevents the theory being applicable to these quite ordinary relationships and situations. It also forgets that even killers live their lives as part of a wider setting.
This having been said, this is a remarkable and powerful book through which men have been allowed to speak about matters that are unspeakable. The book has had a significant impact among scholars, particularly outside Ireland, though my impression is that it is little spoken of in Ireland itself. No doubt this is in part because it is theoretically dense and not always easy to read. Partly too it is because, for those who are close to it, it is a painful subject to discuss.
Feldman has engaged in some very dangerous fieldwork, interviewing people and discussing topics that I, as an anthropologist working in adjacent fields, would never have attempted. He has interviewed members of paramilitary organizations, prison officers, hunger-strikers, entering the bleak souls of paramilitary murderers discovering what it is to kill and maim. We also discover how it came about that Republican prisoners came to starve themselves and to soil their cells with their own excrement. With only an American accent and identity as a shield, he has boldly gone where few have gone before.
His approach is heavy with “late modernist” theory derived from Nietzsche, Foucault et al.. As he says, he looks to “bodily, spatial, and violent practices as forming a unified language of material signification, circulating between and formative of antagonistic {social}blocs - - - [treating the body but also geography:] as the locus of manifold material practices.” And actually, with relation to these situations of extreme violence, his approach works very well. His focus is upon urban territory, and the politics of the human body.
Feldman has a fine eye for the subtleties of his subject. We discover that the extremes of the so-called Shankill Butchers, whose killings approached the entirely random, were beyond the pale for most paramilitaries. He notes, for example, the subtlety of doorstep killings: “Paramilitaries could drive up to a household and ask for the resident male. -- - As the victim came to the open the door, he was assassinated. A cruder variation was to kill the first adult to answer the door not matter what the person’s identity, age , or gender. Most paramilitaries conducting this sort of operation had a distaste for actually crossing the threshhold in search of their intended victim”. One can only applaud Feldman’s ability to record such finesse.
He has also a feel for the dynamics of unfolding situations. A good exposition of the politics of the body is his exploration of the hunger-strike and the dirty protest in the prison at Maze. These were an unfolding response to the attempt by the authorities to impose normal prison conditions on inmates. Normal prison discipline had been subverted by the existence of a continuing quasi-military hierarchy among the prisoners. No prisoner would obey a prison officer without the explicit approval of his paramilitary superior. The situation escalated as the prison authorities enforced ever-stricter controls. Prisoners were beaten so regularly that the beatings lost their meaning, eventually disgusting many of the officers themselves before the beatings faded away. The prisoners discovered that, whatever else they might control, the prison officers had little or no control over the intake of food and the outpourings of excreta. Finally, after a bitter campaign, the authorities capitulated and a high degree of paramilitary control over the prison regimes was quickly re-established.
My only real difficulty with Feldman is that his focus on extreme violence and extreme situations is often to the exclusion of the other things that go on in Northern Ireland or anywhere else. For example, several of the people who engaged in extreme violence are now politicians actually in government. Those who gave the violence support financially and otherwise – both locally and in such places as Libya, South Africa and the United States – were, again, not themselves violent people. And indeed, Northern Ireland, throughout the Troubles, continued to have a strong undertow of peaceful behaviour and goodwill. Any theoretical approach that will accommodate violence, therefore, must therefore also accommodate ordinary life including kindliness and good neighbourliness.
For example, there is an interesting discussion of secrecy, which is a feature of paramilitararism. Feldman sees this as “the creation of centres [of power:] in perpheries deprived of stable anchorages”. He says “In a colonized culture, secrecy is an assertion of identity and of symbolic capital”. Of course, it seems appropriate to talk like this about secrecy in the context of murder and torture. But the truth is that all social relationships and institutions - all families, all friendships, all organizations – have shared secrets which are kept from others. It follows that to speak of secrecy in this extreme manner prevents the theory being applicable to these quite ordinary relationships and situations. It also forgets that even killers live their lives as part of a wider setting.
This having been said, this is a remarkable and powerful book through which men have been allowed to speak about matters that are unspeakable. The book has had a significant impact among scholars, particularly outside Ireland, though my impression is that it is little spoken of in Ireland itself. No doubt this is in part because it is theoretically dense and not always easy to read. Partly too it is because, for those who are close to it, it is a painful subject to discuss.
December 9, 2021
Chilling post-modernist ethnography shining a light on the very darkest aspects of power and subordination.
May 22, 2009
240b. violence, trauma, etc. very interesting attention to spatial production.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews