(polyphonic music)
- Hi, I'm Brad Evans,
I'm a senior lecturer in
international relations
in the School of Sociology, Politics,
and International Relations
at the University of Bristol.
I'm also the founder and director
of the Histories of Violence project.
(synthesized music)
The main points that I hope
students and faculty take away from
the big talks and seminar today
is to think a bit more seriously
about how we would interrogate
violence in the 21st century,
and also provide, maybe, a
meaningful response to this.
One of the most difficult and challenging
questions we face in
the contemporary period
is how do we develop an
ethical critique of violence
which does justice to the subject,
and I guess part of, you know,
the aim and the ambition for the talks
has been to get people to, first of all,
be exposed to some of the
raw realties of violence.
To think seriously about
how we engage with violence
in the age of the media spectacle.
But then beyond that,
to try to think about
more imaginative and innovative ways
about how we collectively
and collaboratively
can respond to violence.
There's no point in just
simply deconstructing violence,
or critiquing violence, for that matter,
despite how ubiquitous
and inevitable it seems,
I think the only purpose
for really interrogating
the problem of violence is if
we can instill within people
the idea that we can transform
the world for the better.
♫
What I mean by the term
"intolerable violence"
doesn't simply refer
to people's individual
capacities to tolerate different forms
or representations of violence.
So my engagement with the
question of intolerable violence
deals with it both at
the level of aesthetics
and also the level of human emotion.
Now, we're all acutely aware, of course
of the representations of violence in
the mainstream media,
and how certain images can appear quite
personally intolerable for us.
My concern, however,
has been to interrogate
the ways in which intolerable images
get put to use and
recycled for the tolerance
of purer forms of violence.
So what I'm interested in with the concept
of intolerable violence is
to look at the ways in which
certain intolerable images
function politically,
and what I mean by that is
how something which should
appear intolerable to us
sets the conditions for the
violence in political rule.
And this requires, I guess,
a very serious and critical engagement
with the politics and aesthetics
around questions of why
certain images do appear,
at a much broader sort of level,
appear intolerable to us,
and others are less so.
And to understand the threshold between
tolerable forms of violence
as appear justified,
and intolerable forms of
violence as being unjustified.
♫
The connections between
violence and education
are inseparable.
But there's no greater challenge
that we encounter today,
than to make the
connection more meaningful
between forms of violence
and critical pedogogy.
On the one hand, we are taught to accept
the inevitability of violence today
in an age of catastrophe,
the ubiquitousness of violence,
almost the fact that
we need to even accept
that violence is inevitable in the future.
We might only think about
recent political events
to see almost the
impossibility of breaking
the cycle of violence.
What's therefore demanded is
different critical interventions,
different pedological interventions,
which on the one hand,
preaches more of the
virtues of nonviolence
to get people to think
more critically about
the lasting significance of violence
and questions of social responsibility
and how we might counter
the problematic of violence
with more imaginative responses,
that has to begin at
the level of education.
(synthesized music)
