Not lit­er­ally, but there is a ker­nel of truth in this par­tic­u­lar pas­sage from his “On the Phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of Giant Pup­pets: bro­ken win­dows, imag­i­nary jars of urine, and the cos­mo­log­i­cal role of the police in Amer­i­can cul­ture” [PDF] that informs my cur­rent under­stand­ing of how Workan­tile Exchange is set apart from tra­di­tional “eco­nomic devel­op­ment” projects. And also, some­how, it seems to be “about” the frus­tra­tions that Agile Soft­ware gurus are feel­ing, as the move­ment they framed as a fun­da­men­tally social thing reverts to a mere “strat­egy” in cor­po­rate life.

It might be help­ful here to reflect on the nature of the violence—”force”, if you like—that police rep­re­sent. A for­mer LAPD offi­cer writ­ing about the Rod­ney King case pointed out that in most of the occa­sions in which a cit­i­zen is severely beaten by police, it turns out that the vic­tim was actu­ally inno­cent of any crime. “Cops don’t beat up bur­glars”, he observed. If you want to cause a police­man to be vio­lent, the surest way is to chal­lenge their right to define the sit­u­a­tion. This is not some­thing a bur­glar is likely to do. This of course makes per­fect sense if we remem­ber that police are, essen­tially, bureau­crats with guns. Bureau­cratic pro­ce­dures are all about ques­tions of def­i­n­i­tion. Or, to be more pre­cise, they are about the impo­si­tion of a nar­row range of pre-​​established schema to a social real­ity that is, usu­ally, infi­nitely more com­plex: a crowd can be either orderly or dis­or­derly; a cit­i­zen can be white, black, His­panic, or an Asian/​ Pacific Islander; a peti­tioner is or is not in pos­ses­sion of a valid photo ID. Such sim­plis­tic rubrics can only be main­tained in the absence of dia­logue; hence, the quin­tes­sen­tial form of bureau­cratic vio­lence is the wield­ing of the trun­cheon when some­body “talks back”.

I began by say­ing that this was to be an essay of inter­pre­ta­tion. In fact, it has been just as much an essay about frus­trated inter­pre­ta­tion; about the lim­its of inter­pre­ta­tion. Ulti­mately, I think this frus­tra­tion can be traced back to the very nature of violence—bureaucratic or oth­er­wise. Vio­lence is in fact unique among forms of human action in that it holds out the pos­si­bil­ity of affect­ing the actions of oth­ers about whom one under­stands noth­ing. If one wants to affect another’s actions in any other way, one must at least have some idea who they think they are, what they want, what they think is going on. Inter­pre­ta­tion is required, and that requires a cer­tain degree of imag­i­na­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. Hit some­one over the head hard enough, all this becomes irrel­e­vant. Obvi­ously, two par­ties locked in an equal con­test of vio­lence would usu­ally do well to get inside each other’s heads, but when access to vio­lence becomes extremely unequal, the need van­ishes. This is typ­i­cally the case in sit­u­a­tions of struc­tural vio­lence: of sys­temic inequal­ity that is ulti­mately backed up by the threat of force. Struc­tural vio­lence always seems to cre­ate extremely lop­sided struc­tures of imag­i­na­tion. Gen­der is actu­ally a telling exam­ple here. Women almost every­where know a great deal about men’s work, men’s lives, and male expe­ri­ence; men are almost always not only igno­rant about women’s lives, they often react with indig­na­tion at the idea they should even try to imag­ine what being a woman might be like. The same is typ­i­cally the case in most rela­tions of clear sub­or­di­na­tion: mas­ters and ser­vants, employ­ers and employ­ees, rich and poor. The vic­tims of struc­tural vio­lence invari­ably end up spend­ing a great deal of time imag­in­ing what it is like for those who ben­e­fit from it; the oppo­site rarely occurs. One con­comi­tant is that the vic­tims often end up iden­ti­fy­ing with, and car­ing about, the ben­e­fi­cia­ries of struc­tural violence—which, next to the vio­lence itself, is prob­a­bly one of the most pow­er­ful forces guar­an­tee­ing the per­pet­u­a­tion of sys­tems of inequal­ity. Another is that vio­lence, as we’ve seen, allows the pos­si­bil­ity of cut­ting through the sub­tleties of con­stant mutual inter­pre­ta­tion on which ordi­nary human rela­tions are based.

“Vio­lence” here is used in the broad, struc­tural sense we don’t get to talk about any more in Amer­i­can cul­ture. Yet I think these trou­bled groups I’m think­ing about—WorkEx and Agile—are fac­ing it.