by Thomas Alkemeyer
Will Smith slaps Chris Rock, the host of the Academy Awards in Hollywood, because he made a bad, well, joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, Will's wife. The slap in the face only shows how thin the varnish of civilisation is, says sociologist Armin Nassehi on Deutschlandfunk radio on 29 March 2022. And the presenter recognises in Will Smith the image of the man as the protector of women, an image long thought to have been overcome - and in the same sentence draws a parallel to the image of the heroic man in war, which we are currently also seeing on a daily basis. Nassehi takes a slightly different view, but both agree that 'man' cannot be had without violence and that civilisation's achievements, once achieved, are not only preconditional but also constantly under threat. In every encounter between people, in every interaction, violence is present as a possibility. Nassehi at least draws attention to the circumstances - power relations, for example - that promote the transformation of possibility into reality. Ultimately, however, 'man' remains the problem in Deutschlandfunk's narrative. He seems - especially in his male version - to be something like a volcano, whose protective layer of civilisation could break through the violence that occasionally erupts from within at any time; just like the destructive magma that rises from the earth's mantle.
So it is not only heroism that seems to be taking the stage again, but also anthropology. For them, civilisation and society are that which either civilises or suppresses the 'essence of man' - and this apparently as desperately as in vain. Conversely, there would probably be more to be gained by asking about the conditions that give rise to violence and its human actors in the first place. In this line of questioning, civilisation and society would not be conditions in a restrictive sense, but in a constitutive sense. This difference is about the whole. Conditions in the first sense are like an outer shell, a coating under which the true human being slumbers - a varnish. In the second sense, on the other hand, they constitute the concrete, real essence of people themselves, their intentions and motives, their thoughts and feelings, their knowledge and their emotions. Methodologically, this real essence of people would then be analysed from their concrete living conditions and practices, from the (power) relations, the structures, the cosmologies and narratives in which they live and have established themselves - and not from their seemingly asocial, pre-social and ultimately untamable impulses, drives and affective energies. This also brought into focus conditions in which violence is not only accepted as a means of solving problems, but is also admired as sexy in its heroic form. And this, it seems, even by people who were friends of peace just yesterday: "The more civilians, the more war" (according to Peter Richter in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of 29 March)?
Thomas Alkemeyer is Professor of Sociology and Sports Sociology at the University of Oldenburg.
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