The civilizing process makes violence invisible rather than eliminating it

Evidence

What in fact has happened in the course of the civilizing process, is the redeployment of violence, and the re-distribution of access to violence. Like so many other things which we have been trained to abhor and detest, violence has been taken out of sight, rather than forced out of existence. It has become invisible, that is, from the vantage point of narrowly circumscribed and privatized personal experience. It has been enclosed instead in segregated and isolated territories, on the whole inaccessible to ordinary members of society; or evicted to the ‘twilight areas’, off-limits for a large majority (and the majority which counts) of society’s members; or exported to distant places which on the whole are irrelevant for the life-business of civilized humans (one can always cancel holiday bookings). — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 285

Categorization

• XREF: The redistribution-of-violence mechanism and its spatial concentration connect to Foucault’s carceral geography and — in the reader’s module — to biopolitics readings on how exclusion operates by removal from ordinary perception. — connects to: Civilization makes violence aversion irrelevant through bureaucratic complicity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 694; Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 284; Distant violence can become more graphic rather than more abstract (+13 more)
• DEFINE: The ‘redeployment of violence’ concept — key mechanism explaining mass-exclusion tolerance in the reader’s toolkit.

Related

• Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence (similarity 0.84)
• Civilization makes violence aversion irrelevant through bureaucratic complicity (similarity 0.83)
• Civility veils socially sanctioned violence rather than ending it. (similarity 0.83)
• Authorization, routinization, and dehumanization erode moral inhibitions against violence (similarity 0.82)
• Political institutions perpetuate the violence that founded them (similarity 0.81)
• Civilization is the project of rendering violence invisible and virtual (similarity 0.81)
• The civilizing state embodies the very violence it claims to purge. (similarity 0.80)
• Modern civilization idealizes itself while being constitutively built on incorporated violence (similarity 0.79)
• Genocide’s moral invisibility recruits far more participants than conscience-stifling does (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Moral inhibition is neutralized by making victims remote and invisible #expands (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550
• Distant violence can become more graphic rather than more abstract #expands (0.85)
• Civility coordinated the genocide and prompted bystander passivity rather than resistance #exemplifies (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 320
• Violence becomes purely technical and instrumental when bureaucratized #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 287
• Disciplinary power stays invisible while making its subjects compulsorily visible #expands (0.78) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 288