(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Christmas night 2015 celebrated Edy, me and our half-year-old son at a romantic upper-class lake in Rio de Janeiro. Then we were attacked by two men with a knife from a poor neighborhood, a favela, nearby. The incident was dramatic for everyone involved and ended with police fighting. The perpetrators were taken, we were "saved" and could continue our lives as before. Or could we really?
Shortly afterwards, I wrote a travel essay for Ny Tid, to illustrate the effect of liberalization policy. Two years after the incident, it has still not let go. It has affected us, but perhaps not as one would think. We have in fact finally taken action and reported ourselves. This happened in a performance at Sørlandets Kunstmuseum on 9 May 2018. Are we crazy? No, we believe that we, like all privileged people, are responsible for the structural violence that causes the poor to end up at the bottom of an unjust hierarchy and resort to crime to turn this upside down.
A privileged person can turn a crime against him into capital.
For official politics, this self-review may be an expression of madness, for what is by definition not possible. Not because you can't report yourself, because of course you can. But there is no police or judicial system that receives a self-report for structural violence. Nor does any legislation support it. The rationale must be: Social structures prevents the fulfillment of people's basic needs. The structures thus harm people, but structures cannot be reported, because structures are not persons. We do not hide this difficulty; nevertheless, we must conclude that our behavior is a criminal act. Privileged people, like us, are responsible for the desperation, crime, and misery of the underprivileged. For the structures that harm someone, are created and maintained by others. And if there is a personal responsibility for someone being injured, it must be possible to report the people behind. We are such people.
New legislation
Since the judiciary has no categories to receive our self-report, we must (mis) use our own professions. The art gives us opportunities that Norwegian legislation cannot offer. Therefore, in the absence of existing paragraphs, we established a new law:
§ LAW AGAINST STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE.
Who produces, maintains, or gains from structural violence in globalized capitalism, punished adequately.
1. Producing structural violence in globalized capitalism, a widespread phenomenon in the power elite, happens by
- to establish unlawful laws and institutions.
- to avoid establishing legitimate laws and institutions.
2. Maintaining and winning on structural violence in globalized capitalism, a widespread phenomenon in the middle and upper classes, occurs by
- to profit from unlawful laws and institutions.
- to profit from the absence of legitimate laws and institutions.
When we attached the speech to the wall at the Southland Art Museum, it was nothing less than a historical rush in Kristiansand. For the first time in human history, a law against structural violence was created. Based on this new legislation, we then reviewed the following:
The robbers would redistribute the distribution of goods.
“We, Blaue and Poppy, sustained structural violence in globalized capitalism and earned $ 352, 125 accident points, 6590 happiness points and 5010 likes. It may have resulted in the two men from the Rio favela losing $ 100, earning 120 accident points and getting 500 dislikes. ”
Personal responsibility
Although our structural violence is also general, we chose to make it quite concrete, namely to put it in relief to the two poor who assaulted us, since there were also those who shockingly woke us from our naive sleep and made us more consciously the unjust structures. By creating an account where we compared imagined events from the perpetrators' lives to how we might have affected these events, we came to the estimated result above. Two of the events we used were the Olympics and the World Cup in Brazil. Police who caught the robbers after the 2015 assault believed that the cancellation of social programs in connection with saving money for these championships was one of the causes of poverty, and that again it was the assailants' motivation to redistribute the distribution of goods, using violence, in their favor. As we, like almost all other middle-class individuals, indirectly or directly supported the sporting events, we had to say that we were responsible for the assault we experienced. In the arithmetic we still deducted from the accident that caused us Christmas Eve 2015. But then we left to the suffering we indirectly inflicted on them by imprisonment and so on.
We also included the fact that we won both financial and cultural capital for the assault: The performance itself, which had the Christmas Eve 2015 event at its core, is the best evidence of this benefit, but also my PhD position, which is also based on the assault. (Based on this personal experience, I will explore opportunities to criticize and formulate alternatives to globalized capitalism.) This essay, too, is an expression of how a privileged may even turn a crime against him into cultural and economic capital.
The result of this performative calculus we presented to the public was a relative happiness (social, economic and cultural capital) on our part and a great estimated accident for the two men from the Rio favela. Good reason to report ourselves, in other words. And to investigate the estimated relationship more closely, to verify it.
The highway of art
After our self-report, the Fire Truck Gallery came into the picture. The fire truck gallery is a converted veteran fire truck with a large showcase. Here we showcase our life, our personal encounter with world politics (we parody and at the same time are caught by the collective exhibitionism of our time). In the NRK report, which appeared on the November 2017 issue of The Day Review, we proclaimed from our manifesto: "The fire truck gallery runs on art's highway towards a new WORLD ORDER." Now, in the first place, we should just drive the Fire Truck Gallery on the highway of art to a new RULE. We set up a review office in the vehicle and drove directly from the museum to the ferry port, where the boat to Denmark would take us on the exploration trip in Brazil the next morning. While we waited, we received self-reviews in the review office from audience members who were inspired by our good bad example.
Unfortunately, no political or economic power elites came to claim themselves "to produce structural violence in globalized capitalism".
The verdict against us is scheduled for 2020.
In total, there were ten people who reported themselves to the same paragraph we referred to in our self-report: "To maintain and to win structural violence in globalized capitalism".
There was talk of self-reviews for "(post-) colonialist thinking and behavior" in the context of luxury class restaurant visits during an Africa stay. Another sued himself for legally underpaying his maid from Cuba where he lives. Several have reported themselves for the purchase of clothing produced by underpaid labor in poor countries – a classic in structural violence. It was a little more difficult to accept a self-report for negative feelings towards a dilettant street musician. When it came to light that the person who wanted to self-report was in higher education, we decided to report a relationship that consisted in her negative feelings being linked to the street musician's poor or non-existent education, which was probably the reason his dilettante: a structural problem in which the self-announcer happened to be on the sunny side, generating sympathy and money, while the man just happened to be on the shadow side. One last person this evening reported himself for practicing structural violence against animals in connection with an art project. Her posthumanist perspective was important because she made us aware that structural violence is not just about people.
Although Review
We tried to estimate the self-reports in the form of happiness points, accident points, dislikes, likes and crowns – just as we had done ourselves. The plan is to verify these numbers, as far as possible, in the time to come and to examine the self-reports we received, as we will now examine our own review in Rio. In any case, a specificization and personification of political issues that appear to be abstract is nevertheless thought-provoking. And that is something we want to achieve, to awaken the thought!
Now we have just arrived in Rio. Here, the investigation of our own case will accelerate. At best, we manage to meet the two men who assaulted us, maybe we can even invite them to the final trial in Norway. If the legal order is not renewed at that time, so that we can take our case to a Norwegian court, we will, after returning from Brazil, stage the case against ourselves. Here, the other reported conditions can also be examined before the court. The verdict against us, and possibly others, will be handed down by 2020.
All privileged people are co-responsible.
But: Don't you, as a reader and as privileged as us, perhaps also take your share of the blame? No one should feel safe. Everyone should begin to examine themselves. You just have to hurry up and sign up by e-mail to the undersigned on the basis of the newly established law against structural violence.
