GEG306 Flashcards

Flashcards about GEG306: Revision Table Lecture

Who introduced the distinction between subjective and objective violence, highlighting how systemic violence is often invisible?

Slavoj Žižek (2007)

Who wrote 'Specters of Marx' challenging Fukuyama's 'end of history' optimism?

Jacques Derrida (1994)

What does Violence Degree-Zero refer to?

A neutral, unperceived baseline of violence – violence that does not register as violence.

Define Subjective Violence.

Immediate, visible, often dramatic (e.g. terrorism, riots).

Define Objective Violence.

Structural and symbolic violence embedded in social systems (e.g. poverty, racism).

What is Cynical Ideology?

Awareness of systemic harm, yet passive participation ('I know, but I act as if I don't know').

What is Ideology Degree-Zero?

When norms are so entrenched they appear neutral and no longer ideological.

What event raised moral and theological questions about divine justice and disrupted Enlightenment optimism?

Lisbon Earthquake (1755)

What is an example of slow, systemic violence, or structural neglect, framed as ordinary urban management?

Detroit demolitions

What illustrates ideological distraction and false choice in capitalist consumer culture?

Coke vs Pepsi (2023)

What is an embodiment of cynical ideology, where there is widespread knowledge but systemic inaction?

Climate Change

What is an example of how historical atrocities are obscured by dominant narratives, leading to moral blindness?

King Leopold II’s Congo

What contrasting ratio represents how society normalizes routine deaths versus the hypervisibility of terrorism or war?

Car fatalities (ratio 3:1)

Who wrote 'The Great Cat Massacre' about symbolic violence and insubordination by workers?

Robert Darnton (1984)

Define Symbolic Violence.

Violence that expresses opposition without overt rebellion; insubordination through metaphor.

Define Transgression.

Taboo-breaking as an expression of power and desire

What did folk tales highlight as a coping strategy?

Cunning, mistrust, and survival in a cruel, irrational world.

In C.18th Folk Tales, what did original versions of Sleeping Beauty and Tom Thumb reveal?

Rape, famine, and abandonment.

What did Little Red Riding Hood demonstrate?

Lack of moral logic – Red is punished without transgression.

What did tales reflecting harsh rural life and social displacement, especially among youth, contrast?

Open Road vs Household

How did elites and philosophers use slander & gossip in early modern times?

Early modern surveillance and reputation politics.

What is Tricksterism?

Poor and weak characters use wit and deception to temporarily invert social order.

Who wrote about spectacles of death in Roman arenas as demonstrations of imperial power?

Donald Kyle (2007)

Who wrote 'Accursed Share' about sacred violence and ritual expenditure in Aztec sacrifice?

Georges Bataille (1949)

Who wrote 'Massacrifice' about the collapse of ritual into mass killing under colonialism?

Tzvetan Todorov (1984)

What shift did Michel Foucault describe in 'Discipline and Punish'?

Shift from sovereign to disciplinary power; from spectacle to surveillance.

Define Spectacular Slaughter.

Public killings as demonstrations of state or divine power (Rome, Aztecs).

Define Massacrifice.

Fusion of sacred and meaningless violence during conquest; no ritual, only domination.

What is Enlightened Violence?

Rationalized, sanitized, bureaucratized violence (e.g. guillotine, electric chair).

Describe Technologized Killing.

Impersonal methods of execution (e.g. guillotine, gas chamber) create emotional distance.

What was the purpose of Roman Games?

Gladiator shows, animal hunts, executions dramatized imperial order

How was Aztec Sacrifice justified?

Heart removals fed the Sun; victims were honored; warfare and sacrifice intertwined.

How was the Spanish Conquest characterized?

Genocide masked as progress; no ritual, only extermination – early modern total war.

What was the guillotine originally meant to be and what did it become?

Meant as humane tool of equality; became symbol of revolutionary terror.

What was the original marketing of the electric chair and the true origin?

Marketed as humane but emerged from tech rivalry (Edison vs Westinghouse).

What was the evolution of the gas chambers?

From eugenic euthanasia to industrial-scale extermination in Nazi camps.

Who explores how war was rationalized like industrial machinery in 'War Machine'?

Daniel Pick (2017)

Who described war as the 'human slaughterhouse industry'?

Karl Marx (1866)

What inspired Dante's 'Inferno' as an early example of mechanized horror?

Venice Arsenale

Why did Baron Haussmann modernize Paris?

To accommodate bourgeois sensibilities.

Define Industrialized Slaughter.

War and meat processing mechanized for efficiency, distancing, and dehumanization.

Define Total War.

Involving entire populations; made possible by railways, telegraphs, and timetables.

Who pioneered the use of barbed wire and camp zones, later used in concentration camps?

British in Boer War

What is the Duality of Modernity?

Technological progress paired with structural violence, cruelty, and exploitation.

What Civil War was the first industrial war?

American Civil War (1861–65)

What event inspired Dante’s 'Inferno' during the C.14th?

Venice Arsenale: C.14th pre- industrial ship factory

What location is considered the culmination of mechanized death?

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Who introduced 'Terror from the Air' and atmo-terrorism targeting environments?

Peter Sloterdijk (2009)

What is Atmo-terrorism?

Warfare targeting the air/environment rather than the human body directly (Sloterdijk).

Define Environmental Warfare.

Use of gas, chemicals, and bombing to poison or destroy livable space.

What is Pest Metaphor?

Use of extermination language (lice, pests) to justify genocide (e.g. Zyklon B).

What emerges as both reconnaissance and method of mass civilian terror?

Air Power

What is Asymmetric Warfare?

Car bombs as low-cost alternatives to air strikes; strategic for the powerless.

Where was the first modern environmental weapon WWI Gas Attacks used?

Ypres, 1915

What does Hannah Arendt describe as evil in 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'?

Evil acts can be carried out by ordinary people who see themselves as following orders.

Who are 'Desk Killers'?

Bureaucrats who manage systems of death without direct violence.

What describes the structural logic over personal malice, such as killing for efficiency rather than cruelty?

Objective vs Subjective Violence

What is the Bureaucratization of Death?

Division of labor de-personalizes mass murder (e.g. Topf and Sons crematoria).

What did Adolf Eichmann claim as his defense for organizing Jewish deportations?

Just obeying orders; ‘desk killer’.

Who's 'Formation of a Persecuting Society' analyzes the 11th–12th C shift to habitual persecution?

Robert Moore (1987)

What does Bauman argue in 'Modernity and the Holocaust'?

Bureaucratic logic enables systematic violence.

What is Cavarero’s 'Horrorism'?

Violence targeting the helpless; linked to systemic dehumanization.

What is Sanctified Violence?

Crusades framed as holy missions by Pope Urban II.

What is Horrorism?

Violence targeting the helpless; linked to systemic dehumanization.

Who theorized biopower and population control in 'The History of Sexuality'?

Michel Foucault (1976)

What did Agamben critique as permanent emergency governance related to COVID-19?

State biosecurity strategies

What is Sovereign Power?

Right to 'take life or let live'.

Who described Primitive Accumulation as the violent separation of people from land in 'Capital'?

Karl Marx(1867)

What did Harvey describe as capital surplus absorption?

Capitalism’s need to absorb surplus via infrastructure, war, or expansion

What is Carceral Geography?

Prisons store surplus populations and absorb excess land, labour, finance (Gilmore).

What is Lethal Labour?

Nazi and Soviet labour camps as extreme examples of accumulation via disposable bodies.

What is Accumulation through Dispossession?

Seizure of common goods for profit.

What has accounted for the use of prisons to store surplus populations and absorb excess land, labor and finance?

Carceral geography

What are Ghost Cities (e.g. Angola) & War Spending examples of?

Modern spatial fixes to absorb capital surplus.

What concept posits that capitalism continues despite crises because there are no visible alternatives?

Capitalist Realism

Who coined the term 'Zombie Neoliberalism'?

Jamie Peck (2010)

What is the Ambidextrous State?

Uses one hand to support welfare, the other to dismantle it (Peck).

What is Legal Personhood of Capital?

Companies gain rights but no responsibilities (Neocleous).

What is Capitalist Realism?

The belief that capitalism is the only viable system (Fisher).

What kind of Marxism is associated with revolutionary romanticism?

Gothic Marxism

What concept refers to social relations appearing as relations between things?

Commodity Fetishism

How do commodities operate according to Benjamin?

Replace religious devotion

According to Klein, how are traumas exploited in 'The Shock Doctrine'?

To push through unpopular reforms.

What does Klein define as 'disaster apartheid' and militarized capitalism?

Post-Katrina conditions

What is the State of Emergency, according to Klein?

Shift from exception to norm; structural instability becomes normalized.

How is the transition from reactive protest to political demand described?

Historical Riot

What is Communism, as defined by Marx?

Abolition of private property and alienation; radical equality.

What is Badiou’s Militant Truth?

Event + Declaration + Fidelity (St Paul, Marx, Lenin).