*2.2. Their Rejection of the Instrumental View of Violence*

Neither Butler nor Gandhi believes that violence (understood as the wilful infliction of harm or threat of harm) can be successfully contained and limited to a mere means.13 For Gandhi, this view is firstly derived from his understanding of the relation between means and ends more generally. He offers a simile, saying, "The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree ... We reap exactly as we sow" (CWMG 10, p. 81). Different means thus bring about totally different results and ultimately, "only fair means can provide fair results" (CWMG 10, p. 289). Gandhi accordingly denies that violence can be used purely instrumentally without affecting and infusing, even shaping, the ends. However, he gives a further argument which applies specifically to violence as the means and social change as the aim. If one tries to forcibly change the world through harming others, it means that one tries to fight destructive injustice with its own means—one becomes destructively unjust in one's own right, thereby in turn morally justifying a violent retaliation by the opponent. In *Hind Swaraj* (CWMG 10, pp. 92–93), Gandhi explains: "To use brute force, to use gunpowder ... means that we want our opponent to do by force that which we desire but he does not. And, if such a use of force is justifiable, surely he is entitled to do likewise by us. And so we should never come to an agreement."

Violent means can therefore never mediate or facilitate a qualitatively transformed, yet stable or peaceful society—they are more likely to inaugurate more violence and coercion and less fundamental social change; recall Chenoweth and Stephan's telling findings in this regard. Such a situation, where violence or brute force is resisted with brute force, inevitably represents for Gandhi an impasse in strategic terms. He likens it to a blind horse forever moving in a circle around a mill, under the delusion that it is moving ahead and making progress (CWMG 10, p. 93). As we have seen, he sees love force and brute force as completely different kinds, where the former "completely opposes and rejects brute force and the use of arms" and constitutes "a danger neither to person nor to property" (Gandhi 1928, p. 121). The core point here is that violent resistance repeats or doubles (mirrors) the oppressive violence it professes to oppose, leading to escalation without a logical end in sight.14 This impasse is therefore related to the idea that fearful people are less open to changing their views of the world in accordance with the views of those they fear. The only way out of a cycle of mutually inflicted violence driven by both fear and hatred and the only way in which to cultivate an effective counter force are if the field of contestation is disrupted using a completely different logic such as that of *Satyagraha* or love force. This entails a force that is intent upon fundamental change brought about without harm to others: through persuasion and cooperation. This is the way in which Gandhi translates or transfers his spiritual ontology into strategic action for transformation. He draws our attention to both the limitations and the potential dangers of derailment inherent in the use of violent force, challenging the widespread belief in violence as the most effective means of change and in so doing, opens up a larger scope for nonviolent techniques of resistance. Gandhi further illuminates the relative impotence of violent coercion, as follows: when facing soldiers of peace, "the commands of the rulers [oppressors] do not go beyond the point of their swords, for true men disregard unjust commands" (Gandhi 1928, p. 94). This means that he understands the point of Butler about how docile obedience is necessary for the maintenance of any oppressive social order.

For their part, Butler (2020, pp. 13–14) explicitly thematises the same question: "Can violence remain a mere instrument or means for taking down violence—its structures, its regime—without becoming an end in itself?". They are doubtful whether violence can be contained and controlled as a pure instrument or *techne¯*, ready at hand, in the manner envisioned by many proponents of violent change, because they suggest that it is "precisely the kind of phenomenon that is constantly 'getting out of hand'". Resonating with Gandhi's understanding of the integral connection between means and ends, Butler (2020, p. 19) argues that "the tool is already part of the practice, presupposing a

world conducive to its use; that the use of the tool builds or rebuilds a specific kind of world, activating a sedimented legacy of use". Thus, what might be regarded as a mere *techne¯* to be taken up or discarded once the goal is achieved, instead "turns out to be a *praxis*: a means that ... presupposes and enacts the end in the course of its actualization" (Ibid, p. 20). Violence better understood as *praxis* (rather than *techne¯*) can thereby be seen to inaugurate a more violent world: "the actualization of violence as means can inadvertently become its own end, producing new violence, producing violence anew, reiterating the license, and licensing further violence" (Ibid, p. 20). Read together, Butler and Gandhi draw our attention to how acts "speak", i.e., how they are always embedded in discursive systems and participate in them. Part of the way in which violent acts in particular speak is in legitimising wilful harm and thereby calling forth counterviolence springing from injury, fear and hatred. However, as Gandhi also argues, they are blunt instruments that can at most attempt to put fear in others; as speech acts, violent acts are therefore meaning-poor and fairly ineffectual in conveying new meaning in a persuasive way.

Butler further complicates the picture of violence as a speech act by pointing to the inherent ambiguity in the meaning/s of any action—an insight that springs from their understanding of performativity as repetition, which sometimes means to repeat differently or to parody a norm. At the same time, they offer a further argument against the instrumental justification of violence. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence", they ask whether "we can know violence outside of the justificatory schemes by which it is approached", especially those schemes that frame and justify state violence, and "the coercion at the heart of legal regimes", in instrumental ways (Butler 2020, pp. 122–23). Butler is concerned with how "states and legal powers" justify "their own violence as legitimate coercion" and cast all forms of opposition or resistance to existing norms—even peaceful or nonviolent ones—as unacceptable violence. Their discussion raises the broader philosophical question about the relation between an act and its meanings, i.e., the politics of naming violence (cf. also Thaler 2018). Butler shows how modern states tend to frame their own coercive strategies as legitimate, necessary, instrumental violence (or even as nonviolence, as merely "the maintenance of law and order"), and all forms of opposition, protest, resistance and criticism against state coercion as illegitimate violence (even if no harm is either enacted or threatened).15 Butler thereby alerts us to the field of contestation and unequal power relations within which acts get labelled as either violent or nonviolent, "where the power to attribute violence to the opposition itself becomes an instrument by which to enhance state power" (Butler 2020, p. 5). This insight is similar to their understanding of how lives are socially and politically framed as grievable or not.

Linked with this problematic is the pervasive use of the plea of self-defence to legitimate all kinds of nationalist, imperialist and other aggressive and violent agendas. Butler questions how the "self" to be defended is construed and delineated in each instance, and to what extent that construction allows for whomever is thereby implicated as the enemy, to be turned into a nonsubject, ungrievable, and beyond the pale of moral consideration. Because most overt deployments of violence are justified using the language of self-defence, the discourse of self-defence needs to be interrogated further. Butler's main point in this regard is that we should rethink the identification and demarcation of the "self" who is in need of defence in any instance where self-defence is deployed rhetorically. Because of the way in which they describe the self or subject as thoroughly socially constituted, they can claim "[t]here is a sense in which violence done to another is at once a violence done to the self, but only if a relation between them defines them both quite fundamentally". Again, we see that one has to grasp how selves emerge from other selves and social conditions in order to be able to realise the extent to which violence enacted on another is violence also enacted on the self. This ontology is crucial for understanding and practicing nonviolent resistance as a kind of ongoing conversation between selves caught up on different sides of the same, mutually constituting web of interdependences.16 To this extent, "violence assaults the living interdependency that is, or should be, our social world" (Butler 2020, p. 25). For Butler, the one who practices nonviolence is inextricably implicated with the one

who acts from a position of violence and vice versa. Part of the force of nonviolence therefore relates to its ability to expose a pre-existing, mutually interdependent, relationship (however fraught or destructive it might be), and explicitly activating it in transformative yet world-building ways. Nonviolence lies at the heart of a vision that understands the inescapability of having to live together, even with those human beings that one has most successfully disqualified from moral consideration.

For these reasons, Butler (2020, p. 63) argues that "there is no way to practice nonviolence without first interpreting violence and nonviolence, especially in a world in which violence is increasingly justified [as self-defence] in the name of security, nationalism, and neo-fascism". It is precisely in such a world we need to renew our understanding of what violence does when it attacks living bonds. In contrast, we should aim to extend the claims and reach of nonviolent transformation, which takes the form of "a physical assertion of the claims of life, a living assertion, a claim that is made by speech, gesture, and action, through networks, encampments, and assemblies; all of these seek to recast the living as worthy of value, as potentially grievable, precisely under conditions in which they are either erased from view or cast into irreversible forms of precarity" (Butler 2020, p. 24). Thus, the differential distribution of precarity cannot be ignored in these so-called claims to self-defence. What is at stake when the "selves" who are being violently defended all belong to the same religion, nation, neighbourhood, racial grouping or community? What if, for example, "the selves" that you are "justifiably" defending yourself against are perceived as ungrievable to the extent where defending yourself against them assumes that their lives do not matter (equally or even at all)? When your actions performed under the label of "self-defence" are themselves so pre-emptive and excessive that they can no longer be meaningfully distinguished from pure aggression? It is in this sense that we understand also Gandhi's claim that he has no enemies. If the nonviolent resister's actions are rooted in the kind of relational ontology that Butler and Gandhi propose, then the "luxury" of having enemies, i.e., of framing some (groups of) people as sacrificable and disposable in the name of social justice, is no longer available. With this problematisation of the meaning of actions, including their naming or labelling as either violent or nonviolent, legitimate or illegitimate, we now turn to the theme of nonviolence understood as meaningful action.
