VIOLENCE, VOICE AND IDENTITY IN ALGERIA.

INTRODUCTION

THIS ESSAY EXPLORES THE CYCLES of violence in Algeria and the significance of the "production of corpses" in the struggle for the state. The article also explores the symbolic efficacy of violence in undermining national society. It argues that the scope and scale of terror has gone beyond the threshold of the "innocence" of victims, beyond mere terrorism, leaving an enormous void in the construction of a future social project. The violent transgressions of everyday worlds have shattered daily life and the "break out of peace" will be only the first step in creating the possibilities of voice. Reconciliation in Algeria will have to engage personal pain and loss. No religious or national narrative will be able to accommodate its depths.

"Experiences of victimization and torture are emblematic in that they move us [ldots] through the space of death where reality is up for grabs. And here we but begin to see the magnitude of the task, which calls neither for demystification nor remystification but for a quite different poetics of destruction and revelation"." (Zulaika 1996: 191).

The daily diet of violence and massacre spilling into the media suggests Algerian society is in an ungovernable state. In the past few years reports of massacre have been continuous and summarized as body counts often alongside graphic images of the victims. The text of statistics against images of slaughter are chilling and very disorienting because there is no context. How do you make any sense of them? These vignettes of terror, some extremely macabre with chainsaw inflicted mutilations and gross violations of bodies, convey little meaning at all except to repel and to accuse. Even if the political context of recent government gestures of reconciliation is assembled (release of FIS [Islamic Salvation Front] leaders from prison, the government announcement of an inquiry into human rights abuses, local elections in June 1997) the flow of bodies belies any easy narrative. Nevertheless the overdetermining nature of violence means each event is quickly narrativized into the logic of patriots, martyrs or betray als:

Scores are being settled today whose origins lie in conflicts resulting from Algerian independence in 1962 such as the massacre of 60,000-100,000 harkis that took place only months after independence. The harkis were Algerians who joined armed French militias of the same type that the present Algerian government has set up in villages. After independence, the harkis were not allowed into France, and ended up prisoners in their own country. And they were killed. (Tuquoi 1997: 19)

PAST PASSIONS EXPLAIN THE INEXPLICABLE?

The crisis of violence in Algeria is the scale of societal dislocation involved and the depth degradation of social life. The kinds of violence and terror expressed in Algeria -- car bombs, disappearance, kidnapping, massacres. assassinations, armed confrontations -- combine the case of state repression and the anarchy of statelessness familiar in the recent histories of the state in crisis: disappearances and torture by the state (Argentina); the communal terror of car-bombing (Lebanon); the massacre of whole families and villages (Bosnia); the kidnapping of women for collective rape (Bosnia); with its particular elaborations of grotesque levels of bodily mutilation and the targeting of the producers of secular and popular culture (e.g. journalists, musicians as symbols of Islamic betrayal.) For the most part this violence has been contained in Algeria and done by the hands of Algerians against other Algerians.

But while the struggle is largely contained the violence is assimilated into the new world mapping of global fragmentation. Fear of violence over there over here (the West) sees borders drawn demarcating secured from insecure zones. A landscape of pain is being used to reconfigure privileged zones: "the third world, in its complexity, multiplicity, multiple sites, has become, besides the site of torture, the spectacle of the other tortured for us" (du Bois 1991: 157).

The threat of the Rest to the West sees difference made into a fluctuating dividing line of civilizational struggle, in the Algerian case between the West vs. Islam. This spatially conceived history is turned into the epic struggle between the defense of Western secular values on the one side and reclaiming the (post) colonial terrain as Islamic on the other. The Islamic threat is seen as evident in the threat of "terrorism" to the French state, the potential for subversive activities by members of the large North African diaspora in France and Iranian support for the Algerian Islamists. For the Islamists, their conflict with the secular Algerian state is now seen as completing the process of decolonization that had been promised, but not fully realized, through the national war of independence. Moreover the radicalization of itinerant Algerian mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan connects them, through those experiences, to diverse Islamic politics and networks in the Middle East.

The violence in Algeria is being done in the name of values; the liberal (democratic) state or Islamic religious ideals. But is it really possible that one can be drowning in violence and be rescued by it? Can violence provide the means for reconstructing a humane society in Algeria? Is the solidarity realized through violence and terror a foundation which endures to permit the realization of a more humane world?

The aim of this essay is to explore the meaning of the production of corpses (terror), or human sacrifice, in Algeria and the social and moral crisis they represent. Its focus is on violence and the crisis of values in reconstituting social worlds.

THE MICROPOLITICS OF VIOLENCE

The politics of contemporary Algeria is that of violence against the nation, against itself. This is a politics of polarizing terror pursued through torture, assassination and massacre. The tortured (wounded, mutilated or dead) body is the space in which power is being contested in Algeria today. Violence and pain are the basis for political contestation of the state, society and values. If we, as outside/distant observers, encounter such violence as meaningless it is because we are in the privileged position of living lives which have not been overtaken by terror in everyday life. And this response is not altogether honest anyway ignoring the very means by which we deny its impact -- our distance and disconnection. The abjectness/terror of violence is its modus vivendi, its way of reaching many distant audiences, not its instrumental efficacy of inflicting harm. Violence is always powerfully rhetorical in order to be socially constitutive.

Violence is a politics of reinvention which seeks to force a return to the primal moments of making the cultural world. These primal moments address our subjectivity and its connection with the social world. Violence tears through the normality of orderly life, of consciousness, and refocuses cultural recreation on the abject through pain. The abject defines that which is excluded and emphasizes the very weakness of cultural systems of prohibition, the rules that underlie the everyday constitution of social reality. Violence itself becomes an expression of the crisis of boundaries (read certainties, continuities, unity, consciousness) and an instrument to re-establish them, to make social wholes out of fragments. The amorality of violence is its founding in the abject, in that which is inassimilable, cannot be me, cannot be socially. The experience of the abject is to undermine the very possibility of the social, because its silencing quality deprives us of sharing in the making of social life.

The body is the site of pain and the infliction of pain is an act of power premised upon a socially recognized calibration of pain. It is through the tortured body that the abject is invoked. The spectacle of the tortured body is a fulcrum of power signifying the capacity to terrorize through the materiality of the body in pain. The public display of the tortured body terrorizes through the depths of horror implied in its calibration of pain witnessed by a culturally informed public.

The tortured body has a long history in punishment and justice. Michel Foucault (1977) argues the tortured body was given meaning in the triadic structure of victim-audience-sovereign. It was in the public witnessing of torture (capital punishment, dismembering, etc.) that the truth of the sovereign's power was exercised. It was the body which confirmed, through the witnessing of its confession and pain, the truth of the sovereign's power and justice. An extraordinary photograph graphically displays the king's justice in action -- a condemned man is being subjected to the "torture of the Hundred Pieces" (Bataille, 1989). The photograph conveys the pain of the victim, prolonged by opium, and the sense that the ruler's justice is realized in the excess of violence being displayed in the condemned man's body.

The tortured bodies of Algerian violence can also be understood through a similar triadic structure. The bodies of the present victims of massacre are the signs which are being brutally used to substantiate particular values with respect to particular audiences. However unlike the tightly scripted triadic structure of the monarchical state, the contemporary triadic structure of violence/terror is loose. Agency is ambiguous. Who terrorizes, the state, its Islamic opponents, or both? The audience is multiple and diverse. It is local, national, and international. Is this the body of a patriot, martyr or traitor? In other words, death by unknown hands in contemporary Algeria is rhetorical and assimilated into a wider social world of uncertainty, insecurity and rumor.

Nor are we social scientists, and certainly not journalists, in any position to treat such political violence and terror as mere objects of study because we too are implicated as audience - i.e., we do not escape the triadic structure of meaning making. In a world of globalized terror no media violence can simply be treated as a distant localized event to be explained in local context and discourse. We are all audiences because we are asked, compelled by the images of horror, to look [through television] and judge. Violence implicates us because its point of articulation, its reach, is the abject, the experience of the threat to self/extinction. And just like everyone else when confronted with the spectacle of the tortured body each of us finds an urgent need to make sense of it. We make it an event in need of a story. We seek to narrativize the body in pain in order to prevent the tear in the normality and order it signifies to unravel further. It is because I too am implicated as audience that I am seeking to reveal, and escape from, the disarming destructiveness of terror. We must not submit to simply substantiating violence through explanation for an analysis of its modus operandi.

Violence has spawned a cluster of analysts in Colombia called violentologos to examine the meaning of violence (Villaveces-Izquiero, Santiago 1997) and in the fields of Middle East studies and international relations violence has fueled an industry of terrorist experts as an adjunct to state security. But violence cannot be treated as a symptom to find causes and cures. As Feldman comments on the complexity of the task of the ethnographer:

In the state of political emergency, the ethnographic process is a travail through layers of sensory and narrative distortion, white noise, and surrealistic particularities that not only are the internal product of the space of terror and death but that also arise from the contradictory abutment of the ethnographers' own social contexts and disciplinary dispositions with local situations and knowledge (Feldman 1995: 228).

The signs, communications and effects are too diverse to simplify or make singular.

Production of corpses

Attackers massacred at least 87 people near the Algerian capital at the weekend, slashing throats, cutting off arms and opening women's stomachs, survivors and hospital officials said (Khiari 1997: 4).

"Bodies are obstinate signs" (Desnoes 1985: 40). Their presence provokes an emotional response -- indignation, horror, pity, indifference -- as well as need to be made sense of. Violence is projected through the sign of the corpse as fear, the primary emotional response of the self to the abject, the threat to the very existence of the self. The wounded body as sign becomes associated with the moment of crisis of the cultural or shared world, the very possibility of the continuity of the social and self-affirmation. This crisis of the cultural world sees the body (the locus of our sentient existence and knowledge) become the focus for resubstantiating the world:

[ldots] instead of the familiar process of substantiation in which the observer certifies the existence of the thing by experiencing the thing in his own body (seeing it, touching it), the observer instead sees and touches the hurt body of another person juxtaposed to the disembodied idea, and having sensorily experienced the first, believes he or she has experienced the reality of the second (Scarry 1985: 125).

The appropriation of body (corpse) to signify something threatened -- the body, self identity, social worlds -- derives from firstly the reality that pain silences the body and secondly from the materiality of the body, the site where we most intensely experience the self. The crisis which engenders the need for cultural reinvention and substantiation leads to the metaphoric association of the corpse and new/renewed cultural forms:

The body tends to be brought forward in its most extreme and absolute form only on behalf of a cultural artifact or symbolic fragment or made thing (a sentence) that is without any other basis in material reality: that is, it is only brought forward when there is a crisis of substantiation. As a result of this unanchored quality, the disembodied cultural fragment has a fluidity not shared by its physical counterpart -- in war the damage inflicted on bodies is unalterable, whereas the symbolic claims or issues change with great ease (Scarry 1985: 127).

Meaning at its primal moment of cultural elaboration is founded in the existential space of the sentient body. The living body of another, the spectator, is made conscious of frailty of the body and the possibility of the extinction of the self, of death. The fear of violence, or even extinction, confronts the limits of the self defined by the abject -- that which must be excluded, that which is not myself. "There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border" (Kristeva 1982: 3). Abjection then is not just what is polluting but what is out of place. "What does not respect borders, positions, rules" (Kristeva 1982: 4). Abjection becomes a threatening otherness which is juxtaposed to the living.

At these limits to existence the abject becomes available for cultural elaboration. The void is populated by images of evil and fearful things. It is given meaning and form as the feared Other, a difference which is both inassimilable and potentially overwhelming. The abject is given form through narrative mediation. Narration founds social space, "[ldots] stories 'go in a procession' ahead of social practices in order to open a field for them" (de Certeau 1984: 125). The void, that which is beyond the boundary yet is created by the boundary, is given form through narration which creates the social space, the stage on which actions take place. If there is no voice, no story, there is no space.

The victims of Algerian violence are appropriated into a polarized discourse of the Islamists or military state. [1] In this chaotic environment all death tends to become overdetermined and bodies cannot escape representation as either victims of state repression or Islamist terrorism -- even if that death is accidental. [2] Because bodies no longer speak the origins of violence and the passions motivating murder can never be known with certainty. The efficacy of violence (terror) then is not just the ability to cause harm but also to shape its meaning -- i.e., what it substantiates.

The focus of substantiation in Algerian violence is the "innocent" victim. Except in the small number of cases where the victim is in uniform or holds known political office or military rank the bodies of victims are invariably indistinguishable. Whose side are they really on? The violence is also amplified by being culturally informed about what signifies the most serious transgressions (the most humiliating, desecrating, obscene), what terrifies, what is culturally most abject. Terror claims the body of "innocent" victims as a strategy of power which declares that there is no zone of safety, only total war. When the sanctuaries of home, mosque and the bodies of children and women are violated or destroyed everyone is terrorized as a potential victim. [3] The murder of the innocent, a status guaranteed by them being chance victims, allows one death to stand for a whole category. This mimics religious sacrifice. Given the apparent purposeless of such violence in any strategic sense the whole thrust of terror is to terrorize, to conjure up an imagined terror which becomes too terrifying to contemplate.

For those who are the potential victims in this total war (there are no sanctuaries) terror is deepened by dislocating the social world and people's ability to reproduce themselves in a knowable social world. Violence challenges the ability to reproduce daily life/culture, the very basis on which identity and the social can be anchored, shared. As the authorship of acts is defaced "[ldots] a public culture of rumors reveals the extent to which the sense of control over reality is finite, and the extent to which control has to be reasserted through exaggeration and imaginative supplementation" (Feldman 1995: 31). But the narration of rumor seeking to give collective experience meaning in the absence of wide-scale social credibility is constructed with damaged vision and voice. Rumor emerges:

[ldots] first as silence. It is as if the first wound of violence, the initial and simultaneous damaging of individual bodies and their corporate body, effaces the social capacity for description. Things are thought but not said, and when speech emerges it is not from that aborted thought but from the intervening gap of the not said. Rumor begins at the borders of silence around the kernel of the absent event, the disappeared body, the silenced name. Terror and pain is all the more effective when it is experienced as an effect with no cause, with no identifiable place of its own except the locale of one's body (Feldman 1995: 234).

The doubleness of violence is its act of destruction and creation -- violence destabilizes the social, unanchors social reality, and at the same time deploys the materiality of the hurt body to anchor materiality.

The serial character of corpse production -- bodies continue to be produced by both sides -- suggests that it is in the sequence of death that meaning is contested, not in an individual (biographic) death. "The stiff (corpse) as a repeatable code is the passageway [ldots] to intervene in historical time and to demonstrate their ability to regulate the latter in a material form" (Feldman 1990: 233). The body is made a cultural artifact whose surface is appropriated to produce an historical narrative which in turn becomes an object of symbolic exchange.

In the consuming violence of Algeria, bodies are made markers in the contest for territorial and institutional control. The Islamist production of corpses challenges the state's control over cultural production -- media, schools, courts. The corpse becomes a surface used to signify betrayal of Islamic values or the Islamist movement. Alongside the violence against the body Islamists have been able to co-opt the body as surface in performative ways -- e.g., through appearance and gesture in clothing and ritual observance. The powerful rhetorical effect of performance is to signify allegiance, if not solidarity and not just compliance. As a consequence failure to observe the code is a declaration of secular identification.

Massacres also serve as boundary markers or quasi front-lines. In the village and towns of the countryside the state's writ oscillates by day and night. Most corpses are produced by night mapping a kind of high tide mark of Islamist control -- according to the organs of the state. But these are only temporary frontiers however because the project for Islamists and the state alike is for total command of national territory and the state machinery. The Algerian secularists are not about to become pied noir and evacuate the "colony" as Albert Camus wrote "The whole coast is ready for departure; a shiver of adventure ripples through it. Tomorrow, perhaps, we will leave together" (Porchasaka 1990:323).

In contrast to ethnic cleansing which seeks autonomy through spatial segregation and homogenization there are no clear front-lines, autonomous zones or divided cities in Algeria. In the logic of ethnic segregation massacre becomes an instrument for resolution, even self-determination, through homogenization. However, the logic of massacre in the Algerian civil war is about submission, expulsion or death. Violence does not fall along some imaginary front-line between the state and Islamists but is found everywhere. All the spaces of normal life -- street, office, bazaar, home -- have been invaded and overturned by violence.

The most strongly inflected corpses are those associated with maintaining the state. Those recruited into village militias (neo-harkis), those who administer and control state violence (civil servants, police and military), those responsible for cultural production/reproduction of the secular (Western) nation-state - the educators, journalists, musicians, (Skilbeck 1995) and those who transgress the morality of strict fundamentalist interpretations of Islamic codes, especially women.

The production of corpses becomes narrativised as a collection of images of patriots, martyrs or betrayers. A collection of martyrs images is a feature of the FIS Internet website. A page entitled "silent photographic testimonies" presents a collection of grim images of disfigured bodies as a collage. There is no mark on these corpses to identify them as Islamic martyrs except their inclusion on the web page. In the same way that the images published in the Algerian press by definition are alleged victims of Islamist violence.

But while the FIS may assert their martyrdom, just as the state may claim the dead policeman's patriotism and loyalty, it does not mean that the boundaries are decipherable for anyone. There is no "ethnicized space" as produced through sectarian massacre, no borders demarcating safe zones of refuge. Violence has contracted social life around intimate circles, home, workplace friends. But there is no longer security even in these social sanctuaries, not even kinship is the basis for solidarity with families split in their allegiances and activism.

The production of corpses becomes reciprocal. The killing of the abject Other is affirmation of your project and a sign of your vitality -- you are not defeated. The cycle of violence becomes a symbolic exchange without limits because of its rhetorical quality. It is an action to remind and re-terrorize and participants often find it difficult to imagine the state of abjectness ever coming to an end. [4] Violence uses the corpse as an instrument for social mapping alongside the performative acts signifying the recovery of tradition (traditional tradition) on the way to remaking some idealized world.

The production of corpses uses the spectacle of the tortured body to return to the materiality of the body as the most potent sign for remaking the world in a moment of chaos. The corpse becomes a mechanism, through ritual exchange and metonymic association, to remake the social so as to reinstitutionalize the world.

CYCLES OF VIOLENCE

Violence may be deployed to substantiate ideas and values but it creates an ethical crisis in the name of the very values for which it is being done. Can justice and compassion be realized in acts which recognize no such constraints? Algeria's history of nation-state formation is underscored by episodes of violence and great upheaval done in the name of elevated values. The history of colonization, decolonization and the contemporary crisis of the nation-state contain the contradiction of massive violence and human rights abuse (today's parlance) in the name of superior values. The present crisis can be described as the crisis of the post nation-state where the preservation of the state is pursued at the expense of constituting the "nation". What is at stake in the contemporary crisis is the very possibility of reconstituting the "nation" and national identity as participatory and inclusive. Whether today's violence can be understood as in part the legacy of earlier violence [the argument can be made] cannot be resolved here but we can consider the consequences of using violence to seek to reconstitute the social world and Algeria's particular historical experience.

Violence and Nation-Making

The state policy of pacification at the moment of colonization, decolonization and post nation-state formation has led on every occasion to great cost in human life, social dislocation and suffering amongst the population. French colonization of Algeria was undertaken in the name of the civilizing mission (la mission civilsatrice), the export of "the rights of man" was at the ideological core of French colonization. However colonization was realized through the bodies of the (barbaric) Other. Traditional society was radically dislocated and reshaped with an enormous cost in lives.

The struggle for national independence/decolonization was also marked by its celebration of violence for the cause by both sides. Maran (1989) notes how the French colonial state employed torture as a routine instrument for the protection of the state by the state. Torture rather than being a gross violation of the "rights of man", the beneficial values in the name of which colonization took place, becomes distorted to signify their actualization. The French government's use of torture became the means to "[ldots] force-feed its values and insist upon Algeria's acceptance of them in disregard of thoughts and integrity of Algerians" (Maran 1989: 14). One French senator justified the use of torture in the following way: "Yes. There is torture in Algeria, but it is because we have no State. When we have a State again, you'll see, things will change" (Maran 1989: 55). Or even more explicitly, "Soldiers committed torture to save [ldots] France, Western civilization, Christianity, and 'a certain notion of what man is'" (Maran 1989: 192). French security forces violence against Algerians was not confined to Algeria. In October 1961 300-400 Algerian immigrants demonstrating in favor of the FLN (National Liberation Front) in Paris were killed by French police. [5]

Even in defeat President de Gaulle could not help but point to the fact that Algeria's independence was being built on values inherited from France (Maran 1989)! A rather ominous eulogy to decolonization from the present perspective. The Algerian experience led the French government to recast its African presence in terms of a new political role. Without any sense of irony, la mission civilisatrice was reformulated as "peacemaker". When taking office as President of the Republic in 1959, de Gaulle said:

Destiny of the Community! It's a question of giving life to this magnificent institution which unites, by virtue of a contract arrived at in full independence, on the other hand the French metropole and the departments and overseas territories, and on the other hand the Republics born in the countries of Africa where under the folds of the tricolor flag Liberty, Equality and Fraternity have flourished. (Maran 1989: 61).

It is only in recent months, after debacles in various African client states, that the French government has faced up to the political and economic reality that its military presence on the continent had to be drastically scaled down.

Just as explicit in justifying the use of violence in the name of higher values was Frantz Fanon's critique of colonization and the route to independence. Fanon in The Wretched of The Earth regards violence as liberating and empowering in both an individual and collective sense. For Fanon violence was inevitable because it was the only way to break the prison of the compartmentalized world produced by colonialism. The mutually exclusive zones could only be overturned through violence: "From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence" Fanon (1967: 28). The natives' experience of colonial violence in its destruction of their social and cultural world instructs them in their liberation. The colonizer's violence against the native had been justified on the basis that the native had no values, was the negation of values. In the struggle for independence this "[ldots]violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the mome nt when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into forbidden quarters" (Fanon 1967: 31).

For Fanon the route of reform and non-violence threatened betrayal. The intellectual, for example, was alienated because "[ldots] each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought" (Fanon 1967: 36). He criticized the nationalist reform agenda as preventing the breakup of the world they knew and their efforts had helped design.

Violence by contrast represented an irrevocable gesture and was transformative. At the level of the individual "the practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of an organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler's violence in the beginning" (Fanon 1967: 73). It is also seen as an act of self affirmation. "At the level of individuals violence is a cleansing force" (Fanon 1967: 74). However in the spiraling violence of the struggle for national independence even Fanon became alarmed at the potential corrupting effect of "barbarity", "things that compromised the truth of the combat we were waging" (Maran 1989: 157). Albert Camus also despaired at the escalating slaughter of innocents on both sides. He called for a "civilian truce" to outlaw these attacks by both sides but was dismissed by the FLN as having pied noir sympathies (Maran 1989).

Fanon narrativizes violence by contextualizing local acts as part of the common enterprise of decolonization world wide. "A colonized people is not alone" (Fanon 1967: 55). The violence of decolonization is instructive for others who aspire to the same goal. And the goal itself, decolonization, confers sovereignty which in turn engenders respect from other states.

This very passionate and idealistic rendering of violence is a performative account of social remaking. But even Fanon was sanguine about the possibilities of national liberation. The new state still needed to participate in the world economy through the channels established by the colonial power and on very unequal terms. Here he acknowledges the possibilities for development were not just in the Algerian people's hands. "If conditions of work are not modified, centuries will be needed to humanize this world which has been forced down to animal level by imperial powers" (Fanon 1967: 79). And in a prescient comment about the colonial legacy Fanon wrote: "Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdraw their flags and their police forces from our territories" (Fanon 1967: 79-80).

The contemporary violence in Algeria is being done in the name of the liberal-democratic state and in the name of political Islam. Both claim their aims are the realization of a more just and inclusive society. However on the one hand the Islamists distrust any collaborative project after their earlier exclusion from the democratic political process they looked set to win in 1992 and on the other the national secularists don't trust Islamic movements which pronounce that "sovereignty is in the hands of God not the people" and threaten both their way of life and secular institutions. And just as decolonization was perceived as part of a larger worldwide anti-colonial movement for national independence so Islamists view their movement against the secular Algerian state as part of the wave of Islamic reassertion whose battles run through the Islamic world (Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, the Gulf[ldots]. ) in contest with secular states which are viewed as latter day institutions of Western hegemony and imperialism.

The crisis of values contested in massacres can be interpreted as the open sores of deeper wounds which point to a crisis of all governmentality in contemporary Algeria. Selim Zaoui asks: "But what if this violence is no more than a smokescreen concealing another kind of violence, one that is rotting the country to the bone?" (Zaoui 1997: 44). The deeper crisis referred to here are the failings of the socialist state to realize its ideals of the equitable social distribution of goods. In other words, the contemporary crisis is itself the product of a profound crisis of values -- that of the egalitarian and redistributive aspirations of the FLN administered postcolonial state. The "authentic" revolution was implemented as a scripted event, first the proletariat, then the revolution. Oil was bartered away by Houari Boumediene for an imported industrial infrastructure to create the working class (Zaoui 1997).

Zaoui describes the daily grind of survival which goes on without the protection of the state to provide minimal conditions for subsistence, health and education, let alone protection against violence. The state has abdicated its care for the preservation of itself. "One third of the active population has no work; bowing to the demand of the IMF, the government has withdrawn subsidies on semolina, oil, sugar and powdered milk" (Zaoui 1997:44). The centralized state created a privileged world in the cities and an impoverished countryside (where 84% of the population live) after the failure of the agricultural revolution. Algeria imports half its wheat and is the leading importer of powdered milk. When the rural peasants began to form a sizable lumpenproletariat in the city they were sent back home -- the slum clearances in Algiers 1984.

The social degradation and dislocation of Algerian life has created a context in which the normal channels of socialization are in crisis. The trajectory of life for the young is truncated and uncertain. Some 75% of the population is under 30 years and 70% of that population is not adequately employed. Women are even more trapped when we consider that they represent only 8% of the workforce. Whatever constitutes tradition is a very fractured world indeed, not the basis for the re-anchoring of social identity.

The crisis of development forced the state to submit to the financial impositions of IMF. "A good pupil of the IMF, the government is denationalizing everything in sight" (Zaoui 1997:48). And this privatization extends to the very institutions on which citizenship rights and protection are built, security and the rule of law. The consequence is that security becomes transformed into the efficiency of privatized repression whose goal is pacification not the implementation of security through law. This policy echoes the French colonial strategy of mercenary recruitment, the harkis, in the independence war. [6] The impact of privatizing security though is only to further compound the legitimacy of the state and its goals of secular governance. Public perception is that the state is no longer able to rely on the normal processes of mobilization and recruitment of security personnel through conscription. Fear of desertion, internal subversion in the military ranks and the dramatic assassinations of conscripts in their barracks leaves terror by proxies a strategy of last resort. [7]

The privatization of care, economic development and security serves to fragment social life further and undermine the possibilities for any wider solidarities. In this context there is little faith in the politics or values advocated by either the state or the Islamists:

Houria, a survivor of the war of independence, now repatriated to her village in Kabilya, "[ldots]finds herself a stranger in her own country. She hasn't a clue what is going on on the political front: general Liamine Zeroual, president and minister of defense, delivers his discourse in classical, literary Arabic; Said Saadi, head of the Rassemblement pour la Culture et la D[acute{e}]mocratie (RCD), holds forth in a form of 'modernized' Berber. Even less can she comprehend the language of Algerian feminism couched in trendy French that she's watched on a French TV channel in Algiers. Is Houria a democrat? The word rings strangely in her ear. In her ear the word chimes with nothing familiar. Is she an Islamist? Beyond question she is a devout Muslim -- but she has never worn the veil, just a head scarf.

She calls herself a "khobiziste" after khobz, the Arabic for bread: in her eyes she's simply a mother responsible for feeding her family. (Zaoui, 1997: 52).

The contemporary violence in Algeria has been foreshadowed in this deeper violence done to society, the crisis in the project of the nation-state as inclusive and its unraveling. From the historical perspective of the massive deployment of violence in Algeria's history the present looks much more like desperation than revealing hope for social solidarity in a shared and valued project.

Algeria's violence resembles the predicament of many Third World states that deploy violence to create unity and hold the center -- "everything is centripetal, everything is striving after unity and an axis" (Desnoes 1985: 39). This third world predicament contrasts with state politics in the first world where society is fragmented and "[ldots] people are encouraged to live centrituga1ly' in multiple and dispersed ways (Desnoes 1985: 39). "The nature of the state in the North is organic, accepted by most citizens; most people see the state as representing, including them or able to include them with some minor adjustments[ldots] In Latin America (the South) the state is an arbitrary entity, imposed on the people and the country and unable to satisfy their needs. The state, the system is alien and oppressive" (Desnoes 1985: 40).

State violence in the name of unity has the consequence of destroying the very social fabric needed to engender wider solidarities and shared values. Worst of all, violence as a political strategy of unification from the center represents a crisis of values and dependency on international recognition. Victory realized through pacification and silence by the state or the Islamists can readily become Pyretic because of the wider international contingencies for state consolidation and support.

In a global economy where the flexibility of capital investment means corporations have little political commitment (to protect their investments) the nation-state has been rendered extremely vulnerable to the politics of denial. If, in Algeria's case, the secular state prevails then it can be denied the international support it needs by terrorist acts. The small Latin American guerrilla movements such as the Tupac Amaru (MPR) in Peru and Zapatistas in Mexico which had no realistic possibilities of ever capturing state power demonstrated their capacity to destabilize the state through terrorism thereby undermining the confidence of international corporate investors by heightening risk.

The Islamists may take comfort in historicizing the nation-state crisis by representing it as part of a wider opportunity for Islamic reconstruction (just as Fanon narrativised local violence in the wider historical moment of decolonization) but an Islamist victory over the state -- of whatever coalition -- must still win international approval to gain the necessary investment and loans to realize wider social projects. In recognition of the contingencies of power the latest FIS statements are quite explicit in addressing international audiences seeking to affirm their international good citizenship. [8]

IDENTITY CRISIS

Violence in contemporary Algeria is occurring in a disaggregated world in which people have already experienced the loss of the very worlds which sustain identity family, community and nation. Such ideals cannot be lived in abstract they must be performed. As Friedman (1994) argues this represents a crisis of self identity and the very dissolution of the self. This crisis of self takes different forms globally and is producing particular kinds of cultural strategies to realize a kind of unity -- the re-anchoring of self and life in larger social worlds. The process of dissolution differs according to "[ldots]the way in which the self is culturally constituted (but) leads nonetheless to a universal experience in which dependence on the defining gaze of the other becomes the lifeline of personal survival" (Friedman 1994: 188). Because of the fragmented and differentiated character of all contemporary societies there are parallel cultural strategies pursued by different people.

In Algeria we can identify two dominant kinds of strategies in response to the crisis of the nation-state and the particular single-party socialist bureaucratic values it instilled. One strategy, (the broad Islamist project), is the re-appropriation of traditional values in the face of the perceived failure of the modem project. In the face of increasingly transient social configurations "[ldots] the individual feels the need to engage himself in a larger project in which identity is concrete and fixed" (Friedman 1994:191). Another strategy is to intensify the pursuit of the modem through dependency and consumption. But consumption and wealth is highly contingent on the outside flow of resources and goods. The state remains central in perpetuating clientship, wealth and development. Consumption is more than just French style and taste, it represents the positioning of the self in a larger world. These goods/symbols/rewards emanate from the center and flow "[ldots]downward via the chosen representatives of th e center" (Friedman 1994: 182).

Here I would briefly like to explore the ramifications of these strategies in the context of violence by focusing on the highly politicized question of gender identity in contemporary Algeria.

The Predicament of Women

Women have long been a particular trope for Algerian politics. Given the traditional positioning of women in Islamic texts, and subsequently their lives in diverse historical societies, it is not surprising that they should have been a powerful symbolic category for manipulation. In the history of Algerian struggles with French colonialism women were constantly made a symbolic category for manipulation. They became a focus because of French colonial policy of targeting them for "liberation" from the veil. In the present crisis both the state and Islamists alike have made women the focus for symbolic manipulation to constitute their respective values in their bodies.

The effect of symbolization is homogenization. It is not just that women become symbolic categories to be manipulated but that their lived realities become silenced. This is the real crisis for women throughout Algerian society, their loss of space and voice. Their identity is in crisis, feminists and traditionalists alike, because they have been unable to change their subordinate position in either the modern or traditional social sectors and escape being reduced to a symbolic category (Lazreg 1994).

The debate over the Family Code 1959/1984 is instructive of the way the state was able to appropriate women's voice. In the post-independence years the family law code, a legacy of French colonial legislative interventions, became a focus of contest between the state and religious authorities. In 1975 all colonial ordinances relating to family law were revoked in order "[ldots]to purify the structure of the family of all its un-Islamic elements" (Lazreg 1994: 150) and in 1984 a final version of a new code was legislated. The conservatism of the document provoked considerable protest by women. However without any coherent organization their political voice amounted to very little, even those with the moral authority of having revolutionary credentials:

Their appeals to the revolution, socialism and logic only underscored their powerlessness. There was no independent organization to defend their rights. The fact that former women revolutionaries joined the fray in a last-ditch effort to test the extent of their moral power revealed the utter vulnerability of women as a social group (Lazreg 1994: 154).

Attempts to mobilize women foundered on their contradictory position and the state's development problems. They lacked jobs and women were unable to get affirmative action policies implemented; "[ldots] the sacrificial view of women embedded in the Algerian brand of socialist ideology was transformed into a structural exclusion of women as a group in need of affirmative action by the state's development practice" (Lazreg 1994: 155).

The crisis of identity amongst women is expressed in the social chasms opened up by generational life experience, education and career opportunities for younger women. But even the "modern woman" remains trapped in cultural strategies which are profoundly conservative. Thus the institution of dowry, frowned upon during the revolutionary years, has re-emerged as an important moment for display of prestigious modern symbols of consumption. Such "[ldots] ostentatious weddings provide a ritualistic way of 'using a traditional cultural item in order to satisfy modernist ambition'" (Lazreg 1994: 181).

The resolution of the crisis of identity through religion has also led women to abdicate any political responsibility for themselves. From the religious perspective it is God who is sovereign and not the people. For Islamists secularism is a system whereby law:

[ldots] simply ratifies the evolution of mores instead of protecting and controlling them. Thus prostitution, elective abortion, homosexuality, usury, and gambling, alcohol and drugs, are not only tolerated by the law but also legalized under the pretext that public opinion runs in their favor (Lazreg 1994: 215).

The circumstantial silence of women is a result, according to Lazreg, of their abdication of the possibility of speaking for themselves instead of allowing men, secular and religious, to control the discourse on women. If conservative women have accepted salvation in a male mediated tradition secularist women have turned to the outside for salvation, an identity scripted by French feminist associations. However instead "[ldots] of recognizing that they were part and parcel of the cultural vacuum denounced by the religious movement which rendered the quest for a sense of self as futile as the assumption of a ready-made modernist identity. Women failed to score a revolution of their own by missing the opportunity of being the cultural conscience of Algeria through using their own historical circumstances as a metaphor of the impoverishment of Algerian culture, and a model for its renaissance in a new form" (Lazreg 1994: 221-2).

Algerian women's bodies have been appropriated by a rival politics of violence which has made them the symbol of retrieving cultural integrity or modernity (e.g., hijab or no hijab) between rival movements. The cultural amplification of their innocence through violence has simply polarized their positioning. "In another but more deadly replay of their past, women have emerged as the symbols of cultural integrity -- Islamic or secular -- and conflicting interests between men. The sacrificial view of women upheld by the government has finally reached its ultimate expression: their physical immolation on the altar of men's battle for power and control in the names of God and democracy." (Lazreg 1994: 222).

Women's spaces are in crisis in Algeria echoing the larger crisis of national space and the fragmentary world in which there is a ruthless drive to individualize one's fate. But the world created through violence is not going to allow independence or comfortable personal solutions. The failure of women to gain their own political voice and cultural space will leave them vulnerable and manipulated having to confront the same crisis as the post-violence mothers of Lebanon. Reflecting on how she should bring up her daughters at the end of the Lebanese civil war one mother asks: What kind of society should I be educating them for? Should I teach them secular values or conservative religious ones? And if she should choose wrongly what will be the consequences for them? (Lebanon: Bits and Pieces). The strategy offered here was how to fit in, certainly not to create a new space and voice for women in the light of the socially disintegrative violence of the civil war.

The predicament of women highlights the depth of the problem of political appropriation of voice in Algeria. The discourses available have historically marginalized them even if individually it may have appeared otherwise. In being made objects of symbolic manipulation their identity has been defined through male secular and religious discourses and the homogenizing and silencing impact of violence. They cannot simply borrow self-identity constructed outside, they must engage the very domains from which they have been excluded.

POST-VIOLENCE FUTURES

Everything is burned down

Everything is destroyed

Forever.[ldots]

We must mourn the dead

They are all dead

No one is alive

We must mourn them

Thirty-six billion silent kisses

for the dead

(Voice of a woman mourning on a desolate beach)

Any attempt to recreate the social in Algeria immediately confronts the question of morality. The violence in Algeria may be narrativized in many different ways but ultimately it is a question of human sacrifice for political ends. People are being sacrificed, and are sacrificing their own bodies, in the name of beliefs. But to submit to this project, to make ideas worth more than human life, is to face the Abrahamic dilemma. When Abraham prepares to sacrifice his own son Isaac (the first born) in the name of faith, his son Isaac losses his faith. From Abraham we, learn "[ldots] that ultimate surrender to religious belief may lead to ultimate barbarism of repudiating humanity; reflexive self-transcendence comes full circle with the revelation that morality must be an autonomous domain of purpose inherent on the human condition" (Zulaika & Douglass 1996: 126).

Film - "Salima", Producer Florence Dauchez, France 3, 1994

The human condition in Algeria is the alienation of most people from their dismantled social worlds and lives. While the main protagonists may espouse certainty in a future most people have been reduced to survival in shrunken worlds with little capacity to act or have a voice. At this level the meaning of violence is terror, not elevated values, which radically decenters and deauthorizes reality making the possible locus of more inclusive identities and solidarities unclear.

At the level of the nation-state post-violence creates the possibility for voice; for the immediate past to be revealed and for people to have a say in shaping the future. National reconciliation is the term coined to describe the process of regaining voice through national institutionalized channels. But this is a highly directed enterprise which attempts to channel the resolution of grievances, injustices, human rights abuses and restitution of citizenship through the forums of national truth telling (truth commissions), trials and elections. Without a serious attempt at reconciliation through addressing the pain of ordinary people the experience will remain traumatic and socially debilitating.

There are real difficulties in the reconstitution of third, world states as the institutional basis for reconciliation and inclusion. In Algeria's case there is firstly the tendency to see national reconciliation in very limited procedural terms and secondly the question of the deeper violence underlying the present violence. National reconciliation is premised upon the capacity of the reordered nation-state to redress the real social and political grievances of past decades. The conditionality of the post nation-state situation echoes Fanon's sanguine comments about the channels on which such a project must be based externally.

At present the voice being constructed in Algeria is through a circumscribed electoral politics. While this has gradually been expanded to include Islamist groups the idea that reconciliation can occur without a more profound exploration of the spectrum of political violence and its origins is impossible. The forums of truth commissions and trials may end up being quite symbolic -- it is impossible to hear everyone and stories become emblematic of suffering and personal tragedy -- but they permit the public testimony and confession of the past violence through the voices of both the perpetrators and survivors. It is only through these voices that a different national story can emerge -- that reality can be re-anchored. At present there is little likelihood that the state (secular or Islamist) will expose itself to critical self-examination.

But even more problematic historically is the prospect of reconstituted states in managing imploded societies. Unlike the optimistic moment of decolonization/independence the present post nation-state project is restricted to state restabilization. The redistributive problems which underlay violent breakdown of government are presently being exacerbated by the restructuring policies imposed by their international creditors and potential corporate investors. The withdrawal of national social responsibility for the circumstances of the poor and the privatization of state services, especially security, does not augur well for the reconstitution of national space as an inclusive domain. Moreover the prioritizing private needs and interests only further closes down the possibilities for social solidarity. The inclination of elites to anchor identities in metropolitan cultures and hitch their futures up to globalizing trends and markets entrenches their own parochialism and a denial of local realities.

CONCLUSION

The present violence and social disintegration in Algeria raises many questions about the responsibilities we share in the contemporary globalizing world. The violence itself is the first barrier to arriving at a moral position about the suffering and how this might end. The spectacle of the tortured body is deployed once again as a potent political symbol to manage the turmoil of disintegrating worlds.

The political understanding of the Algerian conflict has too readily accepted the discourse of the protagonists as a medium for explanation instead of focusing on the reasons why violence has escalated to such levels of brutality. This we locate in the underlying processes of social dislocation and disintegration where individuals could no longer rely either on traditional reciprocities or state managed care and development to realize even the most basic needs. It is in the processes of dislocation, the deinstitutionalizing of life at different levels, that violence is deployed. Violence is a strategy not simply an outcome or cause. It manipulates different levels of experience, different forms of symbolic communication and confronts everyone at the level of individual consciousness -- how we know and participate in social reality. It is impossible to enter the abyss of violence and make it an object of study. Violence is about the borderlands of existence, the margins where reality is insecure and foggy. Ye t it is also pervasive reaching the cracks of everyday life and it has the semiotic quality of art being "[ldots]able to conjugate a series of moments, of different times and spaces in one instant of perception" (Villaveces-Izquiero 1997:239).

The morality of intervention in the Algerian tragedy is to create the possibility for voice. The discourse on human rights is in fact too abstract and distancing and actually presumes a legal order for their implementation. And the first step in facilitating voice is to recognize the Other's humanity. As we have argued, it is voice which represents the most elementary moment of self identity. Beyond this we cannot presume the meaning of experience from different spaces.

But the body doesn't end arguments between cultures: it begins it. What is pure suffering in one culture may be ecstasy in other; what is humiliation in one may be only humbling in another. We share a body, it is true; but we do not live inside it in the same frame of mind. What matters then is not that we agree on ethical substance, but that we agree on a procedure, a set of rules in which to thrash out arguments. The procedure commits us, whatever our cultural tradition, to a moral minimum: to attempt, as far as we can, to enter into the moral world of the Other, to appreciate the very distance which separates the Other from us, and to treat moral dialogue as an exercise in mutual persuasion rather than a display of force or cultural prestige. (Ignatieff 1997: 212).

While we may treat Algeria as a quarantined space consumed by dangerous passions we too easily allow the tortured body to excuse us from knowing better the circumstances of this crisis. We have disarmed and desensitized ourselves through the ease of distant witnessing (media[ted] violence and accepting as settled sociological concepts (nation-state, Islamic fundamentalism, family, tribe) and categories of experience as knowledge. The Other and their experience is invented as a category and housed in ordering concepts.

At the time of decolonization/independence Bourdieu observed:

Europ[acute{e}]en connait de moms en moms les populations autochtones, a mesure que s'institute cette sorte de s[acute{e}]gr[acute{e}]gation de fait, fond[acute{e}]e sur les dif[acute{e}]rences de niveau de vie et sur la s[acute{e}]gr[acute{e}]gation de fait, fond[acute{e}]e sur les diff[acute{e}]rences de niveau de vie et sur la s[acute{e}]gr[acute{e}]gation [acute{e}]conomique r[acute{e}]gionale. (Bourdieu 1973:114-5)

It is not just the Algerians facing the crisis of social abjection in the return to the politics of human sacrifice. All our societies are being rendered increasingly vulnerable to the reinstitution of the social through violence, the resort to the symbol of the tortured body, the moment of cultural remaking in the abject, in order to authorize and render fixed a world. This is a terrifying prospect where the triadic structure is loose and multiple; agency is thing of play and reality produced from repetition and rumor. The tendency to look away and thereby confirm the Othering of violence and the abyss of a terror torn reality does not absolve us from a constructive and compassionate role in witnessing -- something we cannot escape.

Modem Algerian history does convey one disarming message; in the violent histories of making the colonial state, the postcolonial nation-state and post nation-state the legacy of violence is a very fragmented world which the expected processes of modern transformation did not unify. This history tells us that there is no possibility that violence, in the name of any unitary world view, can realize its project. The legacy of what is lived is part of every present, as Algerians are only too well aware. Human sacrifice in the name of the Islamic or secular traditions does them no justice -- they are actors in borrowed clothing in Algeria's present dramatic upheaval!

Michael Humphrey is a professor in the School of Sociology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

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Algeria Report on Human Rights Practices for 1996, Us Department of State, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, January 30, 1997.

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Desnoes, Edmundo 1985. "The Death System." In Marshall Blonsky (ed) On Signs, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 39-42.

du Bois, Page 1991. Torture and Truth London: Routledge.

Fanon, Frantz 1967. The Wretched of the Earth: Harmondsworth: Peguin Books.

Feldman, Allen 1990. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.

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Ignatieff, Michael 1997. "Varieties of Experience," Index on Censorship, 3, 29-12.

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ENDNOTES

(1.) I am using Islamist to refer to the cluster of different movements in Algeria which have pursued the use of violence in their protest in being excluded from the electoral process. The history of the use of violence and the officially declared withdrawal of parties like the FIS from violence is acknowledged. The purpose is to explore the problem of the legacies of violence in the crisis of values.

(2.) While there is strong evidence that sections of the security services and military have been involved in massacres it is not at all clear who and why. Explanation is offered in terms of doubling the terror and alienating everybody from all forms of social trust. See the Amnesty International Report 1997, Algeria: Civilian population caught in a spiral of violence.

(3.) In Algeria, the Constitution (f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence) provides for the inviolability of the home, but the State of Emergency authorizes provincial governors to issue exceptional search warrants at any time. Security forces often entered residences without warrants. The security services also deployed an extensive network of secret informers against both terrorist targets and political opponents. The Government monitored telephones and sometimes disconnected service to political opponents (see Section 3). Security forces detained relatives of suspects to try to compel the suspects to surrender (see Section 1.d., Algeria Report on Human Rights Practices for 1996, from U.S. Department of State, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 30 January 1997.

(4.) Fussell (1979) notes how participants in bloody and protracted wars - those enclosed by the abjection of war, find it difficult to imagine things ever ending. This was the case with the Great War and even the Vietnam war.

(5.) This is described by Gross, Mcmurray & Sweenberg (1996) as this century's bloodiest atrocity against immigrants to have occurred in the West.

(6.) Recruits are paid three times the minimum wage. (Zaoui 1997).

(7.) Tuquoi (1997)

(8.) See statement by Anwar N. Haddam, President of the Parliamentary Delegation Abroad, FIS Bureau of information, FIS Website (www.fisalgeria. org/pictures/silentphoto/silent.html), 20 September 1997.