Status Updates From Violence: A Micro-sociologi...

Tremendous - powerful arguments with lots of empirical evidence. Enjoying my first Collins book.

Christ this is a grim book. Fair bit of good survival knowledge, though.

“violence is not brute force alone, but where successful it is a skill at picking and maneuvering victims into playing one of the victim roles.” Excerpt From: Collins, Randall. “Violence.” Princeton University Press, 2013. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright. Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/us/TQ9CT.l

“One learns how to become a victim. This occurs both in the short run, at the violent end of the process, and in the long run of moving down the slope. One learns how to fall into resolutions to confrontations that put one successively on the defensive, increasingly passive, increasingly allowing the tension/fear of confrontation to transfer energy to the aggressor and take it away from the victim”

“The torturer has learned a skill, a rather complex interactional technique, for getting an end-condition of emotional feedbacks—rather like creating a drug high—out of one’s own body and via the intermediary of another body. However horrible, it is a form of knowledge, a way of feeling comfortable in the zone of being a habitual abuser of some other person