The Power of Procedure: Systemic Violence in Popular Narratives About Crime and War

초록

Thanks to its broadness and conceptual abstraction, systemic violence threatens to elude popular narratives predicated upon conventional emphases on individualized characters equipped with a full range of agency options. There are, however, iterations of popular genres, like crime and war fiction, that address systemic violence, model its functional mechanisms, and problematize its effects. Analogous to high modernist and postmodernist “systems fiction,” the police procedural is capable of providing narrative and dramatic accounts of the criminal justice system that neither dissolve the immediacy of direct physical violence amidst the abstractions of interlocking institutional forces driving and opposing crime nor minimize the broad impact of these forces in their inability to generate compelling narratives and affective drama. A particular type of war fiction, similarly suspended between systemic analysis and personal drama, performs the same cultural labor. The popularity of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels or TV series like Law & Order, just as that of Catch-22 or Dr. Strangelove, testifies to popular culture’s ability not just to offer solace for modernity’s pervasive sense of systemic disempowerment, but to provide lucid and critical analysis of the vast impersonal forces impinging on individual lives. A shorter version of this essay was presented at the “Embodying Fantastika” Conference at Lancaster University in May 2019. My sincere thanks to the organizers of that conference for the opportunity to assemble and test some of the ideas that have found their way into this essay. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.