In these scenes, the sight and sound of the whip is as important as its touch. But each of these exaggerates an endemic process of violence that maintains the social order. A little violence goes a long way when it takes on a meaning, when people begin to predict what will be punished. That meaning enables violence to function as a means of control. No social order could maintain itself solely by the physical effects of violence.
Violence is always also a warning, a threat of the possibility of more violence.
Violence itself is a language we all learn to interpret. Rob Nixon, also of the English department, describes the symbolic language of ethnic and class violence, particularly in the struggle between the Inkatha party and the African National Congress . Pain is an active response to its causes, not simply a passive effect. The meanings of words and deeds always include the feelings produced when one makes sense of a situation. The tasteless sexual or racial joke is no joke to a woman who has been raped, a man who was a victim of a hate crime, or to any person who feels less safe from pain than someone who can afford to make these kinds of jokes.