Vigilance: On Conflict, Social Invisibility, and Negative Potentiality

Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between conflict, social invisibility, and negative potentiality. Taking its empirical point of departure in fieldwork conducted in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, it illuminates the manner in which people orient themselves toward precarious prospects and potentialities. Little attention has been paid to the orientational effects generated by long-term conflict-that is, the way that violence, as an underlying possibility, an imagined oncoming event, influences social life. Moving from the empirical to the theoretical, and from the specific to the general, the article compares two areas of conflict and orientation toward negative potentiality before moving on to a more general discussion of invisibility and potentiality in social life and theory.At a first glance, Belfast and Bissau may not seem like obviously comparable entities. In Belfast, the social and political environment is locked in a conflictual divide separating Protestants from Catholics, the British from the Irish. 4 The city seems fixed in structures of old hatred and fear, and the poorer, more militant areas remain divided. Despite more than 10 years of 'peace' and an economic boom, Belfast is still separated into Protestant and Catholic areas and population groups. The sectors in question are so solidly divided in terms of ethnic, national, political, and religious categories and positions that there is very little movement between them.Much of the opposite is the case in Bissau. Where Belfast gives the impression of being profoundly rigid, regimented, and structured, Bissau appears fluid and emergent. The city is intensely multi-ethnic with a myriad of mixed neighborhoods and a lively inter-ethnic and inter-religious interaction, all packed into a slow and placid everyday life. Politically, however, the city is tumultuous and charged with uncertainty. Caught in a prolonged state of conflict and strife, its inhabitants are acutely attentive to political tension and changes. Instead of presuming that political positions and processes are stable and enduring, they are busy trying to predict how they will change and seeking to identify shadow alliances and new coalitions, as well as possible scenarios and their eventual effects. Although Belfast and Bissau do not share key values, symbols, orders, or historical ties as such, what they do share-what Herzfeld (2001: 263) calls the "feasibility condition" of comparison-is a long-standing circumstance of political trouble and uncertainty. In both cities, conflict has had such prevalence that it is no longer a critical event but instead a critical continuity-a condition, rather than an aberration. Although neither place is currently at war, hatred smolders, and conflict is seen as an underlying constant that can easily re-emerge, creating an understanding of political processes as brittle, delicate, and full of impending disasters.

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