A more detailed response than I felt up to at the time to Nick’s reading of my treatment of the accidental shooting of Linke (not Finke, poor chap) by the RAF during their rescue of Baader…

The point I wanted to make about what happened to Linke, was that neither the “bourgeois” nor the “militant” framing of violence adequately addresses the problem of - as AWP puts it - “collateral damage”. The bourgeois/moralistic view is essentially that it’s reckless to run around with guns, because someone might get hurt. More generally, actions that might upset social peace (like rioting, setting up blockades, occupying buildings) are to be avoided because the risk is that there will be violent, destructive consequences: someone’s property might get damaged (harm to life and limb is framed in terms of damage to a person’s life as his property). Recent student occupations have provoked responses along similar lines from non-involved students: such actions are bad and misguided because they upset the peace, obstruct my access to and enjoyment of what I am putting myself into debt for, and risk inciting a violent retaliation (the cops just won’t be able to help themselves).

My claim about the RAF is that they framed the “struggle” between themselves and their chosen enemies as a combat situation in which non-combatants didn’t really figure as agents or participants at all - only those involved in the struggle counted in terms of the matrix of causes and circumstances with which the RAF were concerned when planning their actions. An elderly librarian making a dash for the exit is a contingency a bit like a stray neutrino flipping a bit in a microprocessor somewhere - conceivable in principle, but not something you pay any attention to when trying to figure out whether your program will crash or not. This does bespeak a certain myopia, a lack of practical imagination; but every framing entails a circumscription of practical imagination, for precisely practical reasons (avoiding information paralysis, in the first instance).

Now, the claim I put forward is that both the bourgeois/moralistic frame and the RAF frame exclude risk and contingency - the former because it precludes undertaking risky actions, the latter because it seeks to make the outcomes of such actions calculable by narrowing the frame to include only agents whose intentionality is strategically predictable in terms of a sort of “folk psychology” of combat (“X wishes to kill Y”). I’ll leave it to the war nerds to tell me if this is at all similar to the way US military commanders actually think, but it seems at least superficially plausible that it might be.

Nick’s point, it seems to me, is that excluding risk and contingency (beyond a certain threshold) is an inevitable and potentially valuable effect of framing in general, and that the RAF’s “contraction” of their frame was what enabled them to intervene in a situation that would otherwise have appeared paralysingly complex. But there’s what I take to be a slight slippage between his argument and mine, when he says that bourgeois moralism would have forced the RAF to include civilians in their calculations (so restraining them from doing anything that might have risked civilian life). Within the bourgeois moralistic frame, actions that disturb social peace and endanger property are eschewed not because the consequences of that disturbance have to be calculated (and this is practically paralysing), but because they are superstitiously assumed to have bad consequences in all cases. It’s a moralistic frame because it rules out even thinking about such recklessness: you “just don’t go there”. Now in fact, if you do think about it, you will see fairly quickly that there are all sorts of risks and incalculables; but only if you insist on a fully-calculable, risk-free model of engagement will this perception prevent you from acting. What the bourgeois/moralistic and RAF attitudes have in common, it seems to me, is this insistance on a secure framing, one which circumscribes a safe zone of the calculable.

As I said on the day, Nick’s tactical suggestions towards the end of the paper seemed to me like the kinds of suggestions an information analyst or management consultant might consider when looking to overhaul a computer system or corporate environment. The systems-theoretic bias is very appealing, at one level, to techie minds like mine. But the underlying assumption, I think, is that one is dealing with possible permutations of a system under some framing operation (what Badiou calls the state of the situation, the count-of-the-count); and this results in a technical-managerial view of political processes which either corralls risk and contingency within the domain of the calculable, or expels them into the outer darkness.