Cross-Cutting Preferences in Interactional Trajectories Toward Violence

Contemporary scholarship on violence has offered contradictory accounts for its situated production in interaction, with some proposing that it is difficult to carry out and others contending that most violence is motivated by ostensibly pro-social moral imperatives. We address this puzzle using video recordings of mundane and institutional occasions of violence to document two normative preferences that have “cross-cutting” implications for possible trajectories toward violence once its use has been projected. First, participants orient to a preference for producing violent actions that are, or claim to be, responsive to another’s violent action and thus defensive. Second, participants orient to a cross-cutting preference that privileges progress toward the realization of physical violence once it has been projected. Our analysis of participants’ management of these preferences both elucidates some systematic features of the social organization of (potentially) violent conflicts and extends conversation analytic findings regarding preference organization.