“Violent Possible”: The Stochasticity of Institutional Violence

Abstract Conceiving violences, in the plural, as stochastic, that is, probabilistic, phenomena remains of interest both for advancing the understanding of their open and undetermined nature, and for neutralizing narratives that naturalize them, using them to promote labeling, incite stigmatization, and manufacture scapegoats. What follows here is a prolegomenon focused on the inveterate subtlety of institutional violences. Do institutions generate or facilitate, undo or disregard violences? Are institutions and violences symbiotic? Would it be useful to recover the ecological vision of classical anthropologies to observe in detail the mode of operation of institutional violences? The hypothesis has evolved from observing that multiple conditions materialize in events that may or may not become violent and, that, if they do, in fact, are not necessarily equal, even within the same institution, since they are segmentary, function in non-homogeneous contexts, and with relative temporalities. The notion of stochasticity is promoted to advance the description and eventual explanation of why institutions (social, cultural, economic, or political; altruistic or charitable; public or private) sediment at some probable moment “violent possibles”; a promotion that aids in the critique of structural violence, since the possession of a “potential for violence” by institutions cannot be construed to mean that all institutions are structurally violent or that they necessarily employ force for control at any given moment.