In classical mechanics, the area of physics devoted to the study of movement at the down-to-earth Newtonian level, force is defined as an entity¹¹ capable of altering a body’s state of inertia, either by altering its condition of rest or uniform motion and/or by causing elastic deformations in flexible objects (D. Van Nostrand, 1956; Alonso; Finn, 1972; Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; Deeson, 2007). Consequently, it is something that can be said objectively to act on things when these are observed to experience such a change of state. Furthermore, as a quantity, force is vectorial: in other words, it combines magnitude with an angular component (the result is dependent on its direction in relation to the observed body at the point of application).¹² Consequently, it has a sign, an angle, and an intensity, and can be measured and compared: we can say that it is applied in greater or lesser intensity in a given situation and/or that there is a disproportion between its investments on either side - since we can speak of an optimal limit to its application, the infinitesimal point after which the inertial resistance of the movable body is overcome (for example, the resistance of the forces of weight and friction, which oppose the force inducing motion to the body).

From the sociological point of view, this framework of physical definitions may trivially make sense if we adopt an approach such as the actantial model, entirely consistent with the approach advocated here. This model was introduced into the social sciences by Bruno Latour (1997(1987)) through the concept of actant, proposed by the Lithuanian linguist later settled in France, Algirdas Greimas (1976(1966)), the architect of a semiotic model dedicated to analyzing narratives, narratology. According to Greimas himself, the actant is whoever or whatever practices an act. More specifically, it is an entity with the observed capacity to determine what occurs in a narration. Moreover, this entity may be of any kind, a person, an animal, an object, an idea.¹³ Within this scope, we can think of force as the fundamental actant, the sign of everything that makes something move, makes something happen, the determinant of any situation (if someone or something determines what occurs, it does so because it applies some physical or symbolic force). In this way, an entire series of metaphors of a physical kind (energy, work, potency)¹⁴ acquires sociological feasibility through the possibility of observing this operator as something actually present (and with objective actancy) in social interactions.

John Dewey (1916; 1929(1916)) also presents a series of physical metaphors to characterize violence, which he describes as “wasteful” (1916, p. 363). His treatment follows an energetic economy: the term power or energy “denotes the effective means of operation; ability or capacity to execute, to realize ends. (…) It means nothing but the sum of conditions available for bringing the desirable end into existence” (p. 361). With this, Dewey argues that power “is force” and that it is through the latter that “we excavate subways and build bridges and travel and manufacture; it is force which is utilized in spoken argument or published book” (p. 361). He continues: “(To say) not to depend upon and utilize force is simply to be without a foothold in the real world.” This energy/potential/power/force “becomes violence when it defeats or frustrates purpose instead or executing or realizing it” (p. 361). Although the thinker’s idea may appear to be a utilitarianist rationalism, it is effectively pragmatic insofar as it seeks to comprehend how the objective substrate of force is always an object of interpretation, such that when this energy is deviated from its ‘purpose,’ it seems excessive: more force than necessary to move/elastically deform a body (that is, to exceed the aforementioned optimal point) is a disproportionate force and merits the name violence if and when it is treated as an excess not associable to any purpose. Our approach is close to Dewey’s reasoning, but seeks to comprehend how the actors themselves qualify this allocation of energy: it is a question, therefore, of distinguishing between disproportion (a neutral phenomenon), purposelessness (an evaluation of pure effectiveness) and illegitimacy (an evaluation of valuative efficacy).

Force can be considered a model pragmatic entity insofar as, being fundamentally invisible, only its consequences are perceptible (Peirce, 1977(1893)), that is, its effects on bodies. Thus, people seem to take into account the difference in its application (or the differential result of its relational applications): for social actors in practical life, force is, for all intents and purposes, the difference between forces in any interaction. Consequently, since what they generally see is this asymmetry (hence force is called disproportionate, considering the disproportion between applied and necessary force, the disequilibrium between force and counterforce), people evaluate it as excessive and may value or evaluate it according to moral perceptions linked to non-fixed points in energetic terms: apparently, for the actors, the same force applied in a situation and appearing as disproportional is judged violent or not depending on whether or not they perceive an energetic imbalance (that is, in the potential use of force) between those involved. As we shall see below, this violence may be subject to a moral problematization (and an attempt to intervene in the agency), depending on whether it is considered, at one pole, ‘unfair’ or ‘cowardly,’ or, at the other, ‘necessary’ or ‘natural,’ according to the situation, context, those involved and so on. In other words, it depends on the regime according to which this disproportionate force is qualified - as violence or not and, if so, what kind. In play here, therefore, is the name attributed actantially by people to this difference, based on the perception of an energetic economy that they consider active in the case at hand. A variable framework of energetic economies seems to be at work here, according to which the actors consider an investment of energy (and/or the capacity to invest it) and a return in terms of motion or deformation as the opposite poles of expression of what they perceive as a disproportionate force applied when certain movements or deformations take place.

In general, therefore, exploring the polysemy of violence through a sociology of disproportionate force involves focusing attention on three crucial aspects of the object: 1) how actors recognize the forces they believe to be constitutive of a particular situation; 2) the ways in which these actors respond to them; and 3) the forms through which they themselves produce and reproduce them.

Disproportionate force concentrates two dimensions essential to the analytic enterprise proposed here since it constitutes both a form of qualifying a particular situation and a form of recognizing the forces that compose it. Put otherwise, the recognition of something called violence simultaneously involves the recognition of a relation between forces - and, whether before or after, necessarily including their identification and characterization - and their moral qualification - as a relation subject to, after being called disproportionate, being called bad. By qualifying a particular situation or action as one of ‘violence,’ a certain configuration is also recognized, a plurality of actants organized in a specific way. In this sense, it can be said that violence, even taking into account its polysemy, is a profoundly relational category since it captures a particular configuration of forces and a plurality of actants at the very moment in which it is qualified as such. However, just as Simmel (2009(1908)) proposed, when it comes to thinking about the relations between form and content, these two dimensions are distinguishable only in analytic terms, since, for the actors themselves, they tend to appear as something integrated into a single experience. At any rate, the different ‘sociologies of violence’ analyzed here concern, first of all, the different forms of recognizing the forces that constitute a particular situation.

In this way, the protocol of a pragmatic sociology of violence, inaugurated as a sociology of the interpretation of disproportionate force, also inevitably entails a pragmatics of how this force is associated with its operators. Therefore, although it involves a force used in disproportion, at the same time it does not seem to be understood by the actors merely as difference, but also as something applied by some agents - figures described by them as strong (Misse, 1999) or even as forces (Brodeur, 2004; Bellaing, 2016) - and therefore something idealized by people as contained in these agents. Moreover, this metonymy consists above all of a play of transferences, which, by superimposing actants and potencies, presumes a set of characteristics of the entities capable of mobilizing disproportional force, especially by situating them within the logic of so-called ‘urban violence’ (Machado da Silva, 1993; 2004; Misse, 1999; Werneck, 2015a; 2015c), its forms of sociability (Werneck; Talone, 2019) and its configurations. It so happens that the set of sociologies explored here is also a set of sociologies of this idealization insofar as it is imagined in violentized situations that someone applies force disproportionally to someone else.

As we have seen, while the sign violence serves to cover distinct things in the world, in the analyses of both researchers and everyday actors, it operates as a metonym, taking the form of diverse signs. We now emphasize the varied meanings of this signification, observed in the vast empirical matrix that we have examined, schematizing the meanings attributed to violence, which, in turn, enables us to map the metaphysics that provide the foundation for behaviors in situations where disproportionate force is mobilized.

A fundamental element of the mechanics of the social production of violence as a native concept involves a primary cognitive filter: through it, something that could be, in principle, pure, neutral, the mobilization of disproportionate force (an objective phenomenon) is taken and converted into a second sign, which actors recognize primordially as a disjunction in relation to the ideal. This cognitive filter is, therefore, strictly pragmatic, emphasizing the effectively practical character of the defined situations. When observed by actors in their day-to-day deployment, these situations translate into something that, with a minimum degree of discomfort (because these situations mobilize a large force), they generally call violence, although not necessarily expurgating it from the spectrum of definitions, either theirs or someone else’s, of what is plausible - as is generally the case in the aforementioned modern interdiction - and, notwithstanding this, without including it, conversely, in a process of moral positivization. In this way, it comprises a safe distance between ideal and factual, much as in the distinction proposed by Austin (1956-1957) between verbs and adverbs. In his analysis of the excuse - a linguistic device capable of giving an operative form of accountability (Scott; Lyman, 2008(1968)) to circumstances (Werneck, 2012a) - the author calls attention to the fact that the concept of adverb fundamentally presumes an alteration vis-à-vis the ideal version of an action, represented by the verb in the infinitive (Austin, 1956-1957, p. 13):

This distancing from the ideal through adverbialization is included in the spectrum of the viable: the adverb functions as an envisaged or predictable modality of the unfolding of an action without it being either the perfect mirror of its idealized version or its imperfect demonization. Thus, for example, if the infinitive of the verb ‘walk’ expresses an image of how the category functions ideally, how one walks for anyone who understands what walking is (putting one foot in front of the other, going from one point in space to another, and so on), an adverb - like ‘slowly,’ ‘quickly’ or ‘stumblingly’ - creates different versions of this abstract movement and litters its path with stones. But none of these obstacles will hurl the walker into the limbo of uncertainty: he or she knows what slow is, what quick is, what stumbling is. This model, which will serve later as a basis for what we call - inspired by Corrêa (2017) - an adverbial approach to violence, accounts for a pragmatic evaluation by expressing the perception of a dissimilar to the ideal, perceived by the actors precisely as dissimilar, but at the same time recognized by them as a modality of this ideal rather than a rupture with it. As Neitzel and Welzer write (2014, p. 409), “violence is practiced by all groups (…) if cultural and social situations make it seem sensible.” In this field can be included not only those situations in which using force disproportionally attributes a productive purpose (according to the actors) to destruction (like knocking down a wall to build another), but also the ‘tough’ tackle or the fight between supporters in sports, the spider that eats the fly, the punishment between gang members in the world of crime, or even the lynching of supposed criminals in the interpretation of the lynchers and their supporters.¹⁵

This classification as violence without seeking to annul the agency of the deployer of the force can be passed through a second, more properly moral filter, which can requalify the disproportionate force in terms of value. This disproportion may be described as morally positive, a qualification historically dominated by the treatment as coercion, and be more than neutralized, becoming positivized in the form of a legitimate use of force - the “legitimate violence” monopolized by the State described by Weber (1947(1922)). Alternatively, it may be morally negativized and reduced to what, for the natives, turns into the substrate of a sociology ‘of violence’ - what they more commonly call violence: the action of disproportionate use of force that they do not recognize, nor see as applicable, with an acceptable meaning. The action is thus classified as ‘violent’ in a form according to which it falls to the level of the unacceptable. In the first case, the process of effectuation involves justification (Boltanski; Thévenot, 2020(1991)), the allocation on a regime of justice (Boltanski, 1990) or regime of the just (Thévenot, 2006), constituting the basis of an order of legitimate domination (Weber, 1999(1921)). In the second case, actions are effectuated either through a circumstance of the situation or through pure and simple imposition (Werneck, 2012a).

This negative moralization can take some different paths. One of them is that the operation of negativization shifts from the specific qualification of a case (person, object, institution, action, and so on) to a generalized level, becoming a metaphysics, a social representation. Another is, through an operation of - for its practitioners - revelation or unveiling, to treat these operations of qualification, metalinguistically, as themselves kinds of violence, altering the positions of qualifier-qualified (or, in many interpretations, inverting the victim-persecutor polarization) and redesigning the operation of the use of force as something previously presented in ineffective or even deceitful form.

This matrix of diverse possibilities results in different meanings that can be analytically conferred by examining the idea of violence, enabling different regimes of interpretation or analytic representation of violence to be discerned, depending on which dimension or operation of this gallery and its repercussions is emphasized, and on which social actors violentized worlds operate, depending on how the signifier (i.e., that which determines the representation/symbolization of something) violence is morphologically localized.

Before presenting these frameworks, however, we need to explain in more detail what precisely we mean when we describe these ‘worlds’ as ‘regimes.’ A regime is a grammar. As two of us wrote in another text (Werneck; Talone, 2019, p. 36):

When we talk of regimes of analytic representation of violence, therefore, we are dealing with grammars whose competences effectuate in a specific way the phenomenon of qualifying mobilizations of disproportionate force as violence. Consequently, since attributing meaning to disproportionate force is the object of the discussion on ‘violence,’ its resignifications could, based on our empirical research, be mapped onto a typology of ‘sociologies,’ distributed in the following sets of regimes, depending on the grammatical type occupied by the signifier ‘violence’:

1) Regimes in which ‘violence’ is a term understood as a substantive, that is, in which this object is understood to constitute a substance and, therefore, an effectively objective entity and a phenomenon in itself that needs to be explained, giving shape to three sociologies:

Figure 1 below summarizes the matrix of regimes of analytic qualification of violence.

As we stated at the outset of this text, this framework of sociologies should not be taken as a synthesis of the main approaches and/or theories on violence in vogue in the social sciences, nor should it be thought that the different regimes describe different established theories or approaches. In fact, many of these tend to be constituted by composites of two or more of these regimes, which ultimately represented a semiotics of the analytics of violence. Moreover, from the viewpoint of several of these regimes, some of the others can be read as particular cases of their representation.²³ Thus, here we have attempted neither to explore how this framework is mirrored in the panorama of studies on crime and violence in Brazil and the world nor to confirm it through a bibliographic review. The objective here has been to test a more abstract treatment of forms of understanding the term/sign violence through a semiotics of its valences (Livet; Thévenot, 1997), both native and analytical.

Figure 1

One of the most striking - and, for our present analysis, most relevant - characteristics of the so-called pragmatic sociology of critique (Boltanski, 2009) - which features among the most prolific contemporary approaches of a pragmatist orientation (Werneck, 2016) - is that one of its fundamental wings, the economies of worth (EW) model (Boltanski; Thévenot, 2020(1991)), presents the metaphysical-pragmatic pairing, taken here as foundational, as a mirroring between two social orders (polity and world) ultimately revealed to be two metaphysics, constructed around the idea of an achieved utopia (Boltanski, 1990, p. 150-151):

The idea of polity (cité) - in the EW model, an achieved utopia founded on the idea of justice, subsequently developed by the authors into a detailed analysis of justifications and agreements²⁴ - appears here as one of diverse possible imagined metaphysics (albeit rooted in experience, without supernatural fantasies), ideal from the viewpoint of their projections of the good onto social life. For its part, the idea of world, which grounds the concept proposed in the excerpt cited (and its attribution to a polity), involves an abstraction emphatically founded in practical life, since it is formed mainly by assemblages of objects put together by actors - but even so, consists of an abstraction. The two mirror each other, one as an elevated abstraction and the other as a grounded abstraction, in the same way as a political philosophy and a sociological theory: the first as an idealization of a thinker who, singularly knowledgeable about the world, projects how it should be; the second as a description of a researcher who, as an empirical observer of the world, explains in generalizable terms what it actually is.

This discussion on the operativity of an analytic treatment based on multiple metaphysically oriented worlds has had a productive impact on our own work. Talone (2015a) suggests that the same form of construction is applicable to social actors when they construct dystopias, imagining models of social life (notably through the idea of a violent city), orderings of sociability, also founded on idealities (how people imagine the world to function) and that call for a pragmatically founded abstraction (a world) to sustain them, but which in this case are not founded on the good but on a view of social life as degenerate, disordered, bad. The idea of an achieved dystopia (Talone, 2015a) thus allows us to consider how social actors conceive the world by thinking of its worst possible version in order to move about in social life and how they define situations on this basis. Teixeira (2013; 2016), for his part, has worked with the circumscription of complex social worlds around the idea of a world of crime and how its central figures are conceived (Teixeira, 2015; Freire; Teixeira, 2016; 2019). In his work, different native theories about how crime becomes embedded in the person define actual practical operative worlds, each one according to a specific logic. Also along these lines, Werneck (2012a; 2015b; 2016; 2019a; 2019b; Werneck; Loretti, 2018) has demonstrated in various studies how actors resort to a metapragmatic dimension (i.e., to circumstances) to disassemble the universality of metaphysical ideals in favor of a descriptive correction of the worlds actually presented to them. The same author has also shown how the representation of urban violence can be conceived as an actantial system, operated in terms of the effectiveness of critical actants of this scenario, each defined according to a form of managing force (Werneck, 2015a, 2019b). Set in dialogue here, our different perspectives allow us to take seriously the process through which social actors operate interpretative social worlds that are founded, according to their own constructions, on disproportionate, violentized force, defining social situations via this framework.

The observation of the diverse regimes of violentization in the preceding items of this text has made explicit the plurality of forms through which social actors, in their technical or native analyses, account for the effectuation of occurrences in practical life - and, consequently, recognize practical worlds corresponding to it - based on metaphysics founded on disparate ideas of what something cognizable as violence (disproportionate force when interpreted through one of the regimes) is or should be used. This allowed the design of a research agenda to explore in more depth the peculiarities of each of these grammars and elaborate an analytic protocol for this purpose: by mapping the different meanings of the sign ‘violence’ in each grammar, we can trace out a framework of different competences deployed to find diverse worlds (one utopian, four dystopian, one neutral, always from the viewpoint of the actors involved), all of them articulated at different levels. Table 1 summarizes the interpretation.

While the approach has proven well-suited to this task of mapping violence grammatical diversity, the contiguous observation of the items of this variation also allows us to discern something about their unity that only separation made perceptible. The transversal observation of this framework in the form of a pragmatics of these various analytical representations clearly revealed the same phenomenon traversing them: qualification. It is in the actors’ intersubjective attempt to produce a definition to designate a broad and varying continuum of actions, situations, and actors under a sign called violence - whether this involves naming, adjectivizing, generalizing or identifying the modality - that we encounter the phenomenology we wish to highlight here. Moreover, this attempt to qualify needs to be understood, like any other of this kind, as an intersubjective production of meaning (Weber, 1947(1922); Boltanski; Thévenot, 1983), which signifies the establishment of a shared foundation and thus of a socially processed and scrutinized definition (Peirce, 1992(1878); Weber, 2001(1904)).

Table 1

REGIME OF VIOLENTIZATION	GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY	MEANING OF ‘VIOLENCE’	WORTH IN PLAY (COMPETENCE OF EFFECTUATION)	ANALYTICAL MOVEMENT	DYSTOPIA/ UTOPIA/ NEUTRALITY
(SUBSTANTIVIST) SOCIOLOGY ‘OF VIOLENCE’	SUBSTANTIVE	UNWANTED AND / OR DESTRUCTIVE INTERVENTION IN THE AGENCY	INTERDICTION ON THE USE OF DISPROPORTIONAL FORCE (PHYSICAL OR SYMBOLIC)	DESCRIPTION OF THE FORMS OF OPERATION OF A POSITIVITY CALLED VIOLENCE	D
POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE		DISCIPLINARY CONSTRAINT (COERCION) FOCUSED ON THE ORDER	ORDER	DESCRIPTION OF THE ROLE PLAYED BY A POSITIVITY CALLED VIOLENCE IN THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL ORDER	U
CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE		RESTRAINING INTERVENTION IN AGENCIES (GOVERNMENT)	POWER	UNVEILING THE MECHANICS OF POWER	D
CONSTRUCTIVIST SOCIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE ON ATTRIBUTES	ADJECTIVE	ATTRIBUTE GRANTED TO CERTAIN FORCE ACTIONS/CERTAIN ACTORS WHO DEPLOY FORCE	ATTRIBUITION	EXHIBITION OF ATTRIBUTES’ SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION PROCESSES	D
CONSTRUCTIVIST SOCIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE ON METAPHYSICS	GRAMMAR	GENERALIZED PRINCIPLE TO ALL SOCIAL ORDER ACCORDING TO WHICH A THREATENING ENVIRONMENT IS ESTABLISHED	GENERALIZATION	EXPOSURE OF GENERALIZATION'S SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION PROCESSES	D
PRAXEOLOGIC SOCIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE	ADVERB	VIABLE RESOURCE FOR CERTAIN SITUATIONS	PRACTICALITY	DESCRIPTION OF PRACTICES	N

Source: Authors’ elaboration.

However, it is not simply a matter of recognizing in a constructivist way the constructed character of the sign - this already occurs as a principle of semiotics itself. Instead, it is a question of going further and comprehending the principles regulating its conditions of possibility and the valuative logics underlying its various moralities. It is precisely a question, therefore, of analyzing the metalanguage shaping these regimes as such, the laws of assemblage involved in a model of effectuation of violence as a grounding metaphysics, comprehending how the actors adopt different readings of violence as value (which, in table 1, appears in the column Worth in Play). Consequently, the question here is the analysis of the conditions of possibility of two hemispheres of a pair, both of which lay claim to being foundational, sometimes eclipsing the role of the other. However, like in any semiotic process, we understand this semiotic instauration as a pair of parallel and inseparable endeavors: metaphysics and pragmatics are mutually determined and created contiguously; neither can one say that a world of devices (Peeters; Charlier, 1999) only takes shape thanks to the intervention of a metaphysics (as her egg), nor can one sustain that a grounding metaphysics comes to exist through elevation to the abstract plane of concrete objects and their situated mobilizations (as their chicken). Quite otherwise, it comprises a process that, perceived situationally, is specified precisely by being configured in a situation.²⁵ Thus, the analysis focuses on the mapping of the forms through which this occurs at specific moments.

As a consequence, a pragmatic sociology of violence extends across a spectrum that spans from the history/genealogy of the processes of grammatical abstraction/establishment (and bearing the very fabric of their particular process of effectuation) to the apprehension, characterization, and mapping of regimes of violentization - i.e., grammars, especially (this seems to be the principal vocation of this approach) those involving the analysis of the specific form through which the sign violence appears (sometimes as a polysemic signifier, sometimes as content, sometimes as both) in the phenomenon defining a situation/effectuation. It is in this sense that ‘violence’ becomes understood as the link of a metaphysical-pragmatic pairing - transformed into an interpretant - and the question of this sociology becomes, in a broad sense, the diverse forms of effectuation.

When we refer to this metaphysics, therefore, we find ourselves on the grammatical level, thinking of this type of regulation in terms of its two registers, either idealized (utopian or dystopian) or praxiological-pragmatic. This means that ultimately, we are proposing a sociology of the fundamental (equally generative) grammar of the composition of an interpretant (violence) according to various competences, each of them generative of derived competences. This sociology thus asks: how, under what conditions, do actors adopt one regime of violentization or another, practically using the term violence for any deployment of disproportionate force they observe/experience?

In summary, therefore, our joint work involved observing, in the empirical cases of our previously conducted research, the cognitive phenomenon that we have described as qualification, dissecting it as the construction, by the actors involved, of assemblages of objects capable of effectuating the situations in which they are inserted whenever they are defined based on the actors’ perception of a ‘violent’ situation. This, however, is only achieved from the moment when it becomes effective, above all (and this is the critical point here), the meaning of violence in play (i.e., which demonstrates that its application in the particular case is capable of producing effects, defining the situation). Only in this way is it possible to set out from the presupposition that the actors also engage in these situations via a worldview that interprets natural objects as elements belonging to a world logically ordered according to the regime in question. The field observations from our various research studies show that the use of the idea of violence always corresponds to the implantation of the aforementioned metaphysical-pragmatic pairing: each meaning conferred to it simultaneously defines a logical-moral metaphysics (defining a context of definition of the term) and a set of devices that actualize it in practice.

Thus, we can add another line to the table presented earlier (Table 2).

Table 2

REGIME OF VIOLENTIZATION	GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY	MEANING OF VIOLENCE	WORTH IN PLAY (COMPETENCE OF EFFECTUATION)	ANALYTICAL MOVEMENT	DISTOPIA/ UTOPIA/ NEUTRALITY
PRAGMATIC SOCIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE	INTERPRETANT	INTERPRETANT (METAPHYSICAL-PRAGMATIC LINK)	EFFECTIVENESS	INVENTORY OF PROCESSES FOR ESTABLISHING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN METAPHYSICS AND PRAGMATICS (SITUATED FORMS OF THE INTERPRETANT)	-

Source: Authors’ elaboration.

The analytic sociology proposed here should not be understood as a form of delegitimizing any of the other sociologies (whether analytic or native). We intend to offer a tool to understand the actancy of the idea of violence in each of them - in other words, the weight or value given to this idea in the worldview of the actions, so as to better comprehend the social phenomena occurred based on this definition. Returning to the question of the conceptual validity of this idea, taking its complexity not as an obstacle but precisely as constitutive information, a pragmatic sociology of violence thus seeks to make explicit simultaneously the devices mobilized by the social actors to effectuate the reading of the world from the perspective of a particular regime and those used to effectuate their movements within them.²⁶

Figure 2 summarizes the mechanics of a pragmatic sociology of violence.

Figure 2