Hey gang,

I’m back at it. Sorry! Close the tab if you want, it’s fine!

So, I’ve got an article coming out soonish in the labor history journal Labor. I’ll let you know when it comes out. I mentioned or at least alluded to it here before. The gist as I remember it is that it’s about industrial physicians, work accidents, and paperwork in the early twentieth century US. Basically, I try to draw out what’s going on with - how fucked up it is - the fact that when something appalling happens in a workplace, often something literally bloody, there tends to also be a bureaucratic process of filling out some forms, with those forms leaving out basically everything that actually matters about the harms. I don’t have enough distance on the piece to tell the degree to, and ways in, which it fails and succeeds but I’m glad it’s coming out, especially because some of it is stuff I first found in 2010 or 2011 and felt very compelled by but didn’t know how to make sense of other than ‘oh my god this is terrible.’

If memory serves I nod briefly to some Raymond Williams in the piece though the bulk of it was written before I did my recent deep dive into Williams. I now, or maybe future me after really digesting the Williams, would probably do it differently. Anyway, I had a bit of a productive-for-me moment while teaching and I wanted to try to connect some dots. Here’s another part of what the piece gets at or tries to get at. I’ve argued in several places that class is intrinsically unjust because harmful: where class relations exists, people are harmed, because class - like racism - is a pattern of harm. In this piece I got part way toward expressing something related that I’ve fumbled to say in posts here at Open Mode, which is that also where we find class we find processes and practices that facilitate normalizing the harms of class. Or, where we find social murder, we find means to help the people who benefit from murderous social relations to be okay with social murder. I don’t get into it in the Labor piece but as I’ve tried to say here I think these means of being okay with social murder face two basic directions, one being a matter of (in)accurate account of social processes and their effects (ie, do people actually understand how the social machinery works and what it does?) and the other being a matter of (in)appropriate moral valuation of fellow living beings (ie, do people actually appreciate the singularity and dignity of others)? To put it more simply, the means of being okay with social murder are a matter of a tendency to become a dipshit (lack of understanding the social) or a tendency to become an asshole (lack of concern for fellow living beings) or both.

In the Labor article I briefly nod to an older article that talks about medical forms as aesthetic objects, the idea being that those forms represent the world and shape thinking through specific kinds of use of language, as novels and plays and songs and so on do, though obviously more boringly. This is tied to the thought I had today. I’m currently teaching Daniel Lachance’s wonderful book Executing Freedom. (I’m biased because he’s a friend but I do think the book’s great, and it teaches really well.) Part of the book examines popular culture depictions of the death penalty and attitudes to the death penalty. In class we were talking about how different kinds of stories, films, and so on can convey a political content in the subtext in ways that may not always be obvious, especially for those of us with a habit of sort of tuning out while taking in the work. My go-to explanation of this is Batman comics: I’ve read a fair bit of them and I remember images of Batman standing over a criminal he’s just punched or is about to punch in a dark, garbage-strewn alley where the walls are massively tall and close together - a cramped space that looms over people. As a kid that stuff was really fun and I didn’t notice any of the subtext that came in along with the ‘wow neat what a cool adventure hero!’ surface content, that subtext including the implications that cities are scary, dirty, impersonal, too large of a scale to be appropriate to human life, or that justice is basically when a good guy - and that it’s a guy matters here, it’s a gendered concept of social order - makes a bad guy feel physical pain.

This sort of relates to stuff I’ve said on here a bit, I think - and I talked about in class a little as well - about agnotology, the study of the production of ignorance. I nod to that a little in the Labor article and it was on my mind in my essay at the JHI Blog when I talked about how some things don’t get thought about by some people (the term I made up is clunky - I called it ‘capitalism’s unthought’, it was the best I could do. https://www.jhiblog.org/2025/12/29/three-meanings-of-political-economy-reflections-on-intellectual-history-marxism-and-capitalisms-unthought/) I like to think about this partly through the metaphor of a street map, as follows.

I love my neighborhood. People are friendly, lots of people have flower gardens, the business district has modest but nice historical architecture (midwest brownstone kinda thing, I think?), the shops are pleasant and sell stuff I like, the residents are mostly ordinary working class people who are pretty down to earth, it’s pretty diverse racially, and there’s a fair bit of signaling that inclusivity is a value a lot of people share - pro trans and queer stickers and flags and so on. The food’s good - good donuts, pizza, coffee, burger and fries, etc - and we have a library branch right by a big intersection in the neighborhood. Almost none of these qualities show up in a street map. A street map makes the space usable in the sense of helping navigate to or through the space, and in order to do so all the qualities I mentioned, and which I care a lot about, disappear into the white space of the map, between the lines of the roads, the roads being of course useful for my life in driving to work and running errands but not figuring in my love of the place. So, there’s a way of representing the world for some purposes, highlighting some elements of the world, which is simultaneously a way of not representing parts of the world, as a necessary part of serving the purposes involved. This is, I think, a kind of aesthetic convention - which is the thought I had today.

Williams has a bit somewhere, maybe multiple somewheres, where he argues that the reception of artworks is a creative activity itself. That is, it’s a mistake to think art makers are the active thinking creative doers and the audience are just passive recipients. One way to illustrate this is via scenes in plays/TV/movies something like the following: two characters start talking, then start arguing. One character turns to the audience and addresses them directly saying ‘ugh, my friend is always like this, so annoying, right?’ and the other character doesn’t hear them. This represents something like the first character’s thoughts and also does something that’s above my paygrade (I am closer to being a literature understander after reading the Williams I’ve read but I’m not there yet! I figure I can be in five to ten years, good lord willing and the crick don’t rise) that links audience and performer in a particular and, I dunno, winking sort of way. This kind of thing only works because audiences know, sometimes implicitly - ie, without knowing they know - that the character addressing them is saying something the other character can’t hear. That’s a convention we who are relatively fluent in this kind of work accept and it helps the work to, uh, work. And it works because the people who made the work and the people who take in the work have a shared understanding and the audience draw upon that understanding as they engage the work. Ditto for maps: we can only use maps because understand maps, obviously. And thus ditto for the forms of (non)representation that I meant maps as analogy for.

That is, my hunch is that the ways that the world is (non)represented exist specifically within particular conventions analogous to what I mentioned where a character addresses the audience. I mentioned two ways of helping powerful people be okay with social murder and I said there’s a tendency to make them into dipshits who don’t understand the organization of society and/or assholes who don’t care about the harms resulting from that organization. The tendency is a result of political-and-labor processes because being okay with social murder takes some work by the powerful and their lackeys. The ‘ways of helping’ that I mentioned, I suspect, tend to exist in the form of specific aesthetic conventions as materialized/organized in particular instances like the medical forms my Labor article looks at. That is, the conventions and related objects are a matter of resources used in the work of being okay with social murder and also a matter of organizing that work in time and place specific ways.

As always, I’m annoyed by and self conscious about how abstract this gets because I’m talking about people literally dying. Trying to concretize it a bit: I grade students’ work as part of my job. I do that work of grading in part in a spreadsheet, which also records the results of that work - ie, I type in the assignment grades over the semester and use the spreadsheet to keep those assignment grades until the term is over, then to turn the assignment grades into an over all grade. Simultaneously with all of this, doing that work and being ‘in’ the spreadsheet means I am also in a headspace in relation to my students and their work, one I object to for various reasons (if I had a modest amount more power than I do, education would not involve grades) but which I still inhabit. The spreadsheet-and-grades headspace is not one that can really hold the things I actually care about in teaching or my relationships with students or students as unique individuals with dignity. That is, the spreadsheet as object is part of an aesthetic convention or set of conventions like a medical form and a street map, a matter of (non)representation in that it depicts some phenomena at direct cost of not depicting some other phenomena (ones that are more important).

So, part of what I’m trying to get at is that while I do think there is, as I’ve mentioned on here before in relation to Werner Bonefeld’s work, a general tendency toward forms of indifference that Bonefeld and Adorno calls social coldness, I also think that tendency often a) exists in the form of specific aesthetic conventions like what I’m talking about here, b) gives rise to such conventions, and c) is partly inculcated by those conventions. Part of why this matters is that these conventions and their relationship to/their instantiation in and through specific kinds of objects like medical forms and spreadsheets and so on are all subject to (and are all raw material for use in) empirical inquiry of the sort done by historians and other scholars.

Another way to come at this: if memory serves, Williams writes in Marxism and Literature that we should qualify uses of the word hegemony so it’s not a general condition but a specific activity or relationship in a particular time and place: a hegemony, this hegemony. He stresses that hegemony is not only a matter of ideas but is something of a full spectrum process, a whole way of living the world including ideas, stories, images, feelings, dispositions, actions, and so on. I tend to lean toward thinking of it in terms of written ideas in books and words uttered by relative elites, which is only piece of the puzzle, and I tend to think of it in terms of specific positive content along the lines of trust in authority, patriotism/nationalism, and so on. At the same time, a key part of any hegemony is what it renders relatively absent, not positive content - the blank space between the lines indicating roads on the map. The stuff blanked out still exists, of course, and often it’s some of the most urgent of life experiences that fall into that blank space, so it continues to have effects. The blanking out is a matter of disorganizing how people understand and respond to those effects, and insulating some other people from having to notice those effects. In rambling here about paperwork and aesthetic conventions and so on I’m trying to get at how keeping parts of life blanked out in the ‘map’ of any particular hegemony takes ongoing work - it’s not blanked out once and for all, it’s an active ongoing practice that has to be done in specific ways in specific places using the resources provided by the conventions I mentioned.

Alright, thread unspooled, such as it is (“it’s not a lot, but it’s what I got”) so time to get back to the usual grind - job stuff, errands, seething, staring in horror, etc. I’ll be back at some later point to worsen your day again, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. In the meantime, you keep on trucking, dear friends and beloved enemies.