Hello again disappointed friends and cherished opponents,

I hope you’re all getting exactly what you deserve, other than, of course, the unwanted intrusion of another email from me (no one deserves that!). But yeah, sorry to be in your inbox again but I wanted to tell you I’ve had an article come out. I believe this link will open a non-paywalled version for not quite three months: https://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article/23/2/13/410147/The-Work-of-Forgetting-Industrial-Physicians?guestAccessKey=93e55163-0c20-4588-8fc2-40a122883fc0

The article reflects themes I’ve been banging on about here at Open Mode for what feels like ages. (The tedium of these posts… I’m terribly sorry! Existentially so, with all of the apologetic disposition cultivated by my almost 50 years living in the midwest. TRULY. SORRY.) I feel like I learned a great deal by writing this particle and I also feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Here’s the abstract, if you’re not sure if you’re willing to click the link:

“This article uses inquiry into the medical subfield of industrial medicine in the early twentieth-century United States to build on recent work in the history of occupational safety and health and the broader history of injury and harm in working-class people’s lives. It focuses especially on Lori Flores’s concept of “amnesic landscapes,” arguing that the concept can do much to advance the integration of the history of occupational hazards into labor history and enrich our understanding of class per se. It attempts to make this case by examining how medical forms helped organize the labor of specialists in industrial medicine. Those forms made it so that industrial physicians’ medical practice became interwoven with what the article calls the work of forgetting, meaning that industrial physicians helped normalize harms to workers specifically by making them relatively palatable to company management. It further suggests that industrial physicians are representatives of more general social patterns: Wherever we find class, we tend to find violence, and wherever we find the violence of class, we also tend to find work that normalizes and depoliticizes that violence. Flores’s concept helps show how that work can be made the object of historical inquiry.”


In other news, I’m nearly done with Raymond Williams’s second novel, Second Generation, and today I got another of his in the mail, The Volunteers. I continue to feel a bit wistful about being nearly done with Williams, and to feel a bit silly about that. Also, I had a nice chat with a dear friend today who knows a great deal more about science and mathematics today and he used this amazing phrase: averages delete information. I’ll be thinking more about that. It’s resonant with my article, really.

As we were chatting I half-remembered some Jacques Ranciere I read and didn’t really understand in 2006 or so. What I recall from it, paraphrasing and riffing a bit, was that there are sometimes political contexts where one person or group says, basically, ‘here is what we think about our lives and situation’ and another person or group says, basically, ‘do you hear those animals with their noises?’ We are often permitted some limited autonomy in a sense of being allowed to improvise in character, but criticize the casting decisions or otherwise go off script and one becomes unintelligible. Thus political conflict isn’t dialog between opponents (often institutions set up under a pretense of harmonizing political opponents through dialog are casting into a narrow script and an effort to avoid or suppress political conflict). I think this scales downward to a micro/individual level, where a lot of our lives and experiences don’t fit into the representational/communication conventions of the dominant culture and its institutions, and upward to massive levels, where collective action is understood as irrational noise, the random biting and clawing of rabid animals. I think ‘violence’ as a political keyword often serves to help foster this formatting into/representation as noise. I suspect it’s not just rhetorical but a matter of training at (mis)perception. The flip side of being able to live calmly with atrocities like the genocide in Gaza and the many harms of social murder is being able to lose the ability to understand the dignity demands of ordinary people and to get morally indignant at the ways those demands constitute insubordination. The moral laundering of hierarchy and the corresponding training of perception, interpretation, and imagination. Yeah, just saying it was a thought provoking chat and I’ll be chewing over some of this for a while.

One last thought, something that occurred to me in a chat with another friend. I think actually existing Marxists tend to spend time focused on specific times and places - life in THIS part of the capitalist world at THIS time - or on specific facets of life - very simply and a little reductively, reading novels vs interpreting films vs research in policy vs interviewing strikers, and so on. There are important skills involved, and they transfer somewhat - get better at understanding films and get generally better at interpretation, etc - but they ONLY transfer somewhat. Part of what Marxism as a relatively holistic framework - a big tent, if you will - is provide a way to gather and discuss, literally and/or metaphorically, so we don’t discuss only in our siloes. And at the same time, that metaphorical gathering or meeting up involves talking across differences - constructing a common language and arguing over it.

Related, and where I really wanted to go with this, is that I have two hunches tied to this. One is that part of what we do as Marxists insofar as Marxism is aligned against the dominant culture, is a kind of chopping holes or sweeping up - clearing away elements of the dominant ideologies and their distorting effects on us. We think our way out, so to speak, in/as a set of labors, individual and collective, and Marxism is both a set of tools for doing that thinking and a framework for making that labor cooperative and collective. The other thought is that I suspect that when we’re in the areas of capitalist society we’ve spent the most time critically thinking about/against, that’s one thing, and when we’re more out of our element or surprised (and surprises are common because life under capitalism is so turbulent) those are times when we're particularly vulnerable to elements of the dominant ideology/culture creeping in, elements which have to be rooted out later via the collective labors of critical thinking and reflection.

Alright, enough for now! Thanks for considering checking out my article and OH I almost forgot: as I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge fan of this paper, Class as Moral Injury, by Jacob Blumenfeld - https://philpapers.org/archive/BLUCAM-2.pdf The timing of my work on my article I mentioned above did not align with my reading of that paper, which is unfortunate because I’d have liked to have worked with Blumenfeld’s concepts in the article, and is also probly for the best because I’m not sure I could have pulled it off and I often felt I had bitten off more than I could chew in writing this article. But yeah, read the paper, it’s very good!
Okay for real this time, enough for now. Keep on trucking!