Facilitative bloodlessness/laundering violence
Some more covid zero zealot marxist (CZ2M) thoughts real quick (eh, I mean, I hope, I’m tryna get in a run by the river today, plus I got more email to despair over...) in follow up to my last genius excretions here at Ye Olde Opene Mode. (I apologize for six of those last eight words. This modality of openness has it costs, and I’m still finding my voice too.) May need a bit of a runway to get there.
Ahem
In my book I argue, in short, that the economy is a death and dismemberment machine, that the law responds to the people harmed by that machine in deeply inadequate ways, that workers’ compensation laws were a reorganization of that inadequacy - the law became differently bad - and one that encouraged employers to become newly unwilling to hire disabled people (because disabled people might raise employers’ costs for employee accidents). In the final chapter I argue that physicians employed in large companies became what I believe I call discrimination technicians, the front-line enactors of a program of medicalized employment discrimination against disabled people.
I’m currently working on a draft where I return to those doctors - a lot of stuff didn’t go into the book. Part of what has long preoccupied me and didn’t go into the book is the role of medical forms in all of this. There’s something so grotesque about routine, dull paperwork entering into employment discrimination and into the medical services doctors provided to the injured (the doctors patched up people brutalized by the death machine then sent them back into it - more blood for the blood god!). It reminds me a lot of the scenes in the movie Brazil about bureaucratized torture and planning for and record-keeping about torture.
What I’m trying to get at in this draft, and frankly I’m worried it won’t work, is the way the medical forms facilitated not knowing, convenient ignorance. The methods of keeping records and reporting on the labors performed by these company doctors meant that lots of awful human drama didn’t get captured, and management personnel who weren’t in the room for that awful human drama wouldn’t have to know about it. I’m currently characterizing the laundered representations that resulted from these methods of record keeping and reporting with the term ‘facilitative bloodlessness.’ Production was often literally bloody, and employment discrimination was metaphorically bloody. All the blood got laundered away so management never had to know - at least not know in any visceral sense.
I’ve relatively recently learned there’s a word, agnotology, to refer to either the social production of ignorance or the study thereof. Charles Mills has also written, I’m given to understand, about what he calls epistemologies of ignorance. I’d eventually like to read on this stuff. (I may have mentioned it before, I can’t remember.) I think this kind of thing is a key part of how the pandemic is being managed right now, as I know I have managed.
On that, I think this essay "Preventing Nuclear War" by what's-his-face Fisher (I told you! shitty first drafts up in this piece!) is worth reading. https://books.google.com/books?id=ygoAAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA11#v=onepage&q&f=false Fisher describes presidents being subject to institutional mechanisms that present the question 'launch the nukes or nah?' in ways that that bake in denial and emotional distancing to the way the question is posed, and in doing so increase the likelihood of launching the nukes. Against that, Fisher says that the nuclear codes should be stored in a capsule inside the heart of a volunteer who accompanies then president at all times with a briefcase containing a big butcher knife. That way if the president decides to incinerate many thousands of innocent people, to act on that decision, he has to cut the heart out of one innocent people. That would offset the denial and distancing via jargon. I read it as an essay on agnotology and how to, err, cut through it, and I think the condition Fisher describes the US president as being in with regard to launching the nukes is also probly the condition the president is in with regard to loads of harms, both military and political as well as the ostensibly depoliticized forms of harm that fall under the umbrella of social murder. And the presidennt is far from the only one in that condition. I think that's part of how social murder is facilitated and how the state becomes an accomplice or intensifier of social murder.
I think the facilitative bloodlessness that results from what I've here called the laundering of violence has at least two facets in the pandemic, one, as I sort of talked about last time, it helps the ghouls to live with themselves. I also suspect it’s sort of on-ramp the ghoulification: powerful people aren’t necessarily fully ignorant so much as they may be learning to actively tune out the harms (like in the scene in Children of Men where the one guy says ‘I just don’t think about it’); institutionally facilitated ignorance helps them learn to tune out. Two, it does ideological work on everyone else by making it harder to even have information about what’s going on. Three, ghouls with clean consciences can better do ideological work - ‘trust me, everything is fine’ is easier and more effectively said when one can truly believe it while one says it.
I suspect that for any concrete expression of capitalism’s tendency to social murder there are real practices of ignorance-making, so that one could fruitfully do an inquiry to the agnotology of social murder in any examples of its actual existence in the world. I also think that some forms of expertise and professionalism especially facilitate this, at least in specific times and places, like medicine, law, and quantitative styles of thinking/representing. That’s not to say those are always and only ignorance-facilitative, it’s to say that specific ways of practicing them are, and further that they foster confidence in ignorance - going untroubled, treating what one doesn’t know as either nonexistent or not worth knowing. I suspect these areas only really play that role of being especially good for making confident ignorance when they’re of high status (and vice versa - not high status if not facilitating confident ignorance) rather than being intrinsic to those forms of thought. This also means they’re not especially reversible - an expert serving ignorance-making has a degree of power to shape perceptions that tends to outweigh the perception-shaping power of similar modes of expertise used critically. That’s in part to say it’s an uphill battle and expertise alone can’t win it, needs mass mobilizations which will initially be called unreasonable.
Enough for now, plus this thought’s run out.
I lied. One last thought: those of us who were like 'wtf where was public health in all this?!' over the last few years probly failed to grasp that public health has always had a significant streak of laundering violence, and that the field is a site of contestation over the degree to which it will play that role vs. another role - we believed myths and ideology about public health. I still do, they hit precognitively and set up cognitive expectations that lead to the awful surprised feeling like 'how could they DO that?!' Not at all to minimize the awful and I suspect genuine bad turns amid all this, but to say that it's important to get those turns correct. Okay now REALLY done.