moral agnowhatsits and aesthetic somethingsomething?
Some thoughts at the confluence (shaken loose by the resonance?) of a couple three strands of my interests...
I feel like I’ve only really dipped a toe into but there’s a literature on the making of ignorance. Some of the scholars involved coined a term, agnotology -- “ology” meaning the study of, “a” meaning without or lack or absence, and “gno” meaning knowledge. The idea is that the word expresses that sometimes the fact that there’s not knowledge of something is the result of an active production process - an effort to hide or obscure, so to speak. If that all sounds obtuse, think much more concretely about cigarette smoke and leaded gasoline. At this point there’s a pretty robust consensus that those hurt people but when those products were new there wasn’t such a consensus. Some of the first people to learn that those products were harmful were - to use a technical term - the evil motherfuckers making huge buckets of money off of those products and - sorry to continue with the jargon - those asshole ghouls rightly, but evilly, thought to themselves, to paraphrase ‘oh shit oh fuck if word gets out that this product hurts people then the river of money might dry up and we can’t have that!’ so they sought first to prevent word getting out and second to discredit information about the harm of their products as it trickled out. (It probably goes without saying that these people are/were monsters, that in a decent society this wouldn’t have happened, that in a halfway decent society the living among these monsters would be put on trial and have their assets seized, the dead would be reviled in public ceremonies of collective shaming and their descendants would stripped of the wealth they inherited so as to send a clear message that you don’t get to keep your blood money, but we don’t live in a halfway decent society.) So, agnotology is at least in part - and maybe entirely, I dunno, I’ve barely read anything - is the study of that kind of shit, the making of ignorance.
What’s currently on my mind is a related but slightly different thing, a thing that feels above my paygrade/feels like deeper waters than I know how to swim in, and I’m not totally sure how to get into it. Let me try this as a lead up.
In my book - titled Injury Impoverished: Something Law, Something Something Capitalism, if I remember correctly - I talk about how we can think of injury law as having an imagination, by which I mean, a set of accounts of the world. A little more specifically, there’s social imagination, meaning accounts of society and the people, practices, and relationships within it, and moral imagination, meaning accounts of the individual lives involved, their dignity, the respect they deserve, etc. In what I said a moment ago, the evil murderghouls trying to hide harms in order to keep the trough of blood money full, is a matter of efforts to prevent accurate social imagination in law and in the population over all. That is, the monsters don’t want people to know the truth of the actual damage done by the products that fund them. This implies that at least in my usage of ‘agnotology’ (which may well be idiosyncratic since I’ve at most started to assemble a list of stuff to read rather than having done the reading yet as I tried to say), there’s an implied ‘social’ as in ‘agnotology’ is ‘social agnotology’ or ‘social agnotology’ is redundant.
Okay so here’s what’s on my mind, I think I’ve built enough ramp to walk up to it. I’m interested in what I will for the moment call moral agnotology. (I’ll probly put that in the title of this post, ruining - well, making even worse, let’s be real - all the throat clearing that starts this post!) By moral agnotology I mean something like the following: people have dignity and that’s regularly trespassed upon as people are subjected to awfulness of many, many kinds, but it’s not at all clear that every trespass is knowingly conducted.
Let me try again. I’ve had a thought for a while and I’m very sure I’ve said on here at least once or twice, that the monsters at the top of the social shitheap simply can not both a) understand the actual workings of the violent social system - and their role in that system - that they’re products of and benefitted by and b) understand that all of us nobodies who are beneath them, and so regularly harmed by this system, are of equal moral worth with them. That’s stated too staticly - do they know or not? - when what I really mean is something more like a dynamic process, like ‘oh fuck I started to see how they system works, how do I unlearn this?!’ ‘argh I accidentally perceived the moral worth of one of the nobodies, I feel so bad now, how do I stop having feelings?!’ kinda thing. The latter is getting closer to what I mean by moral agnotology: how is ignorance of the dignity and equal moral worth of others produced?
This is partly a matter of moral judgment on my part, obviously, but it’s not only that. We live in a world where some people do horrible things to other people pretty regularly, in many, many different ways. Someone doing those kinds of horrible things and finding them horrifiying as they do them is, all things being equal, likely to do them less effectively, in addition to the unpleasantness of feeling horrified. There’s a sort of demand side to this -- wanting to escape being horrified, some of them will seek out, I don’t know, moral numbing agents, soothing topical creams to salve troubled consciences -- and a supply side - wanting the blood money to keep flowing upward, higher ranking murderghouls will want to keep the junior murderghouls they depend on from feeling horrified. To put it another way, a limited moral imagination is partly product of life in this society in general and one produced with particular intensity for/upon/in those living at some specific points in the social division of labor, and it is also a resource for the operation of the death machine. A limited moral imagination helps lubricate some of the gears, so to speak.
That’s part of what’s really on my mind here, that ‘these people have limited moral imaginations!’ isn’t just a denunciation, though it definitely is, but is also an analytical statement: part of how this society does what it does is that it produces people capable of doing horrible things without being horrified or - to put it less staticly, more dynamically and imho more accurately - to manage their own impulses to be horrified and the felt horror that sometimes results. My sense is that this, uh, stuff (ugh, sorry, let me try again) -- my sense is that the production and maintenance of limited moral imagination and the management of the felt horror that results in those times when those limits aren’t as effective (ie, when people start to feel some horror at their actions in their location in the death machine and the effects of those actions and the machine’s operations in general) is in part a matter of aesthetic or rhetorical form. (Now this too is way above my paygrade/a part of the book where my toes don’t touch the bottom and I’m not a strong swimmer, so I’m very hesitant despite being very intellectually excited about this stuff.) What I mean is that the specific ways in which suffering and the social processes creating suffering is depicted - the prose, the literary qualities of the writing, when we’re talking about texts - is not merely incidental but does crucial intellectual work.
Again, out of my depth here but let me try it by analogy: I’ve taught US history in various ways various times, including a fair bit of attention to the history of enslavement. It is basically impossible to overstate the heinousness of slavery and what happened to enslaved people. (Colson Whitehead’s very good, very sad and powerful novel The Underground Railroad gives a decent overview in that it shows a lot of the atrocities involved and situates them in relation to other historical atrocities.) In teaching this stuff, I’ve often tried to be mindful of how upsetting the classes will be for students as I think, on the one hand, there are some things that happened that, when presented honestly, can genuinely traumatize readers or come close to doing so and I don’t want to do that to my students, and on the other hand, if you learn about slavery but never felt a deeply upsetting visceral horror then you didn’t actually learn about slavery, so to speak. That is, someone with anything remotely approximating to a real grasp of the history of slaver is someone who has had experiences of being very upset by the awfulness of what they learned. This means that forms of presenting that history that avoid upsetting depictions are at least to some degree working against people learning from that history, at least if that avoidance goes too far. (I also think it’s possible for the presentation to become so honest/non-avoidant that learning becomes impossible, as the distress sort of flips circuits in the brain - learning involves reflection and it’s hard to reflect while crying and screaming, both of which are very reasonable responses to learning about a great deal of what some people have done to some other people over and over and over and over and over and over and ....)
This is partly to say that the presentation, understanding, and analysis of some facts of the matter necessarily involve value judgments - we can’t really separate fact and value in anything like the way some people think we can - and it’s also to say that aesthetic/literary/rhetorical/whatever-to-call-it qualities involved in the conveying/communicating of some facts to other people having a significant bearing on whether people actually get what the fact of the matter is. I often worried I was failing or would fail at this while writing my book - I’m not a novelist, I never took English after high school, I’m a historian and Marx nerd, how on earth can I possibly appropriately present the reality of a person with their hand stuck, and remaining conscious the whole time, for fifteen minutes in the gears of a machine that is simultaneously burning and crushing that hand, and the myriad painful realities that follow, for the rest of their life, from that awful experience? I felt that I had to try but couldn’t succeed, a circle I tried to square by calling attention to the problem and how much law and business tended to not even perceive the problem (ie, these are matters that don’t fit into the prevailing social and moral imagination, a lack of fit that actively benefits the death machine and the people profiting from it).
I’m going to stop in a moment but where I’m trying to get to here with this last strand of this partial thought, the bit about literary and aesthetic whatsits, is that not only does adequate presentation of suffering (I’ve said ‘moral agnotology’ which implies a category ‘moral ignorance’ which in turns implies a category ‘moral knowledge’, so I suppose I’m suggesting that one who adequately presents and to whom such presentation is made has ‘moral knowledge’ of suffering) have an aesthetic life but also moral agnotology - the prevention, the reversal, the soothing of the effects of accidentally and unwillingly gaining some knowledge of suffering and of the dignity of the sufferers - has an aesthetic life. That is, just as ‘how do I adequately present suffering?’ is a problem for writing/depicting/communicating, so too is ‘how do I adequately occlude suffering?’ for writing/depicting/communication. Of course, I assume the latter is rarely if ever posed that directly, ie, the ‘how to...’ question is a reconstruction of a thought process individuals engage in implicitly and indirectly - and really, I suspect it’s far less a matter of individuals as it’s a matter of institutions/organizations with their own divisions of labor.
An example or a least an analogy: as this kind of thought on this kind of subject has periodically bubbled up in my mind I’ve started to think a little more now and again about grades, as something I assign as an instructor and also as something that has a kind of life after I assign it. Grading boils down everything interesting and worthwhile in a class - nothing about why a class was good to take or teach (or hard to take or teach, or both), and nothing about the actual people and lives involved, fits into a grade, so to speak. That’s a kind of occluding. Grades decontextualize and in doing so facilitate an attenuated moral imagination of the students graded, helping renders them objects education institutions act on, and grades exist in forms of written communication with (very dull) literary/aesthetic/formal/whatever-to-call-it qualities. To an important extent grades are inextricable from those forms of communication and their qualities - those forms and qualities are part of what the practice of grading actually is, I think. Similar goes for the sorts of social practices related to harm and suffering and its moral occlusion, I think.
(Like I tried to say this is far more a matter of me trying to think out some thoughts based on a pretty preliminary foray into stuff I hope to spend more time on eventually as time and obligation permits, typed out here partly for the enjoyment of fleshing out a thought and partly in hopes that the fleshing out will enhance the foray once it really gets under way some day, hey hey hurray.... Please forgive my failing sense of humor.)
Keep on trucking, over and out!
ps- big gratitude to the inimitable James Crane and Sam Fisher for some conversation and correspondence on themes related to this as I’ve been slowly fumbling toward being able to even state what it is I’m preoccupied with!