Some things on my mind today that may or may not cohere. In no particular order...

First, I was on the Death Panel podcast the other day talking about two things I wrote and have mentioned here previously. As ever, my thinking is improved by/happens better through conversation which also means I’m not well placed to judge its use to other people. If you want to check it out, the preview/excerpt is about 20-30 minutes long and is here - https://soundcloud.com/deathpanel/teaser-political-imagination-and-appeals-to-the-law-w-nate-holdren-120125

Second, something clicked into place in my head recently in conversation with a friend that I wanted to write down here. I feel like I’m always saying something like ‘I’m embarrassed by how often I think about the world through song lyrics’ and that remains true. But what clicked was this. We live on a steep hillside and shit rolls down hill. Life experiences differ depending on where one lives on the hill related to how low down and shitful one’s location is. Officially rewarded, supported, and lauded cultural products tend to skew upward, which means they will tend not to be about life within, and tend not to be addressed to the people who live in, the more shitful locations on the hill. This also means that cultural products that do focus on, and are written for the people who live, lower down the hill are less likely to be rewarded, supported, and accorded status. Thus, one, insofar as one thinks the world via official and high status culture, important parts of the life of society go unaddressed. Two, the further down the hill one lives the more of one’s life experience go unaddressed and when addressed the more likely they are to be in terms that reflect presumptions drawn from and compatible with (or, derived from or meant to serve the social internal monologue of) life further up the hill. So it actually makes a good deal of sense that a lot of the things I care most about are often under addressed in respectable cultural works and that the works that do address those things are generally low status. This is not at all to dismiss high status works or to say access to them doesn’t matter, far from it. Rather it’s to say that alongside the more glaring deprivations and indignities of life downhill there are additional deprivations and indignities including a) relative lack of resources/support for cultural productions addressing life downhill, b) pressures toward upward-skewing ways of talking about that life, c) thus relative lack of culture objects that help in making sense of the experiences of life and of the structural/systemic processes shaping those experiences (in this probly overextended metaphor, the steepness and contours of the hillside and the volume and courses taken by the downward flows of shit), and d) relative dismissal or disrespect by those uphill of cultural objects and cultural producers that are of and for those downhill plus pressures to coopt those that succeed despite the above.

Third, I’m excited about this book chapter by Jacob Blumenfeld, out in English now after previously being only available in German: https://philarchive.org/archive/BLUCAM-2. The gist as I recall it is that class as a social relationship is intrinsically a trespass on human dignity such that class must be abolished if dignity is to be respected. It frames the argument in terms of categories including moral injury, epistemic injustice, and recognition/denial of recognition. I’m not a philosopher and haven’t read much of the works it cites. So I assume it’s pushing on/pushing forward some conversations I’m not in. I hope to make my way through some of the works it engages. (I feel I should mention it also engages my book, which is nice - obviously I like when people like my stuff, but what I really like is when people think with my stuff.) I’ll add that I used the category ‘justice as recognition’ in my book, a category I got from Nancy Fraser’s work, and since the book came out I developed some reservations and uncertainties about that usage on my part. I worried I bungled the usage since I’m not a philosopher; I worried if my use of recognition as a negative category (basically I stressed denial of respect for human dignity) might read to some people or be amenable to being put to work in a positive sense of celebrating relative/partial respect for dignity where such exists, which is really not what I wanted the book do. (The book’s for haters!) Blumenfeld’s chapter makes points I wish I’d made and/or expresses things I wanted my book to express that I’m not sure it managed. I also finished the book having nothing further to say about recognition - justice as recognition was a tool that helped me write the book but had no further use for as far as I could tell in the inquiry I’ve been doing after the book. That’s not a problem but being less ‘live’ in my intellectual life also felt pretty similar to ‘this is a mistake or limitation.’ Blumenfeld’s chapter re-enlivens these categories for me, I’m newly curious and there’s new-for-me inquiry to be done with the concept, which is exciting and it’s just nice to feel excited about that aspect of the book for the first time since I finished it. (Whereas I’d remained compelled by the ‘shit is fucked systemically’ aspect of the book, which has been part of the ongoing inquiry I’ve been doing about social murder, public health, etc.) So yeah, check out the paper.

Fourth, I plan to reread the chapter and eventually chase up some of the material it references to read/reread. (Realistically, I’ll get to rereading the chapter way, way before I get to the references so I’m probly going to need to reread the chapter twice.) I read it a few weeks ago and I’m not sure I remember it all accurately, and it’s always possible I missed something. As I recall it anyway, it sort of walks a line between, on the one hand, recognition/denial of recognition as a theorist’s category of analysis in analyzing and evaluating society - we hate this social order for what it does to people, and on the other hand recognition/denial of recognition as a category of the social actors who are denizens of this social order. What I mean is that there’s a difference between observing a situation then saying ‘some people in this situation are being treated disrespectfully’ and observing a situation in which some people involved feel and think they are being treated disrespectfully. The latter gets at something I rant about periodically on here, which is that I think some Marxists think in inadequate ways about morality. Sometimes some social actors’ moral sensibilities are really important material forces operating in the world. When and why that is and is not the case, as well as the particular contents of those sensibilities, is all important stuff that Marxists should take seriously intellectually and try to engage with politically. I want to think more about that, with regard to this chapter and more generally. The Raymond Williams I’ve been reading is on point here for reasons I’m not sure I can articulate right now, and a fair bit of EP Thompson’s work that has been important to me is on point as well. Much of the time in reading that stuff I’m like ‘yeah! good point, I agree!’ but I’m not sure I could articulate the point myself. I think the Blumenfeld chapter helps me walk further down the road toward being able to articulate that stuff and I assume chasing up more of the works it cites will help too.

Fifth and finally, probably, I’m trying to read all of Williams’s book Keywords. The book consists of 150 or so essays about specific words, like changes over time in the usage and meaning of the word ‘art’, treating those words as windows into the societies and historical processes that they’re elements of, and treating those words as nodes in networks of words and ideas. It’s good stuff, and I’ve previously failed in my attempts to read it all due to a mix of my own limitations and other obligations and pressures/an unfavorable context. So this time I’ve started back from the beginning and I’m trying to read one entry a day most days. So far so good, but it’s early in the process so who knows what’ll happen.

Anyway, I read Williams’s entry on the word bureaucracy, and he cites to an Irish novelist writing in the early 1800s about bureaucracy in how Ireland was governed (I don’t know that history much at all but I feel pretty sure this was about England’s colonial governance of Ireland), and that author - Lady Morgan, who I never heard of before and know nothing about - relates bureaucracy to what she calls “office tyranny.” That term is really striking to me, and it reminds me of the phrase “desk murderer” which Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno both used in the mid twentieth century. I forget the details and am not going to look them up right now but as I recall they were both using the term to talk about the role of analysts and order givers in relation to the horrors of the Nazi death camps, the point being, I think, that the guilty parties are not only the immediate perpetrators. The wikipedia entry on “desk murderer” is thought provoking and I eventually want to chase up some of what it references and follow some of the thoughts provoked. The entry references the book I You We Them by Dan Gretton and, if memory serves, notes that Gretton distinguishes desk murderers from desk killers. I ordered the book. If I understand and recall correctly, always a big if, the murderers/killers distinction is something like the distinction between the deciders, on the one hand, and the accomplices and enablers on the other. That seems to me a worthwhile distinction in terms of understanding the actual processes by which horrible things happen; I’m currently unsure if I think it matters as a moral distinction, I want to think more about that.

I mention this because it relates to things I’m compelled by and an area where I’ve felt some limits in my own work. I think the desk violence, so to speak, is of a piece with social murder much of the time - often social murder occurs via desk violence: deciders at a company decides to put a factory that pollutes massively in a given place, some of their subordinates enact the decision, and that factory poisons the residents and employees. That poisoning - and that it’s not really an accident but a system-generated outcome that we should expect to some degree - is what the social murder analysis brings out. Desk violence helps identify some of the concrete particulars of how those lethal processes actually occur - office tyranny and desk violence are categories at a lower degree of analytical abstraction that enrich and are enriched by analysis at the higher degree of abstraction involved in the concept of social murder as I understand it.
Another way to get at the point I’m not sure I’m actually managing to make here is that desk murderers make choices, that’s real, and their accomplices and enablers - arguably not murderers but still killers - do as well. (Whether actually existing perpetrator of desk violence actually know they’re making choices to kill is an empirical matter, and the forms ideology, knowledge, and knowledge-avoidance, involved are worth serious critical analysis in my view.) The social murder analysis helps draw out that those decisions aren’t capricious and are in important respects system-determined: that is, it helps explain how it is that we live in a society where such decisions even occur, and helps explain why the deciders choose as they do with the frequency they do.

Trying again because I still feel like I’ve not cracked the nut: social murder as I think of it is a term that predicts and explains the systemic generation of harm and suffering. That’s valuable in my view but there’s a chance of that analysis falling into a kind of resignation - ‘people are just gonna die, that’s reality, nothing to be done’ - and of that analysis letting actors off the hook for harms they perpetrate against other people. The point though, is not to let them off the hook but that those perpetrators are creatures of the system such that opposition to them needs to be also be anti-systemic. I like the desk violence categories for noting those perpetrators.
In addition, social murder as I think of the term has to do with outcomes arising from areas of life that are taken for granted, above all economic life and structural distributions of life chances, and it names as violence social processes and practices often treated as not violent. This means that as I use the term it doesn’t apply to things like wars and state repression. (I’m not averse to applying it to that stuff, that’s just not the stuff I’m trying to make sense of via the term and I’m unsure the term sheds light on that stuff.) This means that social murder as I use the term doesn’t exhaust all of the violence and suffering that the system generates. The system also generates forms of violence that are treated as violent but relatively legitimated violence. Part of the value of desk murderer/desk killer is in noting that the ostensibly nonviolent violence that falls under ‘social murder’ as I use it and the relatively recognized-as-violent forms of legitimated violence like war and state repression both tend to share some important concrete realities in their institutional organization and the labors involved.

It also seems very clear to me that the category ‘social coldness’ that Werner Bonefeld wrote about in his last book is closely connected here, but I have to think more about that. I’m inclined to say that there’s a degree of pervasive social coldness - everyone able to live with this society is cold to some extent - and there are concentrations of that coldness - desk killers are especially cold. There are also resources that produce/preserve that coldness - impersonal rhetorics, concepts, narratives, etc - and institutions and actors that make those resources. (All the covid minimizer ghouls like David Lyin’heart spring to mind, for one.)

As I’ve tried to say before though I’m not sure I’ve framed it specifically in relation to social coldness, there’s also an important role for ignorance of social reality. I think of it this way: powerful actors who harm others and/or benefit from processes that necessarily harm others can not both a) correctly understand their roles in society and the consequences of their actions and b) believe those others are of equal moral worth to them. I want to stress that I mean this as a dynamic matter of tension and conflict - they might at times do both a) and b) but if they continue to live as they do then one or the other will give way: they’ll find ways of not really knowing the reality or of justifying it (resignation is a kind of justification). Someone who does b) but not a), i.e. believes others are of equal more worth but doesn’t accurately understand our society, doesn’t have to be cold. Someone who does a) but not b), i.e. understands our society accurately as set of relationships and processes but think it’s all totally fine because those harmed aren’t of moral concern is maximally cold. Those are two poles on a continuum and can imply a kind of static picture but as I tried to say I don’t think people inhabit stable positions so much as they move around, ‘warming’ in a sense and looking to go cold again or find ignorance-fostering non-accounts of social reality so the ‘warmth’ doesn’t create distress, and so on. Also important to stress that this isn’t so much a matter of individual reflection as it is a matter of collective life often existing in the form of conflicts, often diffuse and dispersed ones and/or ones that occur in highly mediated form like ideas and sensibilities being worked out over time in art and academic work and so on.

Genuinely final thought: I wonder if what I just said might be mapped onto what I’ve been reading about the history of public health that I’m sitll slowly working my way through, and likewise to occupational hazards, environmental harms, etc something like the following. Over time how much attention does the field pay or permit being paid to (and how accurate is the account given of) various real phenomena of harm and oppression, and how much moral urgency and political solubility does the field accord to the harms and oppression it does attend to. Again I assume changes in both is a matter of conflicts, both internal to the field and in its larger context. And given the evil clown ghouls the Trump administration has put in office and also the degree to which some medical and public health authorities were nefarious actors with regard to covid under Biden, it seems to me pretty reasonable to say that public health as a field produces resources for both opposing and supporting desk killers (that feels right even if I’m not sure I could personally sufficiently demonstrate that empirically just now), again presumably in a conflictual, unstable way over time.