partial knowledges and the limited perception of social murder
Hi all,
I hope you’re holding up alright. This newsletter/blog/thing’s been dormant lately. My energy’s been dissipated by work (I’m teaching three new courses this semester, which seemed like a good idea at the time! By the way, “Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time” is the new title for my memoir, the subtitle being “a story of not much happening” - as proven here https://tenminutewrite.blogspot.com) and by staring in horror. (On that, I’ve been going through cycles something like this: I ingest a lot of news about Israel and Gaza with sort of a jittery not quite frantic energy, I push my focus onto work and other responsibilities with a similar energy, I feel tired and deflated and distracted with difficulty concentrating and where half an hour of work produces about fifteen minutes of output, repeat.) Anyhow, my intent for this thing was, and is, partly that it’d be a way to stay in touch for when twitter becomes completely unusable for that purpose, and partly something to help me keep at top of mind the goal of trying to understand the pandemic better, which is to say, marxistly. That’s still working in that I regularly recall that I’ve not written or read on this stuff in a bit and should get back to it - so just know, friends, that you are an unpleasant reminder! Thank you for your service!
I wanted to write to flesh out a little of what I think about what I’ll here call partial knowledges and I figured I would - appropriately enough - make part of an effort to parse out some partially formulated fractions of a thought on the matter here. (Yowza, that’s like a dad joke made at quarter speed in nerdspeak. By the way, “A Dad Joke Made At Quarter Speed” is the new title for my memoir, the subtitle being “a poor story further marred by nerdspeak.) As the witticisms and self-effacing gestures have already indicated - do keep up - I’m not speaking here with any precision.
By “partial knowledges” I mean just a catch-all for academic disciplines or subfields, concepts, terms or phrases, institutional investigations and report, and so on. This means the stuff that falls under the umbrella of the term is a bit of a grab bag (though at least a grab bag beneath an umbrella stays dry, I suppose?). Pretending I’m writing on a white board in a classroom right now - meet me halfway reader, pretend most of the following is completely illegible - I’d write out a list like public health, pollution, addiction, poverty, deaths of despair, overdoses, work accidents, occupational safety and health, actuarial sciences, law, medicine, individual bad choices... Grab bag, like I said. That said, the thread that unites them - it’s a trick grab bag, I suppose, each item stitched into the lining (these asides, yeesh... can’t stop won’t stop) - is that they’re all partially true and, locally and temporarily, valid and good to steer with, and that they’re all related to social murder. If I remember correctly my friend Matt Dimick has used the term ‘practical validity’ for stuff like this, meaning you can use whatever it is as a tool in a given context and it’ll go okay.
I should say, I'm interested in this specifically in relation to social murder. (My conference talk on the subject's here - https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/socialism-2023-conference-talk-on-social-murder the audio for the full panel, includingAbby's powerful remarks, is here - https://soundcloud.com/deathpanel/dp-x-s23-how-capitalism-kills-social-murder-and-covid-19-session-2 A more footnoted and fleshed out version of my argument's in this book: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-36167-8)
The practical validity of partial knowledges is part of their staying power - in the right setting you can use the concept or body of knowledge or what have you and it will answer the questions posed and facilitate your working well with the people you’re in dialog with. What it will also do is work against the posing of better questions that are harder to answer and conceptually or ideologically destabilizing if taken seriously - genuinely critical questions, so to speak - and, closely related, what it can’t do is explain the bigger picture. That’s because partial knowledges tend to lack a social theory and/or tend to imply a bad social theory. This means that in part what they do is tend to encourage people to approach a social phenomenon at a lower level of abstraction than is necessary to really understand that phenomenon, and also tend to imply and to foster mistakes at a higher level of abstraction. The former, low level of abstraction, means there’s a kind of misunderstanding via omission (missing the big picture) and the latter, bad implicit social theory, means there’s a kind of misunderstanding of commission (actively getting the big picture wrong) lurking in the background.
When it comes to social murder, partial knowledges aid perception of some and only some of the puzzle pieces, so to speak. That fractured, siloed perception is both product and productive of state handling of social murder and struggles over social murder, the state setting a low ceiling on the manner and degree to which social murder can be mitigated and constraining struggles over social murder to be more siloed off from each other and other struggles in various ways, to be less militant, and to have lowered ambitions. The limited character of partial knowledges, that they only grasp some of the puzzle pieces rather than the whole picture, is also useful for the state in that it helps the reduction of struggles in the ways I mentioned - the fractured apprehension of social murder helps keep struggles over social murder from networking further and helps prevent them from proceeding holistically in the sense of politicizing more of the totality of capitalist social relations. That limited character also helps those fields: it lets them set problems for themselves that are soluble, which also means this limited character of those forms of knowledge lets this fields translate the more holistic and robust aspiration of people in struggle into reduced, fractured forms that are more realistic in the short term within - and thus more compatible with - capitalist social relations. That aids the success of those fields, thought it doesn’t guarantee it by any means.
Tony Smith writes that capitalism is a society of dissociated sociality. That dissociated quality recurs across society in various ways, including the fracturing of knowledge I mentioned here - which it occurs to me now has something to do with not-knowing things being a feature rather than a bug (agnotology again!) All of this is at most a set of very general points that can inform situated analyses of actually existing partial knowledges and the institutions and practices they connect with and arise from (capitalism being a dynamic rather than a static society, after all, and people developing various ways to live in that society - this applies both to the working class and its enemies!).
There are two bits from Simon Clarke’s book Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology (a good book marred by a dull first chapter but generally full of great ideas) that I want to mention that are related here. (These bits are in the excerpt from the book in this folder https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Nr6-Fj8W9CadpOaaa0bM0bqH2P11SSuU?usp=sharing I talked in this post about why I put that stuff together, in case it’s any interests https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/open-marxism-excerpts-link/) On Clarke’s account, thinking about the economy got worse over time in the mid to late 19th century, according to one set of standards, but in ways that - according to another and unfortunately more immediately consequential set of standards - served as a feature rather than bug. In the terms I’ve been using here, Clarke says that economic thought became even more of a partial knowledge than before. He writes that it eventually gave up on “any attempt to penetrate the illusions of the fetishism of commodities in order to establish a determinate theory of class relations.” The upside was that the resulting account of capitalism had “ a certain descriptive validity” insfoar as it “accorded with the commonsense experience of the members of capitalist society.” That means “‘vulgar economy’ could present itself as an empirically grounded doctrine,” and it had “the added ideological appeal” of paying less attention to tension and conflict between different actors and especially across class lines. (All those quotes from page 104.) He adds a few pages later that this reduced economic thought “could at best describe, but it could not explain.” (108.) Again, the loss of explanatory power - the quality I’ve here called partiality - can be a feature rather than a bug sometimes. Clarke writes that “the source of the scientific weakness” - meaning, the loss of explanatory power - “was also the source of its ideological strength.” (110.) Clarke’s referring to economic thought like I said but I think it applies more generally to what I’ve called partial knowledges and I think this is relevant for thinking about social murder - as a real social phenomenon, capitalism really does kill people - and the usefulness of the concept.
Partial knowledges of social murder can articulate time and place specific effects of capitalism’s tendency to kill, and that can be situationally really, really important, but at the same time those knowledges tend to silo off those harms from other harms, working against the broadening of social harm, as well as failing to fully explain the rootedness of those harms in the logic of the capitalist system, resulting in a reining in of the political ambitions of struggles over social murder (or, an ability to meet some of the ambitions of those struggle, in ways that are perhaps pacifying, or that allow other actors to legitimize themselves as still the good guys, even as they compete with more robust - and thus more antisystemic - claims to justice and humanity). It occurs me having typed all this out this also relates to Goran Therborn’s discussion of ideology insofar as the partial quality of partial knowledged is a matter of limitations on what partial knowledge considers as (not) good, existent, and possible. The concept of social murder, by contrast, underlines the systemic logic generating the harms which partial knowledges of social murder track onto and so the commonality or at least potential commonality in different kinds of struggles against different concrete expressions of the tendency to social murder.
One other thought, looping back to Tony Smith, whose book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism I wrote about a bit about here: https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/something-liberal-egalitarians-something/ Marxist accounts of capitalism hold (correctly!) that capitalism is a harm-producing society necessarily, while liberal egalitarians believe capitalism’s harmful tendencies can be neutralized by the right kind of state action. I suspect these harm-neutralization efforts by liberal egalitarians and their analogs tend to simultaneously ideologically reframe harms while also acting on those problems. That’s to say, their efforts at reform aren’t neutral to the problems they respond but rather they ideologically define problems in a way that sweeps aside elements of a problem that can’t be solved in capitalism: in working on solving problems they also work on shaping what people define as a problem in the first place. I think what I’ve here called partial knowledges are an important part of this. I think liberal egalitarians are likely to work with (or be practitioners of) partial knowledges, and likewise specialists in partial knowledges are likely to be, at best, liberal egalitarians.