two quick thoughts
Two quick (gotta stop saying that!) thoughts I wanted to capture on this fine fall-feeling saturday afternoon.
One, Max Harris sent me a note (hi Max! and thanks!) thinking along with me about the ignorance-producing or -facilitating aspect of techniques/rhetorics/institutions/whatever of power that I was going on about last time. He said that this is particularly interesting in terms of law and I totally agree. It reminded me of a bit in a Christopher Tomlins book called Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic. In the first part of the book Tomlins argues that at some point in the old timey days law beat out other contenders to become the 'pre-eminent modality of rule' and that as one part of that, law gained a power to define the world for people. One can quibble with various details - the people for whom the old Diggers' song line "the club is all their law" remains true are likely to buy the law's images of the world as much - but it's a good book anyway and the point can I think be read as talking about how people in the middle of the pyramid of capitalist society (visually represented in this old classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System and updated in this fine more recent take https://www.prole.info/pdfs/pyramid.pdf - personally I'd be keen to see someone upated this further to represent how shit rolls downhill, lethally) manage to get enrolled into their position there comfortable. As in, law is one of the agnotological devices that helps the minimizers minimize, both in some immediate instances (like this one I was talking with The Panel about https://soundcloud.com/deathpanel/unlimited-liabilities-w-nate-holdren-unlocked) and also in terms of helping set up the basic terrain of the playing field that all of this occurs on.
One and a half (I said "two thoughts" and I'll keep it that way by manipulating the counts! You can call me Joe Biden, Jack), is this bit from Abby's recent post: "so much of this happened at the level of the tools we supposedly use to manipulate reality like sadistic little dauphins scorching ants with a magnifying glass." (https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/hamlet-soliloquizing-at-a-crystal-skull/) I'm not a science-understander so idk that I could back this up in the face of strenuous pushback but I'm inclined to say that the line between social domination and technological manipulation of parts of the world is a blurry one. That's badly put, trying again: science and technology are of their context, bearing the society that made them in their purposes and practices and materiality (at a level of very basic technology I think about this at work all the time when I show up to teach discussion in a room where the furniture has designed into it a model of education where the expert stands at the front and knows things at learners depicted as audience; this model has gotten resources thrown at it in the form of periodic upgrades to the a/v of the classroom, when it's a struggle to get work to buy me any books) and it's not the case that they're just products - they're effects as well as causes, they exist in feedback loops of social relations' reproduction. (I've been teaching Gavin Mueller's excellent book Breaking Things At Work lately and it's good on this, there's also some bits in Soren Mau's book Mute Compulsion.)
Anyhow this one and a halfth thought is really just me echoing and trying to get into my head Abby's point that sometimes stuff made for the sake of facilitating instrumental activity - acting on the world for practical purposes, often in service of terrible values! - can end up doing important world-defining or how-do-we-know the world sort of work. (A coworker sometimes talks about 'spreadsheet ontology' to describe the massive headache that comes of being a nerd committed to intrinsic values and trying to talk to people in management who seem to see the world in excel sheets.) That world-defining power of tools made to manipulate the world, how the tools get in our heads, seems important and seems like another facet of how we started the pandemic on the wrong foot. I can't spell it out here but at a gut level I feel like this also speaks back to the liberal 'I believe in science!' assertions made in a tone that implies a) this belief is importantly political and b) science is apolitical. This may be obvious but the belief that like 'the science' dictates what should or shouldn't happen and does so with no moral or political judgment (like 'the science says this is safe' as if 'safe' isn't itself a judgment about what sort of risks to what people are acceptable relative to other purposes) has been convenient for people pushing a specific (and murderous) political line on the pandemic. (Making a note to self here to talk about the vaccine as ideological object or practice at some point, and to consider exploring Peter Hotez's version of liberal vaccine politics.)
Thought one and three quarters is maybe annoyingly meta and self-involved (again! still!) and it's that I'm not comfortable with the voice here yet as reflected by my doubts over how to start this: I almost wrote this with a 'dear readers' type salutation (for a split second I was gonna steal the old Jim Anchower Onion 'hola amigos, been a while...' bit, and I reserve the right to still do so - I have the freedom to be wrong! I hope to use it enough that I develop the capacity to be right! ... uhhh where was I...) and then I was tempted go straight out the gate with this 'how to start, what voice, addressed to whom...' nonsense. I think it's partly that I'm doing a thing I care a lot about but/and which falls outside a lot of the spaces I'm in a lot of the time - informal with a mix of first and second person and singular and plural... I think, you individually think, you collectively think, we think... and it's partly also probly just nerves regarding my awareness of my own limitations and the relative lack of eloquence that is built in to expressing thoughts that are still somewhere mid-process. I did, and do, want to address you directly here this time, though, readers, to tell you to subscribe to Abby's newsletter - https://buttondown.email/abbycartus - if you haven't already done so. I may address you directly in the future and I will also sometimes definitely not, again I'm still figuring out the voice - and form should follow function, the function being to try to get into and remain in an open mode of working as much as possible, to keep the thought unfolding. Enough, enough, I bore even myself sometimes.
Thought two is that this whole enterprise of this blog comes largely out of my talking with Abby - like I said, you should subscribe to her newsletter - and I'm not sure I indicated that as clearly before. We'd been exchanging notes and ideas as part of the larger milieu we're in and after while I said 'so, sorry if this is stupid, but what if we started a blog? or each of us does? and we can just write things to clarify our views' and she was like 'bet' and now they exist. My go-to metaphor for this sort of thing is the people who built the pyramids or stonehenge, rolling a giant rock really far along rollers made of logs or whatever, the hope is to roll the rock further along than when I showed up, partly for the sake of the doing of it and partly to be able to later say 'I helped roll that rock a ways, I was part of that.'
(I'll say by the way that I'm not going to post this often on the regular, this is partly me having some energy around starting and also me having a bit of a window of time as my semester's teaching is about to launch into the awfully hectic no time for a life phase but is still sitting on the launchpad counting down at the moment.)