Lévi-Strauss

Humankind ceases at the border of the tribe, of the linguistic group, even sometimes of the village.

Claude Lévi-Strauss 

wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_correlation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Criticism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robbers_cave_study

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_narcissism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#:~:text=Survivorship%20bias%20or%20survival%20bias,a%20form%20of%20selection%20bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associationalism#:~:text=Associationalism%20or%20associative%20democracy%20is,democratically%20self%2Dgoverning%20associations.%22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

Keller

'When you have a society organised in such a way that those at the top benefit from the labour of the majority, you have some strong incentives to develop the kind of selfhood that gets you there. The only kind of selfhood that gets you there is the kind of selfhood that allows you to numb your empathies. To maintain the system of dominance, it’s crucial that the elite learns this empathic numbness, akin to what Robert Jay Lifton calls ‘psychic numbing,’ so that its members can control and when necessary torture and kill without being undone. If its members are incapable of numbing, or if they have not been trained properly, the system of domination will collapse.'

Catherine Keller

Sandel

Consequently, neoliberalism equates social value with economic value. Everything of value is given an economic role. Education becomes a path to income security. Social organizations become an avenue to make business connections. Spirituality and religion build character for success in business. None of these outlets have value outside of their economic consequences. So the impoverished have no avenue for redemption outside economic performance. Incomes define not just economic, but also moral value. A wealthy family deserves not just economic, but social and political rewards as well.

The left advocates egalitarian policies to allow for meritocratic outcomes. Nowhere is this more clear than in education. The left believes a truly meritocratic educational system relies upon an egalitarian distribution of economic resources. And yet, the educational system perpetuates inequalities through meritocratic assessments. Universities claim to accept applicants solely on the basis of merit. Its decisions establish barriers of entry which individuals left behind struggle to overcome. But primary and secondary educational institutions also direct resources to districts with the most wealth in the United States. Even in France, different educational tracks eliminate opportunities for those left behind at an early age.

 

Michael Sandel

Achille Mbembe

The camp has not only become a structural feature of our globalized condition. It has also ceased to scandalize. Or, rather, the camp is not just our present. It is our future, namely our solution for ‘keeping away what disturbs, for containing or rejecting all excess, whether it is human, organic matter or industrial waste’. [32] In short, it is a form of government of the world.

Unable to face up to the basic fact that what once belonged to the exception is now the norm (the fact that liberal democracies, like any other regime, are capable of incorporating criminality into their system), we find ourselves plunged head-deep into an endless racket of words and gestures, symbols and language, delivered with increasing brutality like a long series of blows to the head. There are mimetological blows too: secularism and its mirror image, fundamentalism. All this, every blow, delivered with perfect cynicism. For, let’s face it, all the surnames have lost their first names, as it were, and there are no more names to name the outrage, no more languages to speak the unspeakable. Almost nothing stands up any longer, except in the form of a kind of viscous and rancid snot, draining from the nostrils without even a single sneeze. 

Can one truly come to presence in the world, dwell in the world, or traverse it, on the basis of this impossibility of sharing it with others, this impassable distance? Is it enough to shoot down enemies and expel foreigners to be truly rid of them, to doom them to eternity, to forget them for all time? This attitude demands that such acts of death and banishment succeed in erasing the face (its living substance) that gives the enemy his humanity. The task of disfigurement and erasure is almost a precondition for any execution under the contemporary logic of hatred. Within societies that continue to multiply structures of separation and discrimination, the relation of care towards the other has been replaced with a relation without desire. Explaining and understanding, knowledge and recognition, are no longer necessary requirements. Hospitality and hostility have never been so opposed, a factor that serves to explain the interest in returning to those intellectual figures for whom the misery of men and the suffering of enemies were never mere ‘silent remainders of politics’. [34] Instead, they were always combined with a demand for recognition, notably in contexts where the experience of being unrecognized, humiliated, alienated and mistreated was the norm. 

Achille Mbembe

James C. Scott

“The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.”

James C. Scott

The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor’s office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regulations, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force.

James C. Scott

The Sneetches II

 The Sneetches II

With Apologies to Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin & Dr. Seuss

Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches Had bellies with stars. 

The Plain-Belly Sneetches Had none upon thars. 

Those stars weren't so big. They were really so small 

You might think such a thing wouldn't matter at all. 

Because the Star-Belly Sneetches Had This Mark Upon Thars

They would brag, "We’re all equal, I don’t even see stars." 

With their snoots in the air, they would snort and they’d bob,

While the star-bellied bosses hired other star-bellies for jobs.

And if a plain-belly sneetch does get a higher vocation,

Their paycheck depends on defending the corporation,

They’re the plain-belly rep, tasked to stop discrimination

And if racism continues, the star-bellied bosses replace ‘em

The star belly sneetches by deed and not being
Star-picked and star-chose choose which things they were seeing

The horrors around make not a dent in their thoughts

As plain bellies are harassed and shot by star-bellied cops

Many Star-bellied sneetches call loudly “this unfairness must be ending!”

And then hold conferences on ‘tolerance’ with no Plain bellies Attending

No plain bellies voices to rise above the star-crossed chatter

All saying “In this house love is love, and Plain belly lives matter”

By giving more star crumbs to the star-bellied working sneetches

Star bosses sow division so that sneetch solidarity decreases

They push down the wages the plain bellies can reaches

And star-wash the history with star leadership’s bleaches

The Radical starbellies all promise real action

But dismiss painbelly issues as ‘just a distraction’

“True power lies with politicians, landlords, and bosses of all kind”

“The real stars are thars! There's none upon mine”

“We must fight these real enemies through total sneetch unity”

“I have plain belly friends and they all agree too with me,”

“Wait your turn!” said the starbellies “Once the real fight is done.” 

But history has shown that “later” never comes

Many left wing sneetches with stars still find themselves caught

And ultimately conditioned with the same star-supremacist thoughts

You find elsewhere in star-bellied supremacist civ

That exploits and extracts more than plain-bellies would give

So plain belly sneetches might not trust or work united

With Star bellied sneetches who don’t try to fight it

Who don’t amplify plainbelly sneetches struggles as real

And instead hide in delusions to protect star-bellied feels

And a star-bellied movement of commanding starbellied leaders 

Rather than plainbelly liberation and autonomy is weaker

It takes real work to renounce taking dubs so unjustly

Systems which harm you might harm neighbours doubly

The working class sneetches have bellies of all types

With different struggles and different dislikes

Listen to everyone, lived experience is personal

The fight for all bellies dissimilar can be made universal

Oppressed sneetches have a right to self-determination

To set their own rules and make their own organizations

They don’t need backseat star-bellied opticians

Remember: One sneetch mouth to talk; two sneetch ears to listen

This is basic, it’s justice, it should just be elementary

But star-bellied radicals want to debate it endlessly

It’s not fun to confront shortcomings, your own especially

But you can’t confront sneetch society without confronting star supremacy!

        SRSLY WRONG

Stereotypes about others leading to prejudice (e.g., Devine, 1989) and schemas about the self leading to depression (e.g., A. T. Beck, 1967) are fundamentally the same type of cognitive structure. According to the integrated perspective on prejudice and depression, negative stereotypes (i.e., schemas) are activated in a Source, who expresses prejudice toward the Target, causing the Target to experience depression. This linking of prejudice and depression (i.e., "comorbid" prejudice and depression) can occur at the societal level (e.g., Nazis' prejudice causing Jews' depression), the interpersonal level (e.g., an abuser's prejudice causing an abusee's depression), and the intrapersonal level (e.g., a person's self-prejudice causing his or her depression). The integrated perspective addresses several longstanding paradoxes, controversies, and questions; generates new areas of inquiry; and spotlights specific methods and findings that have direct cross-disciplinary applications in the battle against prejudice and depression. Ironically, some interventions developed by depression researchers may be especially useful against prejudice, and some interventions developed by prejudice researchers may be especially useful against depression.

William T L Cox 1, Lyn Y Abramson 2, Patricia G Devine 2, Steven D Hollon 3

In particular, I have tried to show that social man fears the Other and, if need be, creates him, so that, by invalidating him as evil, he may confirm himself as good.

These ideas are conveyed with consummate artistic skill by Jerzy Kosinski in his extraordinary book, The Painted Bird. The title alludes to the theme: "The Painted Bird" is the symbol of the persecuted Other, of "The Tainted Man."

The story is a harrowing tale of what happens to a six-year-old boy "from a large city in Eastern Europe [who] in the first weeks of World War II . . . was sent by his parents, like thousands of other children, to the shelter of a distant village."2 To protect their son from the ravages of war in the capital, his middle-class parents entrust him to the care of a peasant woman. Within two months of his arrival, she dies. The parents do not know this, and the child has no way of making contact with them. He is adrift on a sea of humanity, sometimes indifferent, often hostile, rarely protective.

During his peregrinations through the countryside of war-torn Poland, the child lives, for a while, under the protection of Lekh, a huge, solitary, but decent young man, who makes his living as a trapper. It is this episode that so movingly portrays the theme that, to the tribe, the Other is a dangerous alien, the member of a hostile species that must be destroyed.

Lekh loves a woman, Ludmila, with whom he has passionate sexual relations. Ludmila had been raped as a young girl and, when we meet her, is crazed with sexual lust. The farmers call her "stupid Ludmila." The episode that concerns us here occurs after a period of separation between Lekh and Ludmila. I shall quote it in full.


Sometimes days passed and Stupid Ludmila did not appear in the forest. Lekh would become possessed by a silent rage. He would stare solemnly at the birds in the cages, mumbling something to himself. Finally, after prolonged scrutiny, he would choose the strongest bird, tie it to his wrist and prepare stinking paints of different colors which he mixed together from the most varied components. When the colors satisfied him, Lekh would turn the bird over and paint its wings, head, and breast in rainbow hues until it became more dappled and vivid than a bouquet of wildflowers.

Then he would go into the thick of the forest. There Lekh took out the painted bird and ordered me to hold it in my hand and squeeze it lightly. The bird would begin to twitter and attract a flock of the same species which would fly nervously over our heads. Our prisoner, hearing them, strained toward them, warbling more loudly, its little heart, locked in its freshly painted breast, beating violently.

When a sufficient number of birds gathered above our heads, Lekh would give me a sign to release the prisoner. It would soar, happy and free, a spot of rainbow against the backdrop of clouds, and then plunge into the waiting grown flock. For an instant the birds were confounded. The painted bird circled from one end of the flock to the other, vainly trying to convince its kin that it was one of them. But, dazzled by its brilliant colors, they flew around it unconvinced. The painted bird would be forced farther and farther away as it zealously tried to enter the ranks of the flock. We saw soon afterwards how one bird after another would peel off in a fierce attack. Shortly the many-hued shape lost its place in the sky and dropped to the ground. These incidents happened often. When we finally found the painted birds they were usually dead. Lekh keenly examined the number of blows which the birds had received. Blood seeped through their colored wings, diluting the paint and soiling Lekh's hands.3

Still, Stupid Ludmila does not return. To vent his frustrated rage, Lekh prepares another bird-sacrifice. This is how Kosinski describes it:


One day he trapped a large raven, whose wings he painted red, the breast green, and the tail blue. When a flock of ravens appeared over our hut, Lekh freed the painted bird. As soon as it joined the flock a desperate battle began. The changeling was attacked from all sides. Black, red, green, blue feathers began to drop at our feet. The ravens ran amuck in the skies, and suddenly the painted raven plummeted to the freshly-plowed soil. It was still alive, opening its beak and vainly trying to move its wings. Its eyes had been pecked out, and fresh blood streamed over its painted feathers. It made yet another attempt to flutter up from the sticky earth, but its strength was gone.4

The Painted Bird is the perfect symbol of the Other, the Stranger, the Scapegoat. With inimitable skill, Kosinski shows us both faces of this phenomenon: if the Other is unlike the members of the herd, he is cast out of the group and destroyed; if he is like them, man intervenes and makes him appear different, so that he may be cast out of the group and destroyed. As Lekh paints his raven, so psychiatrists discolor their patients, and society as a whole taints its citizens. This is the grand strategy of discrimination, invalidation and scapegoating. Man searches for, creates, and imputes differences, the better to alienate the Other. By casting out the Other, Just Man aggrandizes himself and vents his frustrated anger in a manner approved by his fellows. To man, the herd animal, as to his non-human ancestors, safety lies in similarity. "

Thomas S. Szasz

Sapolsky

The fantasy always runs something like this. I've overpowered his elite guard, burst into his secret bunker with my machine gun ready. He lunges for his Luger. I knock it out of his hand. He lunges for his cyanide pill. I knock that out of his hand. He snarls, comes at me with otherworldly strength. We grapple, we fight, I manage to pin him down and put on handcuffs. "Adolf Hitler," I say, "I arrest you for crimes against humanity."


00:58Here's where the Medal of Honor version of the fantasy ends and the imagery darkens. What would I do if I had Hitler? It's not hard to imagine once I allow myself. Sever his spine at the neck. Take out his eyes with a blunt instrument. Puncture his eardrums. Cut out his tongue. Leave him alive on a respirator, tube-fed, not able to speak or move or see or hear, just to feel, and then inject him with something cancerous that's going to fester and pustulate until every cell in his body is screaming in agony, until every second feels like an eternity in hell. That's what I would do to Hitler.


01:41I've had this fantasy since I was a kid, still do sometimes, and when I do, my heart speeds up -- all these plans for the most evil, wicked soul in history. But there's a problem, which is I don't actually believe in souls or  evil, and I think wicked belongs in a musical. But there's some people I would like to see killed, but I'm against the death penalty. But I like schlocky violent movies, but I'm for strict gun control. But then there was a time I was at a laser tag place, and I had such a good time hiding in a corner shooting at people. In other words, I'm your basic confused human when it comes to violence.


02:21Now, as a species, we obviously have problems with violence. We use shower heads to deliver poison gas, letters with anthrax, airplanes as weapons, mass rape as a military strategy. We're a miserably violent species. But there's a complication, which is we don't hate violence, we hate the wrong kind. And when it's the right kind, we cheer it on, we hand out medals, we vote for, we mate with our champions of it. When it's the right kind of violence, we love it. And there's another complication, which is, in addition to us being this miserably violent species, we're also this extraordinarily altruistic, compassionate one.


03:03So how do you make sense of the biology of our best behaviors, our worst ones and all of those ambiguously in between?


03:10Now, for starters, what's totally boring is understanding the motoric aspects of the behavior. Your brain tells your spine, tells your muscles to do something or other, and hooray, you've behaved. What's hard is understanding the meaning of the behavior, because in some settings, pulling a trigger is an appalling act; in others, it's heroically self-sacrificial. In some settings, putting your hand one someone else's is deeply compassionate. In others, it's a deep betrayal. The challenge is to understand the biology of the context of our behaviors, and that's real tough.


03:47One thing that's clear, though, is you're not going to get anywhere if you think there's going to be the brain region or the hormone or the gene or the childhood experience or the evolutionary mechanism that explains everything. Instead, every bit of behavior has multiple levels of causality.


04:06Let's look at an example. You have a gun. There's a crisis going on: rioting, violence, people running around. A stranger is running at you in an agitated state -- you can't quite tell if the expression is frightened, threatening, angry -- holding something that kind of looks like a handgun. You're not sure. The stranger comes running at you and you pull the trigger. And it turns out that thing in this person's hand was a cell phone.


04:36So we asked this biological question: what was going on that caused this behavior? What caused this behavior? And this is a multitude of questions.


04:45What was going on in your brain one second before you pulled that trigger? And this brings us into the realm of a brain region called the amygdala. The amygdala, which is central to violence, central to fear, initiates volleys of cascades that produce the pulling of a trigger. What was the level of activity in your amygdala one second before?


05:08But to understand that, we have to step back a little bit. What was going on in the environment seconds to minutes before that impacted the amygdala? Now, obviously, the sights, the sounds of the rioting, that was pertinent. But in addition, you're more likely to mistake a cell phone for a handgun if that stranger was male and large and of a different race. Furthermore, if you're in pain, if you're hungry, if you're exhausted, your frontal cortex is not going to work as well, part of the brain whose job it is to get to the amygdala in time saying, "Are you really sure that's a gun there?"


05:46But we need to step further back. Now we have to look at hours to days before, and with this, we have entered the realm of hormones. For example, testosterone, where regardless of your sex, if you have elevated testosterone levels in your blood, you're more likely to think a face with a neutral expression is instead looking threatening. Elevated testosterone levels, elevated levels of stress hormones, and your amygdala is going to be more active and your frontal cortex will be more sluggish.


06:17Pushing back further, weeks to months before, where's the relevance there? This is the realm of neural plasticity, the fact that your brain can change in response to experience, and if your previous months have been filled with stress and trauma, your amygdala will have enlarged. The neurons will have become more excitable, your frontal cortex would have atrophied, all relevant to what happens in that one second.


06:42But we push back even more, back years, back, for example, to your adolescence. Now, the central fact of the adolescent brain is all of it is going full blast except the frontal cortex, which is still half-baked. It doesn't fully mature until you're around 25. And thus, adolescence and early adulthood are the years where environment and experience sculpt your frontal cortex into the version you're going to have as an adult in that critical moment.


07:12But pushing back even further, even further back to childhood and fetal life and all the different versions that that could come in. Now, obviously, that's the time that your brain is being constructed, and that's important, but in addition, experience during those times produce what are called epigenetic changes, permanent, in some cases, permanently activating certain genes, turning off others. And as an example of this, if as a fetus you were exposed to a lot of stress hormones through your mother, epigenetics is going to produce your amygdala in adulthood as a more excitable form, and you're going to have elevated stress hormone levels.


07:52But pushing even further back, back to when you were just a fetus, back to when all you were was a collection of genes. Now, genes are really important to all of this, but critically, genes don't determine anything, because genes work differently in different environments. Key example here: there's a variant of a gene called MAO-A, and if you have that variant, you are far more likely to commit antisocial violence if, and only if, you were abused as a child. Genes and environment interact, and what's happening in that one second before you pull that trigger reflects your lifetime of those gene-environment interactions.


08:34Now, remarkably enough, we've got to push even further back now, back centuries. What were your ancestors up to. And if, for example, they were nomadic pastoralists, they were pastoralists, people living in deserts or grasslands with their herds of camels, cows, goats, odds are they would have invented what's called a culture of honor filled with warrior classes, retributive violence, clan vendettas, and amazingly, centuries later, that would still be influencing the values with which you were raised.


09:07But we've got to push even further back, back millions of years, because if we're talking about genes, implicitly we're now talking about the evolution of genes. And what you see is, for example, patterns across different primate species. Some of them have evolved for extremely low levels of aggression, others have evolved in the opposite direction, and floating there in between by every measure are humans, once again this confused, barely defined species that has all these potentials to go one way or the other.


09:41So what has this gotten us to? Basically, what we're seeing here is, if you want to understand a behavior, whether it's an appalling one, a wondrous one, or confusedly in between, if you want to understand that, you've got take into account what happened a second before to a million years before, everything in between.


10:00So what can we conclude at this point? Officially, it's complicated. Wow, that's really helpful. It's complicated, and you'd better be real careful, real cautious before you conclude you know what causes a behavior, especially if it's a behavior you're judging harshly.


10:18Now, to me, the single most important point about all of this is one having to do with change. Every bit of biology I have mentioned here can change in different circumstances. For example, ecosystems change. Thousands of years ago, the Sahara was a lush grassland. Cultures change. In the 17th century, the most terrifying people in Europe were the Swedes, rampaging all over the place. This is what the Swedish military does now. They haven't had a war in 200 years. Most importantly, brains change. Neurons grow new processes. Circuits disconnect. Everything in the brain changes, and out of this come extraordinary examples of human change.


11:05First one: this is a man named John Newton, a British theologian who played a central role in the abolition of slavery from the British Empire in the early 1800s. And amazingly, this man spent decades as a younger man as the captain of a slave ship, and then as an investor in slavery, growing rich from this. And then something changed. Something changed in him, something that Newton himself celebrated in the thing that he's most famous for, a hymn that he wrote: "Amazing Grace."


11:43This is a man named Zenji Abe on the morning of December 6, 1941, about to lead a squadron of Japanese bombers to attack Pearl Harbor. And this is the same man 50 years later to the day hugging a man who survived the attack on the ground. And as an old man, Zenji Abe came to a collection of Pearl Harbor survivors at a ceremony there and in halting English apologized for what he had done as a young man.


12:12Now, it doesn't always require decades. Sometimes, extraordinary change could happen in just hours. Consider the World War I Christmas truce of 1914. The powers that be had negotiated a brief truce so that soldiers could go out, collect bodies from no-man's-land in between the trench lines. And soon British and German soldiers were doing that, and then helping each other carry bodies, and then helping each other dig graves in the frozen ground, and then praying together, and then having Christmas together and exchanging gifts, and by the next day, they were playing soccer together and exchanging addresses so they could meet after the war. That truce kept going until the officers arrived and said, "We will shoot you unless you go back to trying to kill each other." And all it took here was hours for these men to develop a completely new category of "us," all of us in the trenches here on both sides, dying for no damn reason, and who is a "them," those faceless powers behind the lines who were using them as pawns.


13:18And sometimes, change can occur in seconds. Probably the most horrifying event in the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre. A brigade of American soldiers went into an undefended village full of civilians and killed between 350 and 500 of them, mass-raped women and children, mutilated bodies. It was appalling. It was appalling because it occurred, because the government denied it, because the US government eventually did nothing more than a slap on the wrist, and appalling because it almost certainly was not a singular event. This man, Hugh Thompson, this is the man who stopped the My Lai Massacre. He was piloting a helicopter gunship, landed there, got out and saw American soldiers shooting babies, shooting old women, figured out what was going on, and he then took his helicopter and did something that undid his lifetime of conditioning as to who is an "us" and who is a "them." He landed his helicopter in between some surviving villagers and American soldiers and he trained his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and said, "If you don't stop the killing, I will mow you down."


14:34Now, these people are no more special than any of us. Same neurons, same neurochemicals, same biology. What we're left with here is this inevitable cliche: "Those who don't study history are destined to repeat it." What we have here is the opposite of it. Those who don't study the history of extraordinary human change, those who don't study the biology of what can transform us from our worst to our best behaviors, those who don't do this are destined not to be able to repeat these incandescent, magnificent moments.

Robert Sapolsky

 

 

Christopher R. Browning

 

“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.”

Christopher R. Browning

 

Tove Jansson

 

Tove Jansson

Cat Chong (Excerpts)

How many times have you been in pain and had all the words needed to tell the story of it? While medical interactions...have produced scales, fixed registers and other appraisers of pain to evaluate its severity, Melzac...seems to say that pain, on some level is a failure of management - that the arsenal does not yet contain the ultimate expression of weaponry. Which is to say, when it comes to pain, we cannot kill it well enough. Held within both the index and the scale is the implicit assumption that, in regards to pain, its not real until its been registered. Either through observation or through the visual register of the wound, or through the medical vocabulary of the standardized scale. Within both of these inventories of pain, the measurement is incommensurate to the measure, as the scale is untethered from the body its attached to. The failure to conduct the body through statistics and therefore to manage pain appears consistently throughout The Undying as Boyer elegantly illustrates pain as a system containing the system, exposing the prosaic legal, financial and domestic through which pain passes in her life. By annotating the boundlessness of pain Boyer foregrounds each system as inadequate, as unable to contain any kind of whole. In The Undying, every system appears as partial... 

'...they ask the question: rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10. I try to answer but the answer is always a-numerical'. Sensation is the enemy of quantification...Boyer seems to invoke biometrics as akin to Roland Barthes understanding of language as a system of encoding...language being a system and the aim of the movement being a direct subversion of codes, itself, moreover, illusory - a code cannot be destroyed, only played off. To the OED, a code is described as a system of signs or symbols, any system by which information or instructions are conveyed concisely and a system used for economy or secrecy. Pain becomes the data her body emits as a code which cannot be destroyed. Which, in its quantification, is transmuted into a system of management, insurance, recovery and other kinds of economic power, all obscurities which commit agony into a type of secrecy...pain is the code which cannot be destroyed or written out of the body, only made to seem illusory...

The phenomenon of not being believed by various medical authorities, being itself a type of pain, is foregrounded in punishing, grueling, vicious, killing, unlistened to pain in which Boyer implicates the act of convincing a doctor of her pain is, itself, a form of violence, one that becomes necessary for her survival. The diagnosis and the agony are framed as, at once, inside and outside belief.

Within a condition of illness or pain Gleason asserts that the body is made vulnerable as it is made public. This is not an inherent category - the diagnosis and the necessity of convincing are enacted within a construction of unequal social relations. To be wounded is not a disadvantage but produces one in response to this site, which is to say: it is not my body which included the world, the way power is structured produces bodies at its mercy. To perpetually ask for care, in the same way, is what we might recognize as vulnerable, it is as much a state as it is contingent and responsive to the site of its production.

If a sufficient register for pain is a lexicon outside didactic language, where does that leave us? Somewhere outside of the weight of genre? Genre non-conforming prose? Memoir? Poetry? If the dominant rhetoric for pain is medical then the vocabulary which translates the sensate into language requires the medical as a medium. The clinical space becomes a substrate through which the experience must pass. If we reconsider the value of the index and the scale, would we find more people? Would the community expand? Would the imagination of the unfathomable open to include those who are excluded from institutional vocabularies? In refiguring the register, might we reconceptualize one that centers those in pain rather than those trying to eradicate it?

The pain scale as it operates within bio-medical rhetoric seems self-alienating. From within the capitalist medical universe in which bodies must orbit around profit at all times, the scale is framed in The Undying and Constellations as enacting a form of violence, as a mechanism of pain which corroborates in the creation of medical subjects through a process of quantification and subjugation. The person becomes the data they submit...The process of writing, then, marks a commitment to re-inhabiting the body after it's been doubled away into obscurity...

Cat Chong

depression

The gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.

William Styron

anxiety

 

 

 

death by astonishment

 

 

Barbera Kruger

 

dpdr

 

 

 

Liv Hope

 

People who fail to recognize imbalance and inequity are most often those who stand to benefit from it. Because political structures work for them, it may be hard to imagine the insidious ways that forces of power are enacted on the vulnerable. This interpretation provides benefit of doubt and assumptions of benevolence, neither of which are granted to the vulnerable, nor afforded by them in the face of oppressive structures. Legality doesn’t equal morality or freedom from reproach or critique. It doesn’t mean freedom from consequence.

   

     Authority Collective