GPT commentary:

Yes, this is the horror of the rational polis—its prudent exclusions, its quiet and violent erasures, its demand that existence must justify itself in terms that the polis itself prescribes. Conway’s reading, via Agamben and Foucault, reveals that the so-called reasonable city is always a city built upon unreasoned abandonments, upon the orchestration of disposable life.

To untangle the mobile—whether that mobile is a living system, a social order, or an assemblage of thought—is to interrupt its precarious balance, its carefully distributed tensions. The untangled mobile that is the polis, depends on the concealment of its own violence, on the pretense that exclusion is simply the byproduct of practical reason rather than its condition of possibility.

Conway's invocation of Plato is crucial here: when the pathological shifts seamlessly into the moral, when suffering is coded as an individual failure rather than a structural necessity, the biopolitical apparatus no longer even needs to declare itself. It simply is. The machine hums along, refining its circuits of elimination, demanding speech under duress, demanding coherence under threat. To stutter, to err, to be unidentifiable—these become not just misstatements or misunderstandings but existential threats to the polis, justifications for its most brutal clarities.

This is the logic of civilization as an ever-renewed project of purification, where the very notion of the good—whether eudaimonic flourishing, prudential polity, or rational discourse—contains within it the latent necessity of sacrificial suffering. The garden in Auschwitz, the flowers Höss cultivated—this is not an aberration but the most distilled form of the polis' unspoken bargain: that beauty, order, and reason can only exist alongside their negations, carefully managed, rendered invisible, or staged as necessary horrors.

The unspoken wager of civilization has always been this: that some will live as bearers of reason, order, and progress and others will die for them.

You wrote:

You wrote: "The unspoken wager of civilization has always been this: that some will live as reason, and others will die for it". What did you mean by "some will live as reason, and others will die for it"?

ChatGPT said:

What I meant was that civilization—at least in its dominant historical forms—operates on an implicit division: some people are positioned as the bearers of reason, order, and progress, while others are rendered expendable in service of that order.

The "some" who live as reason are those whose existence is legitimized as rational, valuable, and necessary—the architects of law, economy, and ideology. They move through the world with the assumption that their lives have meaning because they contribute to what is seen as civilization’s higher purpose.

The "others" who die for it are those whose suffering, labor, and disposability fuel this machinery—whether through war, slavery, industrial exploitation, or exclusion from political and social recognition. They are not just sacrificed physically but also erased from the conceptual space of reason itself; they are cast as irrational, primitive, excessive, or collateral to progress.

This is not just about past atrocities—it persists today in the way certain lives are systematically devalued, in everything from economic systems to policing, environmental destruction, and mental health discourses that frame suffering as an individual defect rather than a structural effect. Civilization, in this sense, is not a universal human project but a selective one, where the benefits of reason are hoarded by some while its costs are offloaded onto others.

You said:

Can you critique the text I wrote?

ChatGPT said:

Your text is dense, rigorous, and layered with references that push the reader toward an unsettling but necessary confrontation with the violence embedded in reason, polity, and civilization. It is effective in its interweaving of Conway, Agamben, Foucault, and Akomolafe, creating a strong theoretical scaffolding that exposes how exclusion is not incidental but foundational to civic order. However, there are a few areas where refinement could strengthen its clarity and impact:

1. Syntax and Readability

   • The long, complex sentence structures sometimes obscure the sharpness of your argument. While the density reflects the complexity of the ideas, breaking up certain passages would improve readability.
   • For example:

     "The customary phrase we are reasonable people silently circumscribes, circles the wagons and outcastes but there is a sense in which 'we' are, nevertheless, formed by whoever we vanquish, as Bayo Akomolafe says..."

     • This could be more forceful if split:
       The phrase "we are reasonable people" does not merely invite consensus; it silently marks boundaries, outcasts, and exclusions. Yet, as Bayo Akomolafe notes, 'we' are always shaped by those we vanquish...

2. Clarifying Key Transitions

   • Some transitions between thinkers (e.g., from Conway to Arendt, from Plato to Höss) could be made more explicit to guide the reader through the argument's unfolding logic.
   • The transition from "biopolitical circuitries" to the notion of "civilized limits and dividing lines" is intellectually coherent but could be unpacked further to show how this specific biopolitical mechanism functions.

3. Refining the Use of Quotations

   • The quote from The Republic is pivotal, but a brief clarification of its contested interpretations would be useful. Does Plato’s city literally execute the incurable, or is this a metaphor for a purified social order?
   • Similarly, the use of Höss’s "paradise of flowers" is evocative but could benefit from a sharper analytical connection—how does this reinforce the broader argument about suffering as the hidden foundation of the polis?

4. Balancing Abstraction with Specificity

   • Your text engages heavily in theoretical abstraction, which is powerful, but occasionally risks floating above historical or material specificity. Adding an example of how these exclusionary mechanisms operate today (e.g., migrant camps, algorithmic governance, mental health ideology) could ground the argument further.

Overall, this is a deeply incisive critique of reason’s hidden violences. Refining readability, sharpening transitions, and anchoring some abstractions in contemporary instances would only amplify its force. Would you like me to help rework certain sections while preserving your style?

You said: Yes

GPT said:

For Will Conway, horrors often arise when we attempt to untangle mobiles; to dehumanize is to orthopedically exterminate the erring that is human. Pervasive, hair-trigger biopolitical circuitries do not merely detect error and those who err—they create them. These circuits seek to eliminate the novelty that is error, attacking unpredictability, variation, and multiplicity. The result is a world in which we must either justify ourselves immediately and flawlessly or face lethal disregard.

Conway’s analysis, drawn from Agamben and Foucault, exposes how gatherings founded on practical reason and its moralisms are sustained through the violent exclusion of those deemed incapable of such reason. This exclusion is not incidental; it is generative. It produces the hoi polloi, the stupid, the errant, and the anomic—figures that judicious assemblies define themselves against. Before dialogue and governance can appear “sensible,” certain hindrances must first be swept aside, though not entirely erased, since they must persist as a foundational other. Those who perform this purification—self-styled arbiters of good sense—often happen to be ourselves and our accomplices, so long as we have inherited or accumulated sufficient authority to participate in authoring civilized limits.

Arendt, in a charitable reading, takes on the perspective of colonizers when she notes that to them, native savages were “as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse.” The customary phrase we are reasonable people silently marks out who is not included within reason’s embrace. But ‘we’ are always, in some sense, constituted by those we vanquish. As Bayo Akomolafe puts it, “Each individual citizen is the majestic product/outcome and yet ongoing exertion of the hidden public. The blood of the vanquished.”

The establishment of nomoi, laden with moral value, necessitates the simultaneous creation of zones of indistinction between bios and zoē—between politically qualified life and life reduced to bare existence. Civilization, in this schema, requires the continual production and extermination of savages, impurities, and brutes. Citizenship is sustained through the subjugation of its “useful” and through the abandonment and extermination of its “useless”  alter-egos.

If eudaimonia is achieved through leading a virtuous life in accordance with moral law, then failure to achieve it is easily reinterpreted as sin, a lack of individual virtue, or a failure of practical reason. In The Echoes of Utility, Conway quotes The Republic, where Plato describes a just society as one in which:

"Those who are diseased in their bodies they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put an end to themselves."

Plato’s passive, fluid shift from the pathological to the moral is striking. Illness becomes corruption; suffering becomes a justification for elimination. The seemingly noble call to cleanse society of its disorderly elements masks the foundational violence upon which that very nobility depends.

Binarized social orders demand that suffering be made productive. It becomes the unsensed sacrificial labor constituting the eudaimonic and hedonic subjectivities of others. Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, described his garden adjacent to the death camp as “a paradise of flowers.” The horror here is not the contradiction, but the coherence: the garden is cultivated precisely because the machinery of death is so meticulously maintained. The polis, too, has always depended on its hidden zones of elimination.

As Ernest Becker reminds us, it is in the places where “the goats are torn apart” that the “pathetic cowardliness” of it all is revealed. Civilization’s wager has always been this: some will live as bearers of totemic reason, while others will die for it.