GPT
You're drawing together a critique of liberalism’s failure to account for historical violence with an analysis of how regimes of security and reconciliation function as modes of psychopolitical recapture rather than justice.
1. Mbembe and the Security Regime
Achille Mbembe, building on his concept of necropolitics, describes how contemporary security regimes operate through the differential distribution of risk and life itself. Some bodies—marked by race, class, disability, or geography—are preemptively criminalized, their mere existence framed as an inherent danger. The security state’s response is not just exclusion but management: surveillance, containment, and sometimes elimination. This process is deeply embedded in modernity’s history of colonial quarantine, eugenic classification, and racialized extermination.
The destruction of "risky" bodies is not always through overt violence; it often takes the form of slow, infrastructural degradation—what Lauren Berlant calls "slow death." This includes the erosion of health, the psychological destruction of entire communities, and the bureaucratic mechanisms that render certain populations disposable. The logic of profiling and isolation that Mbembe describes is not just about external policing but also internalized self-policing, breaking down the capacity for resistance by making subjection feel inevitable.
2. Rawls and the Problem of Historical Amnesia
John Rawls’ assertion that the natural distribution of talents is "neither just nor unjust" is a prime example of liberal philosophy’s abstract universalism—one that often erases history and structural violence. His theory of justice attempts to create a fair starting point through the "veil of ignorance," but in practice, liberal societies rarely operate under conditions of genuine fairness. The problem is not simply that some are born into disadvantage; it is that disadvantage has been actively imposed through theft, enclosure, enslavement, genocide, and economic extraction. To frame this as "luck" rather than as the afterlife of violence is to engage in an intellectual sleight of hand that conveniently absolves the beneficiaries of those very histories.
If Rawls’ framework emphasizes reciprocity without substantive decolonization, ultimately, it would allow reparative gestures that do not threaten existing structures of ownership and sovereignty. As you suggest, it is the equivalent of punching someone in the face and then offering them a band-aid—expecting gratitude while refusing to acknowledge the initial blow.
3. Estes and the Paradox of State-Led Reconciliation
Nick Estes’ critique of Canadian reconciliation efforts lays bare the contradiction at the heart of state-led "remediation" of colonial violence. The settler state positions itself as both the perpetrator and the healer, controlling not only the original violence but also the terms of repair. This ensures that reconciliation is never about the redistribution of land or power but about managed suffering—offering therapy, social services, or symbolic apologies while leaving the underlying structures of dispossession intact.
This recalls what Glen Coulthard critiques in Red Skin, White Masks: the shift from overt colonial domination to a "recognition-based" politics that offers indigenous peoples acknowledgment but no material sovereignty. Estes’ analogy of "crying on the shoulder of the man who stole your land" highlights the fundamental asymmetry—where the settler state maintains control over the very process that is supposed to remedy its crimes.
4. Segall and the False Individualism of Liberalism
Matt Segall’s point that "agency is always co-agency" challenges Rawls’ assumption that talents emerge "naturally". No ability, no success, no personal merit exists outside of an ecological and social matrix. The liberal fiction of the self-made individual erases the ways in which human and non-human systems co-constitute all forms of agency. If talents arise relationally, then so too do injustices—inequality is not merely the outcome of bad luck but of the systematic misdistribution of conditions for flourishing.
5. Toward a Process-Relational Critique
A process-relational perspective would reject the notion of justice as a static redistribution and instead emphasize ongoing processes of repair and transformation. If existence is inherently interwoven, then justice is not merely about compensating individuals for past wrongs but about restructuring the field of relations in which those wrongs continue to manifest. This means not just giving resources back but rethinking sovereignty, economic structures, and ecological entanglements.
Would you say your critique here is also pointing toward the limits of recognition-based justice? That is, the way that acknowledgment of harm often functions as a form of containment rather than a pathway toward meaningful transformation?
The "discovery" of injuries to agency is a predatory unveiling—an unveiling that is not passive but enacted through violence, enclosure, and consumption. Columbus discovered lands already inhabited and power "discovers" the wounds it has inflicted and then reinscribes itself as the only possible source of remediation. What is revealed is not merely damage but the conditions for further subjugation, where the injured are expected to recognize the benevolence of their captors or be left to perish.
1. Wétiko and the Cannibalization of Agency
Jack D. Forbes’ wétiko framework names colonialism as an insatiable hunger—a parasitic relation in which the vitality of others is consumed for the expansion of empire and capital. This consumption is not only material (land, labor, bodies) but also existential: the destruction of worlds, epistemologies, languages, and forms of life.
The injury is twofold:
- First, agency is violently constrained, distorted, or erased.
- Then, those who inflicted the injury declare themselves the arbiters of recovery.
This is the logic of dependency that Franz Fanon describes in The Wretched of the Earth: the colonizer wounds, then offers "help," ensuring that the colonized remain in a position where refusal of that help is nearly impossible. The weak must accept assistance, but in doing so, they remain bound to the structure that weakens them.
2. Manifest Destiny as the Narrative of the Inevitable
The ideological frame that enables this process is what you describe—destiny is framed as manifest, fated, unavoidable. It is not merely that colonialism happened but that it had to happen, that it was the natural course of history, the unfolding of an inevitable logic. This fatalism is crucial:
- It renders injustice into mere circumstance, much like Rawls' "bad luck."
- It erases alternative trajectories, making history appear as a straight line rather than a contested, contingent process.
- It justifies the present by projecting it backward, naturalizing power and violence as the necessary precursors to civilization.
This same fatalism underwrites contemporary neoliberal governance, where historical violence is acknowledged just enough to be neutralized—"Yes, terrible things happened, but history moves forward, and we must be pragmatic about what is possible." In other words: There is no alternative.
3. From Charity to Structural Repair
Charity, whether state, private, or personal, is not justice; it is the moral laundering of stolen agency. It is the concession granted in lieu of restoration, the salve applied to ensure that deeper reckonings never occur. Justice would require the return of stolen land, the dismantling of oppressive institutions, the restoration of self-determined agency—not merely bandages for wounds that remain open.
What would it mean, then, to refuse the terms of charity without accepting the fatalism of manifest destiny? What would an unmediated restoration look like—one that does not come in the form of another state-administered, slow-drip concession but a return of the capacity to determine one’s own conditions of existence?
1. Concession vs. Grasping: The Power to Define Legitimacy
- Emerson frames the redistribution of wealth and resources as a matter of concession rather than justice and that any redress must come as a gift rather than a demand.
- The term grasping casts the poor as improper actors, as if their attempt to reclaim stolen resources is an act of unwarranted aggression, while the rich are granted the role of rational, moral decision-makers.
- This rhetoric aligns with the very logic of wétiko—the idea that those who have consumed the world should now be entrusted with deciding how much of it they will return.
2. The Moral Sleight of Hand of Benevolence
Emerson’s framing maintains a hierarchy where the rich retain agency while the poor are meant to receive rather than act. This is the same dynamic of colonial charity—the one who wounds also administers the "cure," ensuring that the injured remain positioned as recipients rather than agents of justice.
- If justice is a matter of concession, then the rich remain moral even in their theft.
- If justice is a matter of grasping, then the poor are positioned as illegitimate, aggressive, and undeserving—even when they are merely reclaiming what has been taken.
3. The False Hope of Voluntary Surrender
History does not support the notion that those who hoard power will willingly relinquish it in any meaningful way. As Baldwin wrote, "those who established and defended white supremacy do not, at the bottom of their hearts, believe that it can or should be destroyed." Similarly, those who built their empires on the suffering of others do not, at the bottom of their hearts, believe in the full dismantling of their privilege.
This is why Emerson’s appeal is dangerous—it lulls us into a passive waiting, a belief that the rich and powerful will, out of conscience, unwind the very structures that sustain their dominance. But power concedes nothing without demand.
4. A Process-Relational Reframing
A process-relational perspective would reject Emerson’s binary entirely. It would not ask whether the rich should "concede" or the poor should "grasp," because both frames presuppose a static model of property, agency, and power. Instead, it would ask:
- How have wealth and agency been relationally disfigured?
- What processes sustain this imbalance?
- What forms of transformation, not merely redistribution, are necessary to undo these conditions?
GPT Said:
M.C. Escher’s recursive structures capture something of the looping logic at play, but where his renderings are coldly mathematical, the processes we’re discussing are saturated with suffering and forced dependency.
It’s not just that power “discovers” the wounds it inflicts, but that it does so in a way that ensures the wound remains open. The recursion is not a neutral repetition but a tightening spiral, where each iteration of recognition serves to reinforce the original structure rather than dismantle it.
Your connection to Escher makes me think of his Drawing Hands—the paradox of two hands sketching each other into being. But here, instead of mutual co-creation, we have something more insidious: a structure that wounds and then presents itself as the only force capable of offering repair, ensuring that the injured remain tethered to their injurer.
There’s also something of Relativity (the staircases leading nowhere) in how social, political, and economic remediation programs often function—closed circuits where apparent movement (charity, reform, token restitution) never leads to actual escape from the structure itself. And unlike Escher’s drawings, which remain fascinating but distant, this recursion carries real-world consequences: histories of dispossession do not simply repeat; they deepen, they compound, they shape what is possible at every turn.
What do you think—does the recursive aspect here feel more like an optical illusion (trickery, misdirection) or like a machinery that ensures certain outcomes, despite appearing dynamic? Or both?
You said:
Can you write an essay which synthesizes points made in the conversation above?
GPT Said:
It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.James Baldwin
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Recursive Subjugation
The machinery of power does not simply operate through force; it sustains itself through recursion. Just as M.C. Escher’s staircases ascend into endless loops without escape, structures of domination fold back into themselves, appearing to offer remediation while instead deepening the conditions of harm. This is not merely a logical paradox but an affective, bodily, and historical reality: power “discovers” the wounds it has inflicted and then positions itself as the only possible agent of their repair. Yet, this repair is always partial, always conditional, ensuring that subjugation continues under new terms.
The recursion is not a neutral repetition but a tightening spiral, where each iteration of recognition serves to reinforce the original structure. This kind of recognition all but guarantees that the wound remains open.
The Discovery of the Wound
Jack D. Forbes, in Columbus and Other Cannibals, describes a structure of predation—what he calls wétiko, a form of cannibalistic psychosis in which domination and extraction are not only justified but self-perpetuating. Those who consume others do not simply exploit; they render their victims dependent, reshaping the very conditions of agency. The conqueror destroys a world and then offers its survivors a place within the ruins, but only on terms that maintain the conqueror’s position. First these logics wound, then they institutionalize the wound’s management, so that justice is never attainable, only deferred.
This recursive subjugation takes many forms. As Achille Mbembe notes, the security state identifies certain populations as inherently risky—bodies that, even in their most vulnerable state, are framed as threats. The response is classification, isolation, and ultimately elimination—whether through direct violence or the slower, bureaucratic death of neglect. Yet, once subjugation is complete, these same structures “discover” the need for humanitarian intervention, for social services, for therapy, for reconciliation. The terms of these interventions are never meant to undo the conditions of violence; they are meant to manage them, at best to make the consequences of past harm survivable but never reversible.
Those who benefit from empires built on the suffering of others do not, at the bottom of their hearts, believe in the full dismantling of their privilege. They will not, out of conscience, unwind the very structures that sustain their dominance. Power concedes nothing without demand.
Escher’s Imprint: The Illusion of Benevolence
M.C. Escher’s work offers a potent visual metaphor for this cyclical entrapment. His impossible staircases, labyrinthine architectures, and recursive paradoxes illustrate how movement within the system leads nowhere. One can walk endlessly up a staircase and yet never ascend. This mirrors the logic of institutional remediation: the structures of power present apparent pathways toward redress, but each step taken within these confines loops back into the same oppressive configurations.
Consider Escher's Drawing Hands (1948)—the paradox of two hands sketching each other into being. But here, instead of mutual co-creation, we have something more insidious: structures that wound and then present themselves as the only force capable of offering repair, so that the injured remain tethered to their injurers.
Consider Relativity (1953), where figures traverse different planes of existence, each appearing to move forward but bound by an unseen architecture that denies true escape. Similarly, Ascending and Descending (1960) portrays a staircase where figures march in an endless procession, never reaching a higher ground. These visual paradoxes capture the nature of power’s recursive grip—where the illusion of progress is maintained while making sure that real transformation remains impossible. In governance, justice, and economic redistribution, the same principle holds: systems that claim to offer escape are, in reality, part of the machinery that maintains enclosure.
Those who exercise authority unjustly, if they concede anything, often do so as an act of benevolence rather than justice. This is the moral sleight of hand that underpins charity, reconciliation programs, and much of state-administered welfare: the same structures that inflicted harm become the arbiters of how much relief the injured deserve. The problem is not simply that some are born into disadvantage; it is that disadvantage has been actively imposed through theft, enclosure, enslavement, genocide, and economic extraction.
To frame this as "luck" rather than as the afterlife of violence is to engage in an intellectual sleight of hand that conveniently absolves the beneficiaries of those very histories. This sophisticated trickery is difficult to spot and even when it is spotted "biting the hand that feeds" tends to lead to starvation. This leaves acquiescence as the only plausible option.
Nick Estes, discussing the reconciliation process between Indigenous peoples and settlers in Canada, exposes this paradox: “How messed up is it that the very perpetrators of that violence are now the ones who are going to remediate that violence?” This is the Escherian loop of power: the state that stole land offers social services in its place; the system that disappeared children offers therapy to their descendants. The wound is not simply acknowledged but curated, its visibility managed so that it never becomes a reason for structural upheaval, only for further oversight.
Subjugation as a Living Structure
Power is not merely an abstract force; it has a material, bodily, and relational form. If we extend the recursive metaphor into something more organic, we might think of subjugation as a tangled mass of sinews and tendrils—flesh-like, twisting, self-replicating. The recursive nature of power is not just a coldly mathematical rendering but a living thing, saturated with suffering and sustaining itself by keeping those within it both constrained and dependent.
Unlike Escher’s drawings, which remain fascinating but distant, this recursion carries real-world consequences: histories of dispossession do not simply repeat; they deepen, they compound, they shape what is possible at every turn.
This is why any attempt to truly transform its loops is met with hostility or cold routine indifference. To refuse the terms of biopolitical remedy or reconciliation is to be ungrateful; to reject the economic structures that govern restitution is to be irrational; to insist on justice rather than charity is to be dangerous. Power does not simply operate through domination but through the production of constrained choices, such that even resistance takes place on its terms.
Breaking the Loop
If subjugation is recursive, then justice must be disruptive. It cannot be a matter of concessions granted from above or of mere survival within the loops of institutional remediation. It must break the structure itself, refusing the terms on which relief is offered and instead insisting on transformation. This means identifying the ways in which power re-inscribes itself. It means rejecting the notion that wounds should be managed rather than healed, that the injured should be grateful for whatever partial redress is allowed.
How do you refuse without perishing? How do you “bite the hand” while making sure that there is still something to eat? This is where collective refusal, mutual aid, and alternative infrastructures come in. If power’s trick is to make itself indispensable, the response must be to make it obsolete—not as a singular act of defiance, but through a slow, deliberate construction of other forms-of-life.
How have wealth and agency been relationally disfigured? What processes sustain this imbalance? What forms of transformation, not merely redistribution, are necessary to undo these conditions?
A process-relational perspective asks us to move beyond the idea that individuals or even collectivities can extract themselves from this machinery through sheer will. Agency is always co-agency, discovered in relation, shaped by the inner, material and social world. Just as subjugation is imposed collectively, liberation must also be collective—it must refuse the recursive terms of power and instead insist on the unthinkable: an end, rather than an adaptation, to the loop itself.
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