Hydraulic and Nano Prejudice

Hydraulic prejudice is concrete - it is instantiated in "micro and macro-juridical, bureaucratic and institutional apparatuses" (Achille Mbembe). Nano prejudice, by contrast, is cultural; it manifests in the way we habitually speak, act, and think. It goes without saying, it is metronomic, boring, anodyne, and narcotic but, paradoxically, it is also a frenzied manifestation of a genocidal unconscious. It involves a tacit desire to wipe out outgroups or to evict them so that, in both instances, not only do you owe them nothing, you do not have to share the earth with them at all. Nano prejudice is not a person or an apparatus; it is particulate and molecular, as pervasive as air, and has the "capacity to infiltrate into the very pores and veins of society." We cannot turn screens off, but they can turn us off, because if we do not adopt and adapt to the norms represented and generated by mass media and mass politics (through its form as much as its content), then we will likely be excluded.

To reiterate, this kind of culture and its spores, along with the hydraulic apparatuses that accompany it, consist in the tactical destruction of reciprocity and in taking pleasure in wallowing in ignorance and claiming a right to stupidity and to the violence that it institutes (Mbembe). It consists, also, in the silent and horrifying indifference which Cornel West, Elie Wiesel, Baldwin, and many others are right to place so much emphasis on. Individuals are not taken to be rights-bearing by default or even to be living by default; as such, they may or may not be killable objects.

Stupidity, in this sense, is not an intellectual deficit but a foreclosure of relation—a refusal to engage with the complexity and density of others, a denial of alterity’s depth. This refusal, this flattening, is not passive ignorance but an active, violent simplification. It is the cognitive mechanism of prejudice, the means by which nano and hydraulic prejudices function: reducing others to static categories, abstractions, caricatures, killable objects.

To view others as simple is to neutralize their capacity to disrupt one's world, to demand recognition, to exist beyond the frameworks that render them legible to power. It is to make them manageable, containable, disposable. Stupidity, in this sense, is an epistemic violence—it ensures that the world remains small, predictable, and comforting to those who benefit from its exclusions. It is the narcotic pleasure of not knowing, of not having to know, of ensuring that knowledge remains a closed circuit rather than a site of disruption, encounter, and transformation.

But stupidity is not merely a failing of the individual; it is structural. It is manufactured, rewarded, and naturalized. It is a mode of governance, a way of keeping the world in order by ensuring that rich, disruptive, and fugitive forms of knowledge remain inaccessible, unimaginable. It is, as Mbembe suggests, the tactical destruction of reciprocity—not just through force but through the dulling of thought, the erasure of complexity, the refusal of relationality itself.

Thus, stupidity is not innocent. It is not harmless. It is an orientation toward the world that facilitates violence, that makes eliminationism possible by making it seem natural. It is the ideological soil in which genocidal logic takes root, the quiet precondition of atrocity.

Though it seldom sinks in, it is commonly noted that the Holocaust must be understood primarily in terms of social rather than individual psychology—in terms of group dynamics rather than individual traits. Speaking about the Holocaust and about genocides in general, Dr. Wendy Lower said: "Genocide is a social practice, an entire society is mobilized—men, women, and children." The terrorization and the liquidation of many impaired and injured people are, similarly, non-local—no one person or organization is the sole culprit. Echoing Sara Ahmed, Lennard Davis, meta-humanism, Conway, and Hedva, it might also be worth considering the hegemonic figure (and organizing principle) of a mythic human, which not everyone can match up to, and whose qualities not everyone can possess or perform, and which we are castigated (or killed) for failing to match up to.

If such a human exists, then so does the in- or sub-human, and vice versa. If Christopher Browning was right to suggest that "Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception," then being an ordinary person might not always be such a great idea. Davis’s critique of statistical norms becomes particularly relevant. The norm is not merely a descriptive average but a prescriptive mechanism, determining who counts as fully human and who falls outside that category.

See, Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Robert J. Lifton's The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, and, of course, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent.                            It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

James Baldwin

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 through 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 participate in the unjust exercise of biopower, if they concede anything, often do so grudgingly or 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.

Rejecting entanglement doesn’t sever it, only knots it further, like an Escherian braid looping back on itself, recursively constructing the illusion of separation. The distancing methods—economic, educational, political—don’t extricate; they mediate in ways that reinforce their own necessity, turning entanglement into something abstract, something one can, supposedly, opt out of. But opting out is just another move within the tangle.

Mediation doesn't merely stand between us and reality but is constitutive of our participation in it. The more intricate the mediation, the easier it becomes to mistake the tangle for an external object, rather than something we are always already within. And yet, once recognized, what then? Cutting through, untying, casting aside or tangling further—each response takes place within the same woven field. There’s no Archimedean point outside of it, just different ways of grasping the strands but some are privileged enough to larp as detached, as above the fray, intervening in it from the outside and for the best.

Privilege is often mistaken for clarity, for a capacity to see clearly without being implicated. But it is in fact a question of grasping from a more insulated position, mistaking insulation for transcendence. The game is to make one's entanglement invisible, to pose as the historian rather than the event. Some strands are given the force of law, of norm, of inevitability, while others are rendered contingent and unspeakable. Those who get to larp as detached also get to define what counts as inside and outside in the first place, dominant social positions get to frame their own perspective as neutral while marking others as biased, interested, or particular.

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.

The injured and the slain are a mirror held up to the assassin. A mirror they refuse to look into, for to see oneself in such a reflection is to acknowledge the wound as one’s own and as one’s own doing. The assassin wishes to remain untouched, to be only the hand that delivers, never the body that suffers. But the world is not so cleanly divided. The knife wound is an analogy for the knife. The wound is the wound, endlessly repeating itself. Once made, it is not just an event but a pattern—something that does not simply heal or conclude but continues, taking on new forms. The knife’s path is written in flesh, but the assassin pretends it was only ever air. To see the wound is to see the knife—to see the knife is to know one’s own hand. To cut is to be cut, though not always in the same place or at the same time.

This is why any attempt to truly transform its loops is met with hostility or cold routine indifference. Denial is its own kind of steel, sharp enough to cut away even recognition. 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 organizations can extract themselves from this machinery through sheer will. Agency is always co-agency, discovered in relation, shaped by the intersubjective, material and social world. With that said, 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.

Entanglement Never Vanishes

Gordian knots can be solved by cutting them, untying them, or—more darkly—by discarding them altogether, as has been done throughout history. The desire to rid oneself of entanglement often manifests as violence against those who expose it. Alexander’s act—cutting through the Gordian knot—epitomizes a worldview where problems are to be overcome rather than entered into. The logic of excision—of treating entanglement as something to be eradicated—has always been the logic of empire. His solution is external, forceful, and ultimately a refusal of complexity. The Celtic braid, by contrast, suggests an ongoing, generative process, a way of being entangled that is not about domination but about co-creation and mutual involvement. Endlessly weaving itself, it offers an alternative to the imperial gesture. Instead of treating complexity as an obstacle to be removed, it becomes a medium of participation. This reframing makes the historical stakes of mediation even clearer. The more sophisticated distancing methods become, the easier it is to think of entanglements as mere problems to be managed—or worse, erased. But if entanglement is fundamental, then even the act of elimination only reconfigures the knot, displacing and intensifying its effects elsewhere. The knot never vanishes; it just becomes someone else’s noose.