The Invention And Making Of Trust

moral-aesthetic productions of power that categorise, delineate, and de/attach personhood to individuals in an effort to justify a moral ill committed against them

A bit over a year ago, my life fell apart in a very bureaucratic and administrative way, caught up in visas and departments and officials, and I’ve done a very good job of putting it back together since. I am talking of this event and its fallout again not because I still obsessively think of it, or because I am seeking some continued sympathy, or because I still consider it a part of what shapes my life today. Instead, I am talking about this because I think it set off a chain of emotional reactions and realities that morphed into a kind of illness that wasn’t the unruly or unsettled sort I was used to, but rather took the shape of a sort of muted numbness, a scrubbed-down version of reality inhabiting and enveloping me, shutting me off from the outside. I think ‘shock’ is a good word to use here, but so are ‘coping mechanism’ and ‘dissociation’, depending on how clinical you’d like to get. 

Less than a month after this, three days after my 25th birthday, my dog died. I found out about the term ‘funeral mania’ in this aftermath — a hazy, ill-defined idea that suggests that mania can be triggered in bipolar individuals by the death of a loved one. It made sense, but I wasn’t just manic, I was also hysterically miserable and afraid and lost, having lost (from continents away), an anchor of love and world-making that had shaped me for fifteen years. This, I am talking about because it continues to shape my life, continues to be on my mind, continues to dictate how I breathe and sit and think and where I look when my eyes wander and what I remember when my mind is idle and how I walk through my house and how I eat my food. It will continue to, forever, and I am grateful.

The thing is, this loss, and the loss of my grandmother a few months after, felt both private and not, both real and unreal, hideous and serene. Most of all, they both, ultimately, felt kind of numb. About a month ago, while talking to Jack, I think, I came to the realization that a lot of this numbness, this feeling of removal and inaccessibility (which had been accorded to shock, a particular grief, by my therapist), could possibly have something to do with the SSRIs that I had been on since shortly before the initial rupture at the beginning of last year. On verbalizing this possibility, I started crying, a kind of release and reality and ferventness that I scarcely remember feeling another time in the past year or more. 

Today, my psychiatrist told me I could take my SSRI dosage down from 20mg to 10, and then to 5 in a week, and then two weeks later, everything going to plan, to nothing at all. She agreed to do this immediately after I asked, agreed with my suspicion of how it may be interfering with my ability to feel. She told me I could manage the tapering myself, and gave me some guidelines and told me what to do in case things didn’t go to plan, and of course I could always come back and see her, but if that wasn’t needed, she’d see me in a year. 

As cheesy as it sounds, I think this is something resembling a sense of empowerment — being able to have a say in my own care, being trusted by someone who calls the shots to shape my own relationship to the drugs I am on, being told, and encouraged, to listen to my own body and mind and symptoms and reality while doing so. 

Last year, I read A Matter of Appearance by Emily Wells, which is a book that transformed my brain and my priorities during my time with it, and I have spent more and more time reading about how ‘health’ as a bureaucratic taxonomy functions to exclude and exploit individuals at the margins of society — margins that this bureaucracy has produced and continues to produce by virtue of its creation of spacialised realities made of morality, which, also, is produced by it. 

Here, I started to think of what it means for something to be bureaucratised, and what the goal of bureaucracy (as a phenomena, rather than an entity, if such a separation is possible) is. My theory/understanding of bureaucracy places at its core the intersubjective belief in verifiability, that is, the invention and making of trust —  an idea to be exponentially and, in perpetuity, fragmented, intersubjectively upheld, and reproduced. Truth and reality then become inextricable from one another within a particular bureaucratised system, and also from the coercion that produces them, owing to the appropriated authority and violence exercised in establishing verification. 

In other words, if something is recorded, witnessed, categorized, or otherwise absorbed into a bureaucratic system, it is deemed true, because the body or entity that controls the system has appropriated the power to either (1) force you to believe in its moral authority, its commitment to tell the truth or (2) convinced you that it has demonstrated to you sufficient evidence that you have arrived at the conclusion it wants you to on your own. It works to obfuscate the violence, power, capital, bias, and agendas that shape this interaction, while creating a truth that you come to believe is one and the same as reality — with no opportunity to verify this yourself. 

I have been thinking of this chain of coercion, control, truth, capital, and cyclical reproduction in relation to health in terms of its manifestations that are most proximate to me. Wells’ memoir, late 19th century anthropological studies of phrenology, the present-day weaponisation of ‘mental health’ as a tool of anti-revolution and anti-intellectualism by Zionists in israel and elsewhere alike during the active genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere — each demonstrating or detailing moral-aesthetic productions of power that categorise, delineate, and de/attach personhood to individuals in an effort to justify a moral ill committed against them. Most pertinently, and most immediately, this is evident in the way israeli ‘civilians’ and IOF members characterize all Palestinians (including children) as ‘Hamas’, attempting to utilise the term for a revolutionary counter-occupation force as a catch-all for depravity and immorality, suggesting, and hoping, clearly, that this characterisation will create the public and popular conditions necessary to continue sustaining its genocidal mission. 

This bid for approval is not (at its most basic level) a moral one — it is a pragmatic and aesthetic one, qualities that, when put together, have the potential to produce morality. The struggle for Palestine is a struggle for humanity, and one that is inextricably tied to the struggle for land. In the words of David Lloyd:

“... neither the history nor the theory of racism can be thought without reference to spatial categories, whether we attend to the global geographies of imperial expansion and international capital, or to the more intimate geographies of the inner city, ghettoisation, or the displacement of peoples.” ¹

It is no accident that Palestine is subject to a colonial occupation that channels each of these possibilities into a single, ever-transforming system of violence, terror, and coercion, be it in terms of the unending sound of drones overhead Gaza or the targeted assassinations of Gazans seeking aid in the form of food or medicine. Gaza had long been referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison, a motif of architectural suffocation invoked to convey the unthinkable reality that its residents were being forced to exist within. I think that this descriptor is also accurate in conveying the mechanisms of bureaucracy and liberal absorption that Palestine has been subject to — for instance, Palestinians being imprisoned in Zionist prisons for decades on end, often without trial (a nod of legitimacy to the Zionist state, ultimately, which suggests that the existence of process of a trial would make such an imprisonment any more legitimate). 

When people try to justify or sanitize israeli actions, they often insist that their targets were ’Hamas’ and ‘non-civilians’. This, again, is an attempt at categorisation that codes morality as an aesthetic category, a means of popularly sanctioning murder. In addition to the fact that every single Palestinian civilian is forced to involuntarily exist in a warzone under occupation and is not accorded the basic respect of humanness by israel, let alone the liberal farce of civilianness, and that any Palestinian who has picked up arms has done so under a necessarily extreme reality of coercive choice, this categorisation also shows an israeli attempt to sanitize a particular spatial reality, the artificial production of an ‘other’, who can then justifiably be cleansed. This echoes Samuel Caitlin’s analysis of the violent suppression of US campus protests in solidarity with Palestine, particularly in the case of USC (usefully read alongside Lloyd’s on the inwardly and outwardly replicated networks of racialised geographies, above): 

“Lurid, prurient, gothic, and almost farcically blunt in its racism, this institutional fantasy of the rape of the “very young girl” (white, of course) by the “non-affiliate” is the primal scene of the campus. Ostensibly so that it may be prevented from ever actually coming to pass, this assault must be ceaselessly imagined (a worst-case scenario for the university’s general counsel) and narrated (a cautionary tale for incoming coeds). A paranoiac security apparatus gets up and running entirely on the frisson of this rape fantasy. The campus is imagined as the place where there are people—“very young girls”—to whom something might happen. There must be somewhere the girls can be kept safe from the non-affiliates; there must be a campus.” ²

This speaks to the entire founding myth and farce that israel uses to justify its existence — the idea that nowhere else on earth is safe for a particular community, that there is a justification in violent colonization when a hypothetical inverse is at stake. This potentiality is repeatedly molded into acceptance by deliberately blurring what has happened, what could happen, what Zionists wish would happen, what Zionists supposedly have on good authority that Palestinians want to happen.

This is an instance of a bureaucratic channel of truth-making: by appropriating territorial power and possessing capital and weapons, israel creates the conditions necessary for it to dictate the truth, and, above all, (re)produce an entire populace that subscribes to this truth twofold. israelis (who are not extricable from ‘the government’ or the IOF, but form larger set that the latter two entities belong to) believe not only that they are being told the truth, but also that this truth is self-evident, requiring no further investigation or verification, a thing that it is blasphemous to question. The dissonance is evident, yet worth noting. I am not attempting to psychologically deconstruct the average genocidaire, but I do think it is worth examining the mechanisms through the conditions for these acts are created: 

“It’s not just that some people get to break the rules—it’s that loyalty to the organization is to some degree measured by one’s willingness to pretend this isn’t happening.” ³

The point of this is that, again, in mirrored and self-replicated dynamics of power and oppression, the same tactics and same technologies are utilized to create ‘clean’ spatial realities through the rhetoric and bureaucratic recategorization of people’s humanity. This is true of how mentally ill individuals are treated in institutions, it is true of prisons, it is true of schools, and it is true of Palestine, which continues to act as a litmus test of morality and an instruction in resistance. A free Palestine, free Kashmir, free world in our lifetimes. 

1. David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics

2. Samuel P. Caitlin, “The Campus Does Not Exist”, Parapraxis (https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-campus-does-not-exist)

3. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules