Bodies
Alex Abramovich
Security footage showed the suspect stopping at a Starbucks before the shooting. He’d worn surgical gloves to handle his coffee cup. While the police were searching for him, something else – a ‘ceaseless feast of schadenfreude’ – was spreading online: ‘Prior authorisation is required for thoughts and prayers’; ‘Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage.’
Some pointed out that the NYPD’s reward for information, $10,000, was less than the average UnitedHealthcare deductible. The observation that justice had become as transactional as American healthcare – a system in which companies like UnitedHealthcare routinely imposes $14,000 deductibles on families – spread quickly, because it wasn’t really news to anyone. On social media sites, UnitedHealth Group had to disable comments after tens of thousands of users reacted to Brian Thompson’s death notice with the ‘clapping’ emoji.
The body has always been one of America’s primary political frontiers, a place where our deepest contradictions play out. A nation founded on radical freedom, built on radical bondage; a constitution that proclaimed liberty and enshrined chattel slavery, reducing human bodies to property, labour to capital. The contradiction persists in new forms, in a world where algorithms and actuarial calculations determine which lives matter and which don’t. UnitedHealth’s 32 per cent claim denial rate – double the industry average – isn’t a bureaucratic statistic; it’s a ‘death sentence by spreadsheet’, as one user on Reddit had it. In Texas, the state offers private citizens $10,000 to sue anyone who helps provide an abortion. The methods vary but the logic remains the same: some bodies must be controlled, and everyone must be enlisted in maintaining that control.
It isn’t that we lack the traditional warning signs. The torchlit parades, chants of ‘blood and soil’, are still part of our political repertoire. But our endless debates about whether fascism is coming – our fixation on these spectacular displays – obscure the ways that corporatised state violence has been here all along. That so many progressive Americans took such satisfaction in the death of a middle-aged father of two suggests how thoroughly each side has absorbed the other’s logic – and the media’s bafflement at this response reveals its continued inability to come to grips with men (Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk) and movements (MAGA, Project 2025) that had telegraphed their intentions at every turn.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr frames vaccine mandates as violations of individual freedom while championing restrictive abortion policies that place bodies under state control. The pandemic turned schools into battlegrounds where public health measures, driven by legitimate concern for safety, collided with deeply personal questions of autonomy.
In Texas, the lieutenant governor said:
No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.
Suggestions that older Americans, essential workers or the immunocompromised should have sacrificed themselves for the economy crystallised how thoroughly our bodies had become instruments of political will. Along with inflation, these are the faultlines – between personal freedom and state control, protection and coercion – that drove the American election.
The pattern repeats everywhere that power meets flesh. At the border, migrants become data points in a vast bureaucratic machinery, their bodies tracked, detained and processed according to algorithms that determine their value. In state legislatures, lawmakers dictate which bathrooms people can use, which medical care they can receive, which sports teams they can join, as if identity were something to be authorised or denied, like an insurance claim.
Even public health, meant to protect life, becomes another system of sorting and control. Essential workers. High-risk populations. Pre-existing conditions. Each category determines whose bodies matter, whose labour is necessary, whose lives are expendable, whose murders make headline news. The language changes as the underlying system resets: bodies must be classified before they can be controlled.
Fascism doesn’t start where the body ends; it begins by absorbing the body entirely – ‘everything within the state, nothing outside the state’ – and this absorption happens at a physical as well as a psychological level. The wave of euphoria over Thompson’s murder signals something beyond anger at a broken system. His death became a kind of collective revenge fantasy, his body transformed from person to symbol. As if here, too, some bodies must be sacrificed for the collective good.
Comments
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11 December 2024
at
9:48pm
Vicky Brandt
says:
I’m willing to grant that the body has been a “political frontier” in America, e.g., in the case of slavery. But it’s not clear to me that the problem is “corporatized _state_ violence” rather than corporate violence, period.
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12 December 2024
at
4:08am
Alex Abramovich
says:
@
Vicky Brandt
Vicky, thanks for this I'll buy all of that, with the caveat - I was trying to say it, and you've maybe said more eloquently - that it seems, more and more, like a distinction without a difference. (The key word there being 'seems,' perhaps.)
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12 December 2024
at
1:05pm
Graucho
says:
@
Vicky Brandt
Network (1976) is such a good film and so prophetic of the times we live in. If you haven't seen it before, enjoy this.
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13 December 2024
at
9:46pm
Vicky Brandt
says:
@
Alex Abramovich
Ah, I see: You may be right that it’s a distinction without a difference. Under what James C. Scott terms “high modernism” in Seeing Like a State, states and corporations commit the same philosophical error: they impose simplified schemata (cadastral maps, last names, cities built on grids, etc.) that render the world legible but the over-simplification soon makes them blind to the full nature of whatever it is they’re sorting and tallying; they then use their reductive epistemology to justify the sorting and tallying. This may well have started in the context of the nation state but is clearly the modus operandi of the modern world.
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13 December 2024
at
9:53pm
Vicky Brandt
says:
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Graucho
My goodness! No, I'd never seen the film, but the clip is certainly apt.
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15 December 2024
at
8:47pm
Alex Abramovich
says:
@
Vicky Brandt
Struggling to grade student papers before the semester ends here, but: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy09k15l21ro
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16 December 2024
at
2:34am
Vicky Brandt
says:
@
Alex Abramovich
I share your end-of-semester struggle and thank you for the gift of this exchange. I don't know how to account for the peculiar American culture of violence at the individual level (your BBC link)—and I'm American, now living in NC—but I can think of other LRB articles that point to the same kinds of large-scale problems we've been discussing, regarding Grenfell (James Butler, Oct '24), the world of finance (John Lanchester, Sept '24), and a truly eye-opening piece on McKinsey consulting and its nefarious involvement in government policies around the globe (Laleh Kahlili, Dec '22). Good luck with the grading, and thank you again for your gracious comments.
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16 December 2024
at
11:01pm
Alex Abramovich
says:
@
Vicky Brandt
Reading the above, I couldn't help but wonder about the tech world's obsession with biohacking, the singularity, immortality...
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17 December 2024
at
4:23pm
Vicky Brandt
says:
@
Alex Abramovich
Exactly!
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12 December 2024
at
2:46pm
Rahul Bery
says:
Not to nitpick, but does RFK really 'champion restrictive abortion policies that place bodies under state control.'? He does by association, sure, and that's probably enough to damn him, but despite some inconsistencies he seems to have always spoken in favour of the right to choose, even with very late term pregnancies if there are extenuating circumstances...
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12 December 2024
at
3:50pm
Alex Abramovich
says:
@
Rahul Bery
He's all over the place: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/20/anti-abortion-rfk-jr-00190552
Read moreModern capitalism has transformed everything, organic and inorganic, into a ‘resource’ to be ‘utilized’ and 'monetized’ as ‘efficiently’ as possible. The power of a secretary of health or some minor politician rankled by unisex bathrooms, or even a government as a whole, is minor compared to the power of the corporations that are ravaging our entire planet in their rapacious conversion of complex, interdependent systems into atomized consumables for their own profit. Now that 51 of the world’s 100 largest economies belong to corporations rather than nations, we have to grapple with how the locus of control has changed. And it is likely to get worse in the next few years: Trump, Musk, and their ilk seem to be in politics simply to remove the few remaining constraints on their ever-burgeoning coffers by further deregulation (and in the former’s case, to stay out of jail). We live, unfortunately, in the age of The Machine, not of The Body. The conquest of Nature continues apace, and the body is as much victim as the mind and spirit. Perhaps “the collective revenge fantasy” means people rightly resent being considered only as resources or consumers rather than citizens, at least, or, at best, as full human beings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th_jrd9aJmM
What troubles me in the modern discourse about ‘contested bodies’ is that it, too, forgets the fullness of our existence, cedes the premise of complex wholeness to the extractive, commercial ideology. The transition of so much work life from physical labor to “head work” enforces the same body/mind separation, just from the opposite direction. The body is widely viewed now as a thing that limits us and therefore should be subject to endless improvements, all the way up to vanquishing death—all for a price, of course. I can’t help but think that whole industries and many political and social evils would disappear if we lived and spoke like we understood the irreducibility of flesh and spirit.