Abstraction erases the face so ethical rules no longer apply.

Evidence

And Toscano spells out what makes the two situations, and so also the deceptively similar acts of violence that occur in their contexts, so radically different; and the reason why they call for altogether different explanations. Unlike individual violence, ‘group violence is by definition abstract’; ‘real individual neighbours are not necessarily loved, but they are loved or hated for concrete, not abstract reasons … On the contrary, in order to apply group violence to the neighbour as belonging to a category, the concrete individual’s face has to be erased: the person must become an abstraction.’ … Indeed: abstraction is one of the modern mind’s principal powers. When applied to humans, that power means effacing the face: whatever marks remain of the face serve as badges of membership, the signs of belonging to a category, and the fate meted out to the owner of the face is nothing more yet nothing less either than the treatment reserved for the category of which the owner of the face is but a specimen. The overall effect of abstraction is that rules routinely followed in personal interaction, ethical rules most prominent among them, do not interfere where the handling of a category is concerned, including every entity classified into that category just on account of having been so classified. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 644

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines abstraction as the modern power of effacing the concrete individual’s face to enable category-based treatment.
• XREF: Connects to Levinas’s ethics of the face and to the concept of the Other in Orientalism literature that this reader will study. — connects to: Bureaucratic language becomes structurally unfit for moral evaluation of human objects. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 299; To dehumanize someone is to strip them of qualities that make them recognizable as fully human, so cruelty no longer feels like cruelty — The Psychology of Dehumanization and Moral Disengagement; Dehumanization begins when bureaucratic objects are reduced to quantitative, quality-free measures. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 298
• SEED: The ‘face-erasure’ mechanism gives an essay angle on how news media render victims as categories (casualty counts) rather than persons.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism that category-membership suspends personal ethical rules in toto is the load-bearing insight connecting abstraction to genocide.

Broader Connections

• Bureaucratic language becomes structurally unfit for moral evaluation of human objects. #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 299
• Dehumanization begins when bureaucratic objects are reduced to quantitative, quality-free measures. #expands (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 298