Technocratic report genres enable megadam harm by masking intent in affectless language

Evidence

During the high era of neoliberal globalization, the “disease of gigantism” manifested itself in concrete and on paper: the physical hubris of giant dams was accompanied and enabled by an insufficiently studied, yet potent cluster of outsize genres of writing, prominent among them the World Bank feasibility study and the environmental impact report. (The latter, in the global South, was ordinarily ex post facto, published well after dam work had begun.) This issue of genre and scale is of direct pertinence to Arundhati Roy’s turn to the essay as a small, nimble form that allowed her to take on the weighty, leaden genres that gave ballast to the culture of the megadam and, beyond that, to the culture of developmental gigantism. … As a writer, this was her primary contribution to the NBA and to the international environmental justice movement: to expose the insidious, traumatic violence inflicted on the most vulnerable, human and nonhuman, by the affectless language of technospeak. “Language is the skin of my thought,” Roy observes. “At The Hague I stumbled on a denomination, a sub-world, whose life’s endeavor was entirely the opposite of mine. For them the whole purpose of language is to mask intent … They breed and prosper in the space that lies between what they say and what they sell.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 472

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the ‘disease of gigantism’ as carried as much by documentary genres as by concrete structures.
• ADDENDUM: The unmasking of euphemism and the report genre’s masking work directly serves the prose-reform concern threaded through Nixon’s argument and the trees article’s grafting/metaphor themes.
• XREF: Roy’s critique of language that masks intent connects to Nixon’s ch1 claim that rhetorical unmasking of euphemism is central to exposing industrial harm. — connects to: Language shapes moral perception and sanitizes harm — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2679; Agentless passive language erases human responsibility for harmful acts — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 383; Euphemistic language converts recognized harms into neutral technical categories — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1651 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Language shapes moral perception and sanitizes harm #expands (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2679
• Euphemistic language converts recognized harms into neutral technical categories #corroborates (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1651
• Sanitizing language increases willingness to engage in harmful activities #corroborates (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2694
• Euphemisms numb conscience while convoluted language obscures harm #corroborates (0.85)
• Agentless passive language erases human responsibility for harmful acts #corroborates (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 383
• Passive headline syntax downplays ingroup responsibility for harmful acts #exemplifies (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1090