Truth commissions that individualize wrongdoing leave structural technologies unexamined

Evidence

But the subject supposed to recycle, Jones argued, presupposed the structure not supposed to recycle: in making recycling the responsibility of ‘everyone’, structure contracts out its responsibility to consumers, by itself receding into invisibility. Now, when the appeal to individual ethical responsibility has never been more clamorous – in her book Frames Of War, Judith Butler uses the term ‘responsibi-lization’ to refer to this phenomenon – it is necessary to wager instead on structure at its most totalizing. Instead of saying that everyone – i.e. every one – is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would be better to say that no-one is, and that’s the very problem. The cause of eco-catastrophe is an impersonal structure which, even though it is capable of producing all manner of effects, is precisely not a subject capable of exercising responsibility. The required subject – a collective subject - does not exist, yet the crisis, like all the other global crises we’re now facing, demands that it be constructed. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 139 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Google’s scapegoating of a single engineer contradicted known internal evidence — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 457; Truth commissions individualize harm and ignore systemic institutional violence — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1608; Toothless truth commissions still provoke military establishment backlash — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 323 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability #expands (0.92) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 139