Dissociation

Three senses at three scales, and treating them as one word is the argument. The first is social. Society is made of dependency relationships, so separating people from those relationships dissolves the thing itself, which is what systems of dissociation are built to do. The second is a split inside a self, in cases of refracted or amputated cores. The third is the separation of conscious, self and will from one another, which is the same operation that produces a decoupled person and, taken far enough, death. Marsh runs the senses together because the same instruments produce all three. Torture is a struggle for ownership of the most intimate circle of self, that protected by privacy, and torture of body and mind is designed to encourage dissociation, which is a relinquishing of that ownership. What begins as a defence becomes the means of sublation. At the social scale she reads a long historical drift. Dissociation, externalization of guidance and the establishment of one authority were all required before governance by algorithm became possible, and the wealthy attempting to leave through transhumanism, migration to Mars and seasteading are dissociating from their negative image rather than escaping anything. Abstraction is the same move at the level of ideas. A shepherd who cared for his charges becomes blind justice and the invisible hand, neither of which can see the people they act upon, which deflects guilt by removing the relationship that would carry it.

Clinical psychology uses dissociation for a disruption of memory, identity, perception or consciousness, formalized in diagnoses from depersonalization to dissociative identity disorder, and the trauma literature after Pierre Janet and later Bessel van der Kolk treats it as a defence against overwhelming experience. Sociology has its own vocabulary for the social sense, from Durkheim's anomie to Robert Putnam on declining association. The two literatures rarely meet. Marsh's definition forces them together by claiming that separating a person from their relationships and separating a self from itself are the same operation at different scales, which is a stronger claim than either field makes and the reason her word covers ground neither would.