The Sword and Laser discussion

Without spoiling any of the plot of the novel, I want to explore "unseeing" more deeply. Mieville is pulling on some pretty deep threads about how we work as human beings in constructing his police procedural. It's not merely an artifice or a gimmick. He is taking something we all do, though to varying degrees and often without direct conscious intent, and pushing it an unexpected direction.

I realized as I started reading the book that something about the way our main character was performing the act of unseeing, the ways that skill was instilled and grew over the course of a child's development, and the many different ways unseeing was described in active use in different situations that something about it felt unsettling to me. I had a strong, almost visceral reaction, but at first I wasn't sure why. Then there was a moment when the threads came together and everything fell in place. It wasn't anything about the novel's story or characters. This was my realization.

An adult or child in an abusive relationship almost always engages in some degree of "unseeing". It's an almost essential element in ongoing close abusive relationships.

Hopefully most people reading this will have never been in any sort of actually abusive relationship as an adult or a child and, as a result, my statement may sound surprising or confusing. I will move from the personal into other broader social examples of the unseeing dynamic that became clearer to me once I made this connection. But it felt important to me to start with this personal context. That's where I first made the connection.

Abuse and abusers always do things to distort their target's perception of reality and to establish a different, competing narrative. There's a lot of material available on different approaches and mechanisms employed to that end. Nevertheless, on some level, an abused person always has some sense of the broader reality of their situation. You have to perceive the underlying reality of abuse enough to plan, to react, to hopefully mitigate harm, and to be ready to intervene or redirect to try to protect others who may become targets. It's similar to the way in the two cities in the novel, acts of driving and walking in "cross-hatched" areas require a degree of active awareness which is then quickly unseen.

In an abusive relationship, the abused person must always maintain the positive qualities of the abuser (both real and exaggerated) and the "good" parts of the relationship in the forefront of their mind. That's what must be actively "seen" or perceived. That restricted view must be the reality experienced in the forefront of an abused person's consciousness. The abusive aspects must be unseen when knowledge of them is not essential in the moment. That's not the same thing, exactly, as repression or compartmentalization. The abusive reality must be removed from the conscious mind as much as possible. It's the only way our brains can resolve the dissonance and continue to maintain what feels like the relative "safety" provided by the relationship.

And that's especially true for children who growing up in long term abusive situations. The stakes for a child are even more directly linked to survival. The emotional and physical dependence is starkly tangible. Threats to the child if the family is not maintained are also very real. Children are much more aware than they are often given credit for being. But their brains are also still developing. As the novel discusses, those who do not learn the complex dynamics involved in unseeing as children are less likely to fully master them as adults.

A similar dynamic of "unseeing" is also part of what is happening when people are pulled into various forms of cults. The have to see one set of structures and the altered characterization of reality the cult imposes. But since a cult is in many ways a group form of an abusive relationship, the same things are true. People are not usually completely unaware of what's happening but the only way to manage the dissonance created by those disconnects and maintain what feel like essential relationships in the cult is to unsee everything that does not align or fit the narrative. And cult leaders are usually really good at facilitating that process.

Unseeing also happens at a broader societal level as it does in the book. In fact, to a degree any and all societies include some element of what can be seen and acknowledged and what must be unseen and left unacknowledged. It's a dynamic Orwell was also exploring on the more extreme negative end in 1984. Yes, in that novel as in this one there's an external force enforcing what can be seen and what must be unseen, but it still requires each person unseeing things that contradict their imposed perceived reality.

While there are likely differences in individual propensity, just as there all sorts of individual variations in every situation, this sort of adaptation does seem deeply woven into the way our highly social brains function. And when you think about how homo sapiens survived and thrived it makes sense. For much of our history as a species, being excluded from the group was an almost certain death sentence. The pressure to fall somewhere within the expected social norms of those around us is enormous. As an autistic child, I definitely experienced what happens when you violate those social expectations.

This dynamic is not a delusion or any sort of psychotic break. I've had family members with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses that can include some degree of disconnect from reality. And there have been a few times when stressors have pushed my autistic brain past the point where it could process and handle the world around me. That's something different. The characters in this novel act and perceive in perfectly rational ways given their context.

Rather, the person engaged in unseeing a part of reality is aware on some level of the existence of what they are unseeing and can engage it when needed to the degree with which the otherwise "unseen" part of reality must be engaged for practical reasons. The knack of fully unseeing probably does require some dissociation but then dissociation is a protective response our brains are very good at performing.

I also have to admit it was fascinating to read this book in the midst of a population level 'unseeing' event when it comes to the ongoing pandemic, especially since that particular widely shared social action hasn't seemed to touch me much at all. I don't believe there's anything particularly special about me. Part of it is probably being autistic. But I think it's mostly because I sought out and connected with the disability community and disability activists after I was diagnosed years before the pandemic started. And the disability community cannot afford to play the strange game of Russian roulette in which people engage when they unsee that reality. It continues to be a pretty bizarre phenomenon to observe.

Any other thoughts about unseeing, either from the novel or different examples outside the context of the novel? The novel pushes the dynamic in ways and to extremes beyond any I would have imagined before reading it. But I like it when science fiction pushes those sorts of boundaries. It's not the only thing the genre does. And SFF can just as easily be a fun romp and escape from reality, which I also enjoy. But I also appreciate those times genre authors do more.

I took a big part of it as commentary on broader socio-economic issues. Something to consider is that the author is very strongly socialist. Part of my reaction to the concept of unseeing is that he is reflecting what some people do when confronted with those people in society that they don’t want to acknowledge. Walking past the homeless on the street as if they don’t exist. Ignoring the lines at food banks. Refusing to acknowledge those that are in a less fortunate position.

Yes, absolutely. I spent most of the time in my analysis exploring how that mechanism works psychologically with human beings and to do that I had to start with where it clicked for me personally. The specific unseeing mechanism Mieville employed is a very real facet of our human existence. It's something we all do to some degree every day of our lives.

On a broader basis, some of the things you outline are the sorts of societal things to which I was alluding here.

"Unseeing also happens at a broader societal level as it does in the book. In fact, to a degree any and all societies include some element of what can be seen and acknowledged and what must be unseen and left unacknowledged."

There's also a lot of embedded commentary on the artificiality and fundamental absurdity of borders.

But the social commentary on which parts of society get seen less is even within the murder setup itself within just one city. Even starting with the way the initial police assumptions about the victim at the start, that she was probably a streetwalker, we see some people are often dismissed. It's mentioned that such a case wouldn't have gotten much manpower just a few years before. Even so, until it turns out to be more, the assumption is they won't commit a lot of resources and she's identified as a working girl then even less.

With that said, I think I do want to comment on this comment.

"Something to consider is that the author is very strongly socialist."

And that, in and of itself, has very little to do with the social aspect of unseeing. Whether or not one believes strongly in social ownership (in whatever form) of the means of production simply shapes a few aspects of what can be seen and acknowledged or must be left unseen and unacknowledged. While there will be some differences from those who believe deeply in private ownership (again in whatever form) of the means of production. And in reality, most people and broader political systems function on a spectrum between those two poles. But that's merely one axis of cultural and social forces.

For instance, the cultural social forces in most modern white countries push strongly against whiteness being seen and acknowledged. Rather, that simply becomes essentially the default human. And that runs the gamut across "left" and "right" political ideologies. There's a reason the excellent Scene on Radio podcast series titled their second season, "Seeing White". (The latest season digs into Capitalism.)

https://sceneonradio.org/seeing-white/

I could say more, perhaps diving into the current act of unseeing I mentioned that spans across ideological spectrums, but I think that's the main additional point I want to make.

I have a different perspective on Unseeing (not saying anyone else is wrong, just seeing things in a different way... appropriately enough!). To me it comes across as more like different communities sharing space but living separately. Beszel has a kind of old-school Eastern European feel, and I picture it as something like Prague. Ul Qoma feels more Middle Eastern -- I think there's a reference somewhere to it having more people coming in who are Arabic and African although I'm afraid I can't find it in my library copy. Also, it's clear that Ul Qoma is over-taking Beszel economically in recent times -- there are references to Ul Qoma having skyscraper office blocks and newer cars.

The overall vibe reminds me of a former Communist bloc city that's now opened up to both economic investment and immigration, and the older residents (represented by the Besz) are still living their old-school lifestyle, while there are incomers and those who have adapted to the incomers (represented by Ul Qoma) who are richer and have a flashier and more varied lifestyle, with the two communities right alongside each other but ignoring each other.

I think Berlin was one of Mieville's inspirations and I can certainly see that -- I went there about twenty years ago (so about fifteen years after the fall of the Wall) and you could definitely still see which parts of the city were formerly Communist.

I haven't finished reading yet so I don't know how things will fall out in the last section of the book, but something that's interesting to me reflecting on the author's politics is that he's reminding me of old Eastern bloc cities, and if you go to somewhere like Prague or Berlin then the Communist-era buildings are not usually a great advertisement for Communism! I guess I'll see how it develops...

I don't know that it's a different take and more looking at a different aspect of what Mieville is doing. He's taking the concept of borders, especially borders in closely divided spaces like the old East and West Berlin divisions and pushing those to the extreme. In part that illustrates how artificial and just how much a social construct 'borders' of all sorts truly are.

The psychosocial mechanism he uses to do build that playground is the one that lies behind seeing and unseeing. Just as the perspective of borders as nothing more than social constructs is built on real examples pushed to an extreme, the psychosocial mechanism he uses is also built on a pretty fundamental human social mechanism.

I was most intrigued by the way he used the seeing/unseeing mechanism itself once the pieces fell in place for me. I had never looked at it in that light before, though I had some awareness of the way we all do it. That's why I focused more on the act itself rather than the different things like 'borders' and other social constructs we use to divide or separate ourselves that he was using it to explore.