Seeing Nothing, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Black Box

If you can believe it, I've been looking at the Epstein Docs a lot recently. Other than the obvious (we live in a very lame version of hell, international satanic pedo ring, etc.), what has fascinated me about this most recent set of Epstein headlines is the ways in which it forces us to grapple with absence as a key part of the discourse.

What are we missing? What are we forced to deal with that is absent in this story?

Well, for starters, we're missing a number of the girls and women whose lives were impacted by the crimes of these men. While we get a great deal of talk about 'the victims,' the actual human beings are notably absent. Then, of course, Virginia Giuffre, one of the people who made this story exist in the public eye, will never see justice.

Then, we're missing the names of the perpetrators of these crimes. Sure, we got stalwarts like the Dersh, Bill Gates, etc. Ya know, everyone that everybody already thought was a diddler. We even had some of our problematic faves like Noam Chomsky revealed to be far more involved than previously expected. But the vast majority of participants are still being shielded by the US government. With no mechanism to get rid of the POG (pedo occupational government), American citizens are flailing, trying to understand how and why this was allowed to continue.

While we're flailing around, we're having to figure out how to talk around nothing, the structuring absence of the Epstein Files.

Seeing the Lies

What are we allowed to see? Well, we're allowed to see the files, or at least some of them. At the core of this social drama, we have the files themselves. Selectively released and heavily redacted, the files themselves present a very weighty something, while also revealing very little new information.

Within the files, we see words. Lots and lots of words. This rhetorical tactic, megeithos, explained brilliantly by Jenny Rice in her book awful archives, means to bog down discourse with details while the sheer mass of dox is meant to obscure the absences contained therein. How can you people get mad about the president not being named when you got seventeen million files?

The sheer volume of files distracts from the absence of the files that matter the most: which of our currently serving politicians knew about or participated in these crimes?

These absences take the form of a silence or a void, best exemplified by the black box.

Seeing Absences

Living in a highly bureaucratic society, the practice of redaction is at this point quite naturalized. It is, however, an artifact of a particular technological epoch. This technology, the capacity to decide what does and does not get entered into the public record, is the basis of these other structuring absences in the Epstein discourse. But the discourse is, itself, the product of a number of structuring absences.

I can here rely on Foucault's insight that any discourse is not merely a collection of facts, words and analyses. Instead, "...in every society, the production of discourse is found; discourse production is simultaneously controlled, selected, and redistributed by a certain number of procedures." In the case of the Epstein Files, we are subject to the procedures of the FBI, the Justice Department, etc. A discourse becomes what it is (clearly defined, internally consistent, etc.) only through the exclusion of elements. It makes sense. A discourse about everything is a discourse about nothing. It is no surprise, then, that the government would try to drown us with dox, as it's a strategy attempting to turn the Epstein Files story into a story about sports betting, or crypto, or loot boxes, or some other bullshit Epstein had his grubby little hands in.

Additionally, we can draw on Derrida's notions of the trace and supplementarity to explain the structuring absences at the heart of The Files.

The files, as materially existing objects, produce a sense of presence. You can print them out and hold them. A real guy sat at a real desk and typed that shit up. But in terms of the discourse they produce, The Files have a mysterious absence. Where are the names? Where are the power brokers? Where are the girls and women? They're all covered up by little black boxes.

But for Derrida, meaning is never fully present. It is constituted by what is absent from it. Meaning is purely relational, and therefore can be derived fully only by experiencing what it is not. The missing names, the missing faces, the 119 missing pages. These are the real meaning of The Files, and we experience their trace as a hole in the discourse.

This supplement, where the 'real' meaning lies, cannot be revealed, and so we're left to grapple with black boxes.

We're all forced to look into the redacted abyss and experience the loss of meaning that pulls us into the event horizon of those black boxes. This vexes the population, who are forced to contend with black boxes at every level of society. Our tech, our financial institutions, our government, and so much more are black boxes that seem to lack levers for us to pull and push.

These structuring absences are a defining aspect of modern life.

Feeling Absences

Part of what makes this so mania-inducing is the feeling of helplessness. We've set up a child-eating moloch factory in the heart of our death-cult temple, and we're feeling awfully weird about being forced to face up to it.

Part of living life as an American is learning to ignore, love, or cope with the trail of bodies you leave in your wake just a function of existing. No way out of that one, pal. Your food, your clothes, your security, all of it takes its toll in bodies. Bodies in sweatshops, bodies in climate-changed global south nations, bodies shot down by cops in your own neighborhood.

Now, most of the time we can ignore those bodies. We've created the most sophisticated propaganda machine in the history of mankind to keep us from having to look at the consequences of our lives. But when it's the bodies of little girls? White ones? Oof, marone, that's hard to look at.

Our inability to true-crime-podcast our way out of this one produces a kind of instability that corresponds to all these other absent bodies that we've studiously ignored. Subconsciously, we sense the widening gulf between what we allow ourselves to see and what what takes place.

That's what the black box in the picture up there is doing. It's making us look at the thing we can't allow ourselves to look at, and it produces all manner of strange behaviours.

It's important to sit with that black box and really look deep into it. Can you see what produced it? What does it make you feel? Why do you feel that way?

That absence you feel is pointing you to something real. Now what are you going to do with that feeling?

-Dr. Crow.