The experience of exception

I am struggling with what to make of personhood and subjectivity in contexts of extreme deprivation and concomitant suffering. When political-economic phenomena conspire with overt interpersonal violence in the lives of the sick and poor, what does it mean to try to describe the structure of experience? What does it mean, for example, to elaborate ethnographically (i.e. in person, and in text) on the experience of "social death"?

Much anthropological work on trauma and violence has dealt with the sequelae of such situations, but how might we approach an ethnography of ongoing violence? It seems too ethically and epistemologically simple to rely on the hackneyed and normalizing conception of current violence as just "another layer of complexity," as if the shedding of blood were a fresh coat of multivariegated paint. Such a metaphor, even in its more nuanced, less reified forms, implies the stability of an edifice (i.e., the structure of experience) that, on close inspection, does not provide shelter, at the very least, or worse still, that may not even be there, having been annihilated long since. When--and, more importantly, how--can we begin to admit that the rubble of culture is becoming an evanescent dust, so pulverized by violence that recognizably "human experience" itself seems to evaporate into thin air? If we acknowledge the profundity of the indignities implied by descriptions of "social death," and by the extreme physical suffering of the indigent sick (e.g., deadly "syndemics" of chronic starvation and gang-related physical violence), doesn't a sense of solidarity and concomitant honesty obligate us to repudiate facile formulas like "weapons of the weak?"

Put another way, this is my dilemma: Giorgio Agamben's descriptions of "bare life," at times, seems to me to describe with disturbing accuracy the contemporary lives of the indigent sick. In engaging with and attempting to represent the situations faced by many of my very poor patients in rural Guatemala, however, Agamben's "homo sacer" seems to recapitulate neo-colonial ideologies about "savage Indians" as nearly bestial "clean slates" where "civilization" must be inscribed. But when people are stripped violently bare of what even they themselves would "identify" as universal prerequisites of human dignity, and when, moreover, they are denied the materials necessary for mere survival by everyday structures of violence, what do we risk in describing and publicizing such a "state of exception that is the rule?" The dangers of such an interpretation seem to be magnified when dealing with contemporary "states of exception" that are structured by seemingly self-perpetuating processes of neoliberalism and extractive global capitalism--as opposed to the historically or spatially remote examples of mid-20th century fascist dictatorships that serve as primary material for Agamben's reflections.

Does the ethnography of "bare life"--in all its dehumanizing, exploited nudity--verge on a grotesque "pornography of suffering?"