"For the Sake of Harmony": Beckett's Enactment of the Violence of Abstraction in The Lost Ones

Abstract

Abstract: Beckett's The Lost Ones —an angrier, more action-oriented text than is generally acknowledged—enacts socio-politically functional notions of "social cohesion" predicated on economic, racial, gender, and sexual considerations in ways apt to expose not just their harmful nature but also their aggregate functioning—their interconnected machinic articulation, which allows them to act concertedly, with crushing power, but also exposes them to generalized sabotage. The narrative voice feigns objectivity and detachment while proffering support for practices evocative of real-life economic instrumentalizations of the human body, racially justified forms of mistreatment, and gender-based discrimination and violence. The text's long-winded explanations, conspicuously rich in self-satisfied, pedantic-to-malicious caveats, understatements, and repetitions, ultimately emanate strictly unreliability, voyeurism, and cruelty. The Lost Ones thus provides not a meditative critique but an angry diagrammatic enactment (a term borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari) of the violence of abstraction.