Folklore of Operational Banality

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores the reductive workings of policy that lead to intimate everyday forms of violence within US-based medical administration. Using the framework of folklore of operational banality (“FOOB”), the article examines a geodata-driven way of addressing uncompensated medical care that targets “superusers” of the US health care system. The case scrutinizes the operative truths, procedural rationalities, and absurd reductions performed by this administrative system that sorts people in terms of cost and risk. It shows how such administrative strategies result in further bureaucratized inequities and harm, even as they claim to support life by ontologizing cost efficiency and cost-benefit thinking, accumulating biological data for geosurveillance and biosecurity, and treating risk and vulnerability as the property and responsibility of certain individuals/bodies and spaces rather than as the result of social-environmental problems. A parodic counterfigure appears in the case to amplify criticism of the individualized management of life/risk and the reliance on technocratic methods and biomedical models to define and allocate health care as separate from environmental and justice-oriented concerns. The figure of Health Coach App renders absurd the power relations of health interventions that exclude broader social etiologies of disease and illness and shows that collaborative approaches between environmental and medical humanities are needed to reveal banal administrative violence and to advocate for better policies.