New Materialism and Anti-Racism

In a recent facebook thread, there was a discussion about speculative realism and new materialism (and allied groups) relationship to feminism, queer theory, and anti-racist philosophy. In that thread, I pointed out some of the obvious new materialist thinkers working on feminist and/or queer theory fields. What I want to do here is collect the works where thinkers use new materialist insights to think through anti-racism. This list will be incomplete, and I welcome anyone who wants to add to the bibliography (I will edit this post as necessary). Also, by new materialists I am using the term in the broadest sense. I mean here thinkers who are broadly engaged in new materialism, speculative realism, non-representational theory, constructivist philosophy, posthumanism, and generally all the headings that can be thought under the metaphysical/ontological/non-human turn. I have also decided to write some very quick summaries of each text. The summaries are not super great, but should give you a sense of how the text deals with race and new materialism.


Mel Chen: Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Chen explores the ways that we navigate what we consider to be animate, to be living or dead. In so doing she particularly explores the ways that certain material objects come to be racialized, and she explores the ways other beings become de-racialized and neutered.

Michael Hames-García, "How Real is Race?," which can be found either in his book, Identity Complex, or in the edited volume Material Feminisms. In this essay Hames-García engages Barad's work on intra-action in order to think about the ontological realities (and limits) of race.

Donna Jones: The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. Jones explores how vitalist discourses, including in Nietzsche and Bergson, were implicated in racism and anti-Semitism. She also explores the way that vitalism continues in thinkers like Deleuze and Grosz. Furthermore, Jones explores the way that Négritude cannot be fully understood outside of the vitalist tradition.

Fred Moten: In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition, and his essay, "The Case of Blackness." I talk briefly about these texts in this post. Moten work, principally aesthetic, speaks of an "animative materiality."

Jasbir Puar: Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, and also her essay, "'I'd Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory." In both, Puar uses assemblage theory to try to challenge and extend the concept of intersectionality.

Arun Saldanha: "Reontologising race: the machinic geography of phenotype." Saldanha is interested in understanding race as a material ontology, and as a machinic assemblage.


Okay, what obvious things did I miss? What non-obvious things did I miss, and also need to make sure I read?

EDIT:

I thought about trying determine what counted as new materialist/ontological turn/etc., and if it really dealt with anti-racism. But I decided it was outside of my scope. I will just post the lists suggested from commentators. When lots of suggestions occur for an author, I randomly just chose one, read the comments for more. A lot of these are great suggestions. Also, I highly suggest reading the comments, there are lots of great stuff in there.

Anonymous:
Simone Bignall: Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism;
Bignall and Patton (Eds.): Deleuze and the Postcolonial
Tony Bennett: Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism
Helen Verran: "A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies: Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners."
Mario Blaser: "Ontology and indigeneity: on the political ontology of heterogeneous assemblages."
Marisol de la Cadena: "Indigenous Cosmopilitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond 'Politics'"
John Law: After Method: Mess in Social Science Research
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul

Carlos Amador:
Arun Saldanha and Jason Adams (Eds): Deleuze and Race.
Michael Taussig: Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing 

Jairus Victor Grove:
Glissant Poetics of Relation
Castro, The Enemy's Point of View
Muecke, Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy
João Biehl: Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
Danny Hoffman's The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Sergio González Rodríguez: The Femicide Machine
Octavia Butler: Bloodchild


CC:
Kalpana Rahita Seshadri: HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language.

Whose Joy? Whose Sadness? Building Livable Communities

How do we build inclusive, joyful communities? I believe that building communities where flourishing, livable lives are possible are important projects for us to undertake. But the ideas of joy and sadness are not given terms.

* * *

Todd May recently weighed in on L'Affaire Cogburn.  In his comments, Todd May wrote:

As Foucault once remarked, one does not have to be sad in order to be militant. One can go further: a sad militancy is one of those ways the left has developed whose major contribution seems to be to increase our marginalization.

Sure, I remember that, from his preface to the english edition of Anti-Oedipus. But May's interpretation here (and perhaps in Foucault's original stance), this assumes we know what joy and sadness are, and that they might be the same thing for the same people.

Let's look at two quick footnotes from Steven Shaviro's excellent book, Without Criteria:

This implies that Whitehead rejects Spinoza’s basic principle of conatus, the claim that “each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being,” and that this striving is “the actual essence of the thing itself” (de Spinoza 1991, 108: Ethics, Part III, propositions 6 and 7). For Whitehead, things strive not to persist in their own being, but rather to become other than they were, to make some alteration in the “data” that they receive. An entity’s “satisfaction” consists not in persisting in its own being, but in achieving difference and novelty, in introducing something new into the world. (p. 19, n3)

And:

Whitehead’s rejection of Spinoza’s monism in favor of William James’s pluralism goes along with his rejection of Spinoza’s conatus in favor of James’s (and Bergson’s) sense of continual change, becoming or process, or what he also calls creativity. (p. 22, n6)

We could potentially affirm that both are true, that for some joy consists in preservation of the self, and for others joy (or satisfaction) consists in difference and becoming otherwise. And all of this, of course, will change what you see as sad, or joyful, militancy. If you see joy as persisting in your being, than anything that seeks to change how that being interacts and relates, and anyone who seeks to create new relationships, can only be perceived as killjoys.

* * * 

I have written before about Sara Ahmed's provocative and compelling essay, "Feminist Killjoys and other Willful Subjects" (the essay was expanded in The Promise of Happiness, and, Ahmed has just published a new book entitled Willful Subjects).  Ahmed wishes to "take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously." She goes on to argue:

The figure of the feminist killjoy makes sense if we place her in the context of feminist critiques of happiness, of how happiness is used to justify social norms as social goods (a social good is what causes happiness, given happiness is understood as what is good). As Simone de Beauvoir described so astutely "it is always easy to describe as happy a situation in which one wishes to place [others]." [...] To be involved in political activism is thus to be involved in a struggle against happiness. Even if we are struggling for different things, even if we have different worlds we want to create, we might share what we come up against. Our activist archives are thus unhappy archives. Just think of the labor of critique that is behind us: feminist critiques of the figure of "the happy housewife;" Black critiques of the myth of "the happy slave"; queer critiques of the sentimentalisation of heterosexuality as "domestic bliss." The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made. We inherit this horizon. [...] We can consider the relationship between the negativity of the figure of the feminist killjoy and how certain bodies are "encountered" as being negative. Marilyn Frye argues that oppression involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find yourself. As she puts it, "it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our acquiescence in our situation." To be oppressed requires that you show signs of happiness, as signs of being or having been adjusted. For Frye "anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous."

You can see two currents here. The first is that the feminist killjoy, or more generally the activist killjoy, is the one who is constantly struggling against situations that are declared to be happy. The second current is that oppression often demands that the oppressed declare their happiness in their own oppression (we will return to this second current later). The first current allows us to examine May's original quotation in greater context. It comes as part of this whole paragraph:

To add another example, I know people whose general commitments I would call feminist reject that label because they see feminists as angry man-hating types who just want to make men feel bad. Now, of course, I don't lay all that at the doorstep of feminists. The right does an excellent job of slurring feminism. But I have had the experience of being language-policed when it seems to me inappropriate (ex. by people who would never have escorted women into abortion clinics, as I have). And I think this does not do us credit. As Foucault once remarked, one does not have to be sad in order to be militant. One can go further: a sad militancy is one of those ways the left has developed whose major contribution seems to be to increase our marginalization.

The rather odd thing is the lack of transition that takes us from the discussion of feminism to the discussion of sad militants. He does not do the work to posit why someone challenging his discourse (even someone who lacks May's ethos), leads to sadness. But someone is sad here. Is it May? It is the feminist who "language-policed" him? There exists an ambiguity of where the sadness comes from, and who it is affecting. This leads us to this great blog post by Ahmed. In it, Ahmed argues that when someone points out a problem, it is often the person who perceives the problem who is then perceived by others as the problem. Another long quotation:

When you expose a problem you pose a problem.  I have been thinking more about this problem of how you become the problem because you notice a problem. For example, when you make an observation in public that all the speakers for an event are all white men, or all but one, or all the citations in an academic paper are to all white men, or all but a few, these observations are often treated as the problem with how you are perceiving things (you must be perceiving things!). A rebuttal is often implied: these are the speakers or writers would just happen to be there; they happen to be white men but to make this about that would be to assume that they are here because of that. And so: by describing a gathering as ‘white men,’ we are then assumed to be imposing certain categories on bodies, reducing the heterogeneity of an event; solidifying through our own description something that is fluid. For example: I pointed out recently on Facebook that all the speakers for a Gender Studies conference were white. Someone replied that my statement did not recognise the diversity of the speakers. When perceiving whiteness is a way of not perceiving diversity, then diversity became a way of not perceiving whiteness. [...]  This is why the feminist killjoy remains such a negative stereotype (we affirm her given this negation): as if feminists are speaking out because they are miserable; or if feminism is an obstacle to our own happiness, such that she is what is in the way (feminism: how women get in the way of ourselves). It is implied that you would become well-adjusted if you could just adjust yourself to this world. Smile! The task then becomes self-modification: you have to learn not to perceive a problem; you have to let things fall. 

This last point from Ahmed is interesting and useful. Namely, there is something strangely perverse about the demand that people be joyful in intolerable situations. Of course, such demands for resilience are rather commonplace these days.

* * *

Resilience is rapidly becoming one of the key ways of understanding present ways of governing the world. Robin James has taken up the concept of resilience in understanding how feminism and anti-racism on social media is seen as 'toxic' and 'vampiric.'

A similar claim has been (in)famously leveled against “feminism,” especially “intersectional feminism”: it vampirically drains the lifeblood of the progressive, radical left. [...] Resilience is a specific form of subjectification that normalizes individuals and groups so that they efficiently perform the cultural, affective, and social labor required to maintain and reproduce a specific configuration of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. More simply, resilience is the practice that makes you a cog in the machine of social reproduction. [...] In both essays, feminists, especially feminists of color, are tasked with manufacturing the raw materials–negative affects like guilt or anxiety–on which “good” subjects labor, and, through that labor, generate human capital (e.g., radical cred, moral/political goodness, proper femininity, and so on). They bring us down so we can then perform our upworthiness for liking, favoriting, clicking, sharing audiences. Resilience is part of the means of production, and the “toxicity” of WOC feminists is the first step in this supply chain. Black women do the labor of generating the toxicity that then becomes the raw material upon which white women work; white women do the affective/emotional labor of overcoming, which then translates into tangible employment (writing gigs, etc.)

This narrative of overcoming can be seen in the way that those who are concerned with inclusive language are labeled as policing language, engaging in newspeak, score-keeping, and political correctness. This posits those who are attacking inclusive language as being rebels, truth tellers, concerned about the issues and philosophy. And the failure of social justice movements get laid at the feet of those who want inclusivity. Yet, I really do believe both groups want to create joyful communities.

* * *

The struggle to build communities that create livable lives is not an easy one. And I do believe that many complicated questions about how to go about building such communities are ahead of us. But, a lot of this discussion is centered around the notion of calling out. Let us look at Todd May's last paragraph:

This last bit should not be taken to mean that we should never confront people on their language. My point is rather that in the question of whether to confront, a little judgment is called for, and perhaps a little fellow feeling for people whose behavior actually puts them in the right (i.e. left) camp. It's one thing to call out a racist who uses an offensive racial stereotype. It's quite another to call out someone who aligns her behavior with a sensitivity to LGBT issues and, among a set of like-minded friends, calls something "gay." We are none of us moral saints (thank goodness), and, if our politics are in the right place, I think we can afford to let some things go. (To be sure, language can shape perception. But not all instances of it do.) And alternatively, we need to be aware that not letting certain things go is no substitute for committed political work.

I want to address the last point, first. I am not sure how many people confine their only work to not letting things go on the internet. I am sure there are some. But because many of us primarily only meet each other in our words (I have only briefly met in person only one person I have cited or talked about in this post), it can seem like all we do is reflect on language. Building communities can never be about just getting the language right. I agree with May on this point. But I do believe if we are going to create the sort of inclusive and joyful communities we want, we have to affirm the right to be to those we include. And for people that society has systemically learned to unhear, unsee, and unknow (or to only hear, see, and know in particular pregiven narratives), creating spaces where different narratives can be understood is not a given. And sometimes it is going to require getting the language right. But let us look at May's other point, that we shouldn't call out people whose politics are in the right place, maybe the dialectic is not one of either calling people out or letting things go.

A comment on the original blog post by Cogburn written by "anonladygrad" suggested an article, "Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable," written by Ngọc Loan Trần and published on Black Girl Dangerous. They write:

Because when I see problematic behavior from someone who is connected to me, who is committed to some of the things I am, I want to believe that it’s possible for us to move through and beyond whatever mistake was committed. I picture “calling in” as a practice of pulling folks back in who have strayed from us. It means extending to ourselves the reality that we will and do fuck up, we stray and there will always be a chance for us to return. Calling in as a practice of loving each other enough to allow each other to make mistakes; a practice of loving ourselves enough to know that what we’re trying to do here is a radical unlearning of everything we have been configured to believe is normal. And yes, we have been configured to believe it’s normal to punish each other and ourselves without a way to reconcile hurt. We support this belief by shutting each other out, partly through justified anger and often because some parts of us believe that we can do this without people who fuck up. But, holy shit! We fuck up. All of us. 

I fully admit to having been called out (and called in) on all sorts of statements, beliefs, and behaviors in my life. Sometimes it has been over stuff that I still passionately think I was right on. Sometimes it has been stuff that was incredibly awful for to have said or done, and I have mumbled excuses and apologies, and felt more than a little shame. And sometimes, I have been called out on stuff, and been sure of my rightness, that I got very defensive. And it wasn't until later that I realized I was in the wrong. In general, I have been gifted with friends, colleagues, and mentors who have been incredibly generous to me. They have understood my mistakes, and have often called me in. They have put up with my bullshit, or confusion, or the sort of epistemic parallax that does not let me understand the weight and scars of certain histories, words, and knowledges. And because they are truly generous, they didn't just put up with, but worked to change me, and in so doing gave me the sort of joy and satisfaction that comes from difference and becoming otherwise. They didn't have to do that. Far too often we expect the most marginalized members of our society to have to constantly explain and justify the necessity of their existence. And I hope we can fumble together, to build different worlds, different futures, and different narratives.

A syllabus on the very possibility of #FergusonSyllabus

Recently, Leigh Johnson has started putting together a draft of "Ferguson Syllabus for Philosophers." I highly suggest going, looking, and commentating. It was inspired by the rather compelling "Ferguson Syllabus" created by Sociologists for Justice.   I think this is important work, and I am glad to see it being done. I hope this, at the very least, gets philosophers reading important work in the philosophy of race, decolonial philosophy, and africana philosophy (especially considering the numbers of black philosophers in the profession). However, with all of that said, there is an interesting and important literature base about the role of philosophy to think race, the problems and challenges of multiculturalism, and the way diversity and institutional life can intersect. I think some of these questions are just as important for us to understand. So, in that vein, here are some texts that are important on these issues. This is just a small list. Like Leigh, I would ask for any suggestions, additions, corrections, or general comments.

Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.

Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism.

Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy.

Feminist, Toxic, Vampiric, Killjoys to the Rescue: Resilience and Perception in James and Ahmed

Two blog posts today that work well together, and I suggest you read them.

The first, from Robin James, "Toxic: on race, gender, and resilient labor on social media." (h/t Peter). The excerpts I am going to post from James and Ahmed do not excuse from actually reading the original posts. Okay, as Robin James argues in her post:

A similar claim has been (in)famously leveled against “feminism,” especially “intersectional feminism”: it vampirically drains the lifeblood of the progressive, radical left. [...] Resilience is a specific form of subjectification that normalizes individuals and groups so that they efficiently perform the cultural, affective, and social labor required to maintain and reproduce a specific configuration of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. More simply, resilience is the practice that makes you a cog in the machine of social reproduction. [...] In both essays, feminists, especially feminists of color, are tasked with manufacturing the raw materials–negative affects like guilt or anxiety–on which “good” subjects labor, and, through that labor, generate human capital (e.g., radical cred, moral/political goodness, proper femininity, and so on). They bring us down so we can then perform our upworthiness for liking, favoriting, clicking, sharing audiences. Resilience is part of the means of production, and the “toxicity” of WOC feminists is the first step in this supply chain. Black women do the labor of generating the toxicity that then becomes the raw material upon which white women work; white women do the affective/emotional labor of overcoming, which then translates into tangible employment (writing gigs, etc.). [...] Social media is, at least in part, an affective economy of upworthiness. Resilience generates both human capital and capital capital (often in the form of data that’s sold to third parties or targeted advertising). It distributes gendered, racialized labor in very specific ways: white women overcome the damage produced by women of color, thus cleansing teh interwebs and making it a sparkly, feel-good place for everyone else…just like moms always do. This also produces a hell of a lot of money and privilege for white women and MRWaSP capitalism in general.

Now, as Sara Ahmed argues in "The Problems of Perception":

When you expose a problem you pose a problem.  I have been thinking more about this problem of how you become the problem because you notice a problem. For example, when you make an observation in public that all the speakers for an event are all white men, or all but one, or all the citations in an academic paper are to all white men, or all but a few, these observations are often treated as the problem with how you are perceiving things (you must be perceiving things!). A rebuttal is often implied: these are the speakers or writers would just happen to be there; they happen to be white men but to make this about that would be to assume that they are here because of that. And so: by describing a gathering as ‘white men,’ we are then assumed to be imposing certain categories on bodies, reducing the heterogeneity of an event; solidifying through our own description something that is fluid. For example: I pointed out recently on Facebook that all the speakers for a Gender Studies conference were white. Someone replied that my statement did not recognise the diversity of the speakers. When perceiving whiteness is a way of not perceiving diversity, then diversity became a way of not perceiving whiteness. [...]  When you perceive a problem your perception becomes the problem. [...]  This is why the feminist killjoy remains such a negative stereotype (we affirm her given this negation): as if feminists are speaking out because they are miserable; or if feminism is an obstacle to our own happiness, such that she is what is in the way (feminism: how women get in the way of ourselves). It is implied that you would become well-adjusted if you could just adjust yourself to this world. Smile! The task then becomes self-modification: you have to learn not to perceive a problem; you have to let things fall. [...]  What organizes this shock is the presumption that the perception is problem: that the perception is wrong. According to this logic, people have the ‘wrong perception’ when they see the organization as white, elite, male, old-fashioned. In other words, what is behind the shock is a belief that that the organization does not have these qualities: that whiteness is ‘in the image’ rather than ‘in the organization’ as an effect of what it does. Note the phrase ‘issues of perception’ again suggests that perception is the issue. Diversity becomes about changing perceptions of whiteness rather than changing the whiteness of organizations.  I think the final comment ‘there are issues of perception amongst certain communities, which are stopping them from reaching us’ is particularly suggestive. The implication is thus that the institution does not reach such communities – that it does not include them – because they perceive the institution as excluding them. The problem of whiteness is implicitly described here not so much as an institutional problem but as a problem with those who are not included by it.

Again, read both the blog posts in the full, but I am sure you see how these are working together. In both cases we see an explanation about how those who bring up problems are seen as the one who actually have the problems. Somehow the problems do not inhere in the institutions, the movements, the organizations and organizers (never the organizers!), but rather they inhere in those who notice and bring up the problems. At the same time, those who oppose 'the negativity' get to adopt an attitude. They get to be the ones who are free of ressentiment, they are the ones who get to be cool, who get to truly radical (or liberal, where that is not a dirty word). And I am in no way saying I am free of ressentiment, or cool, or truly radical. Indeed, are any of us? Are these the things you get to individually? And at the same time, you get such good scapegoats out those killjoys. Is the fact that you are exhausted because the movement/revolution/institution did not succeed in the way you would like? Well, that failure is because the killjoys are creating stumbling blocks. They aren't forwarding their criticisms privately or appropriately (constructively?). I have written about this before in vegan movements. The failure of the movements become excuses for purging ourselves of those who are not true believers. Who are not thoroughly in revolutionary solidarity and/or universal sisterhood/fraternity. And suddenly those vampiric killjoys become the reason that our will/desire is not strong enough to reshape the world. Is there really anything more fucked up than thinking it is women and/or people of color who are keeping you from having your revolution?

EDIT: I meant to link to this as well, but I just forgot. In addition to Robin James on resilience, you should make sure to to check out this post from Jeremy Crampton, which includes several citations and commentary. Very helpful.

"An internet museum of shame for future radicals": On the radical anti-Mandela memes

The title of this post comes from a colleague who was complaining about certain reactions to Nelson Mandela's death. I think you know the kind I mean, the ones from (mostly white) radicals who have greeted the death of Nelson Mandela as cause to ruminate on how he wasn't radical enough, and anti-capitalist enough. I say mostly white. Of course, the only examples I can find are from white radicals, and the ones who have been posting on my facebook feed have exclusively been white. There is, of course, famously the Zizek article in the Guardian. Weirdly enough, the Zizek piece is the one that has been the most respectful. But you can also see this post and this post. A lot of the people who have been sharing these posts are people I like, respect, and generally support. I have also been shocked by this.

First, we can certainly argue about Mandela's support and/or lack of opposition to neo-liberalism. There is a good chance the arguments about his support of neo-liberalism will win the day. Still, he certainly helped create a state that tries to spend significantly on healthcare, education, and housing. He spoke often and persuasively, even in the last years of his life, about ending poverty as an issue of justice, and and not charity. He spoke on behalf of unions, and against the war on iraq as merely a grab for oil. There should be real anger by radicals that Mandela, like other social justice leaders, are being sanitized and whitewashed. But regardless of all of that, what is implicit (or even explicit) in these critiques is the idea that ending apartheid is somehow less of an accomplishment than opposing neoliberalism. These critiques assume a logic in which racism is merely an extension of the structures of capitalism, rather than a social ill all of its own, and that capitalism and racism are structurally entangled, but separate evils. They imply a world in which the fight against racism is somehow less important than the fight against capitalism.

And I worry about the kneejerk reactions of radicals to take the death of someone like Nelson Mandela and go, "Yeah, well, he didn't topple capitalism while he was at it, so I don't know what the big deal is." Honestly, what is the psychic economy behind this immediate reaction to his death? I don't get it. Here is what I do get, however. The next time my white radical friends are confused why our radical spaces are so often overwhelmingly white, or when they get defensive that their radicalism and/or causes are not racist, I am just going to send them a link to this post. If your immediate reaction to the death of a anti-white supremacy leader who was also opposed to capitalism (even if not in the ways or degree you wished) is to question their radical bona fides, then you are obviously engaged in a sort of epistemic blindness and violence. I am not saying we need to turn Mandela into some sort of radical saint, or that no criticism is allowed or warranted. I am saying this sort of kneejerk reaction to his death both have consequences, and is deeply troubling.

EDIT: Jairus, in comments, pointed out my ableism in the term "epistemic blindness". I apologize. He argues convincingly for the concept of epistemic parallax, and you should just make sure you read his comments.

The Right of Obscurity Must Be Respected

Chela Sandoval, in her book Methodology of the Oppressed, points out that the problems of the postmodern world--problems of fragmented identities and diffusions of self--are problems that have been confronted and theorized by Women of Color. I think about this as I read about California having passed a bill that will give minors the right to delete, or erase, their online history. This seems to be a small step of our own, American version of the le droit à l’oubli, the right to oblivion or the right to be forgotten. But just like fragmented identities were already being theorized by Women of Color, the right to oblivion already has a theoretical history in minoritarian thought.

Perhaps ground zero for such thinking is Edouard Glissant's amazing book, The Poetics of Relation. In that book, Glissant develops the theoretical concept that you can find throughout his work, namely, the right of opacity. The right of opacity is more foundational than the right to difference (because, indeed, the right of opacity is foundational for the right of difference). As Glissant makes clear, the right of opacity is first a right against the slave master's push of transparency against the enslaved people. It is also a right of the dominated not to replicate the colonial people's displays of ostentation. But the right of opacity goes further. It becomes a right of language and culture, and it goes further still. The right of opacity becomes the right not the be understood, not to be reduced to epistemic violence of comprehension and judgement. Or, colloquially, "You don't know me; don't pretend that you know me".
As Saidiya Hartman furthers this analysis, and provides the title of this blog post, in Scenes of Subjection:

Rather than consider black song as an index or mirror of the slave condition, this examination emphasizes the significance of opacity as precisely that which enables something in excess of the orchestrated amusements of the enslaved and which similarly troubles distinctions between joy and sorrow and toil and leisure. For this opacity, the subterranean and veiled character of slave song must be considered in relation to the dominative imposition of transparency and the degrading hypervisibility of the enslaved, and therefore, by the same token, such concealment should be considered a form of resistance. Furthermore, as Glissant advises, "the attempt to approach a reality so hidden from view cannot be organized in terms of a series of clarifications. " The right to obscurity must be respected, for the "accumulated hurt," the "rasping whispers deep in the throat," the wild notes, and the screams lodged deep within confound simple expression and, likewise, withstand the prevailing ascriptions of black enjoyment. (p. 36)

Fred Moten, in an interview published in his B. Jenkins, riffs on Hartman's analysis:

In the end, however, as Saidiya Hartman says, “the right to obscurity must be respected.” This is a political imperative that infuses the unfinished project of emancipation as well as any number of other transitions or crossings in progress. It corresponds to the need for the fugitive, the immigrant and the new (and newly constrained) citizen to hold something in reserve, to keep a secret. The history of Afro-diasporic art, especially music, is, it seems to me, the history of the keeping of this secret even in the midst of its intensely public and highly commodified dissemination. These secrets are relayed and miscommunicated, misheard, and overheard, often all at once, in words and in the bending of words, in whispers and screams, in broken sentences, in the names of people you’ll never know. (p. 105). 

The issues that we presently face ourselves with, surveillance in the age of the internet of things, NSA spying and the secret holders that believe only they have a right to secrets, are not fundamentally new issues, but rather new manifestations of very old issues. The right to opacity is, without a doubt, a right to see a stranger as a stranger, and the right to have secrets (the right to all be Geheimnisträger). Thus, Hartman quotes Paul Gilroy, from his The Black Atlantic, there exists "politics ... on a lower frequency." This politics exists because words will never be enough to "communicate its unsayable claims to truth" (p. 37).

Therefore, as James C. Scott and Robin D. G. Kelley have shown, there exists an infra-politics of hidden transcripts.  As Maria Lugones has argued, these infra-politics should be understood in opposition to the Habermasian notion of the counter-public. The politics and ethics of these unsayable claims to truth cannot be understood through more transparency, publicity, and comprehension. Rather, we have to conceive of a networked world of relations that take seriously the right of opacity.

Before I go
I’m supposed to get a last wish:
Generous reader
burn this book
It’s not at all what I wanted to say
Though it was written in blood
It’s not what I wanted to say.
No lot could be sadder than mine
I was defeated by my own shadow:
My words took vengeance on me.
Forgive me, reader, good reader
If I cannot leave you
With a warm embrace, I leave you
With a forced and sad smile.
Maybe that’s all I am
But listen to my last word:
I take back everything I’ve said.
With the greatest bitterness in the world
I take back everything I’ve said.
- Nicanor Parra

Philosophy of Race and Critical Animal Theory

Tom has an interesting post, that I started writing a comment to, and it became really long, so I decided to turn it into a blog post. You should go read it, it concerns tensions between animal ethics, philosophy of race, and the role of intuition in philosophy. Short, but smart. Go read, I'll wait. 

(Also, I am excited for his two new books coming out. His short monograph Levinas Unhinged, and his edited collection on Habit.) 

The point made my the philosopher of race (I wonder who it was?) is pretty common (though from from universal) in many philosophy of race, decolonial and postcolonial philosophy theories. And as someone who takes decolonial and postcolonial philosophy, nonwestern philosophy, and philosophy of race very seriously (and incorporates it in my scholarship and teaching) this is a real issue for me. I've written about these issues a lot on this blog, so I embed some links to past posts to do some of the work for me. Even though I do not fully agree with all of these posts. 

On the one hand, decolonial thinkers advance some of the best critiques of humanism, on the other they usually do it in order to talk about the need for a stronger humanism . And I do think that fights against anthropocentrism are useful for fights against racism (though they are not sufficient!). However, there is more than just the fact that people of color have been compared to animals and dehumanized, but the history co-mingling animal welfare and rights groups with obviously problematic, racist, and colonialist projects. Peta still engages in campaigns that are not only sexist, but frequently racist (often both ). And not just PETA, but if you look at the original animal welfare groups in Britain, you see some complex and interesting things. On the one hand, you have the The Vegetarian Society, which was viewed with disgrace, attracted a bunch of different radicals, and Gandhi credits with his radicalizing on the issues of colonialism. On the other hand, the RSPCA and the first animal welfare laws were all centered around class concerns, race concerns, and connected to explicit colonialists. 

I think there is a lot that needs to be done by critical animal theorists in order to help this. (1) Avoid the seduction of tokenism, of being able to point out a few diverse people in order to shrug of systemic claims of what is going on at conferences, edited volumes, etc. (2) Maybe we need to read less continental thinkers, and start reading more explicitly radical women and queers of color, decolonialist and postcolonialists, philosophers of race, and generally nonwestern philosophy. If I want an anthropocentric thinker who is critical of humanism, I don't always need to go after Agamben when I can read and cite Sylvia Wynter. (3) This will mean, also, to practice the sort of humility in engagement that can be really hard. To expect to be surprised, to be open to being wrong, and generally to not engage in that sort of way when one goes around and explains that the other side just needs to get how right you have been this whole time ("But don't you understand that anthropocentrism is behind racism? So thank you very much for no longer insisting upon your humanity..." etc.). 

None of this entails necessarily giving up our core ethics, or even being critical of other philosophers of race on occasion. For example, arguments about the cultural imperialism of vegetarianism and veganism that continue  simply ignore that other animals have culture is not very convincing or useful. 

In general, critical animal theorists need to admit that we do indeed, as a field, often have a problem with eurocentrism. No, this isn't unique to our field, and no, we are not all guilty of it. But none of that changes the fact we need to change our field. 

Egypt and Ranciere

Like many of you, I've been glued to Al Jazeera English live all morning. It is hard to describe. The NPD HQ is one fire, a curfew has been issued and the protesters don't seem to have gone away. The police seem to have completely left Cairo. The army has been called in, but no one knows what will happen next. I also agree with Marc Lynch that the US needs to get in front of all of this.

Yesterday I started teaching Ranciere's On the Shores of Politics to my Argumentation class. I talked about the events in Tunisia and in Egypt, and I used it as a way to talk about Ranciere's comments on the hatred of democracy, on the fear of democracy that seems to come from those places that most claim to support democracy. That indeed, few of us are for democracy, but rather for stability, terra firma, rather than the sea that is democracy. The sea, that as Schmitt remarked in his Nomos of the Earth, that is res Nullius and res Ominium, that the sea belongs to nobody because it belongs to everybody.

Speciesism: Some Introductory Thoughts

Speciesism is a term that I mostly stay away from in my own work (more for rhetorical reasons rather than philosophical reasons), however it seems to be, I hate to say misunderstood but certainly understood in a very limited way. This post is to unpack this concept a bit and see if it useful. This post is in many ways inspired by this video featuring Kathy Rudy and Tim Morton:



The term itself was coined by Richard Ryder in 1970 in a privately published pamphlet of the same name, but for the most part was popularized by Peter Singer in his Animal Liberation. Speciesism clearly is supposed to be analogous to terms like racism and sexism (indeed, Singer is upfront that the title of the book is to put the animal movement as the next rational movement after something like Women's Liberation). But in what way is the word analogous? Is it that we don't treat people of color well, and we don't treat women well, and we don't treat animals well, so they are all in the same boat? It's a bit more complicated than that.
For Singer racism, sexism, and speciesism is the irrational exclusion of beings from the moral community, or beings that we do not have to give equal consideration of interests (I grant those aren't exactly the same thing). Speciesism isn't just the philosophical insight of Animal Liberation, but underpins the entire rhetorical economy of the book. It was (and continuous) to be the case that those who are concerned for the well being of animals are seen as sentimental and irrational fools while the good rationalist isn't concerned for animals. Look toward the descriptions of Descartes and his followers awful vivisection of animals, or remember your Spinoza, "The law against killing animals is based more on empty superstitions and unmanly sentiment than sound reason." (E4p37s1) Almost all of Animal Liberation can be read as flipping this traditional economy, with irrationality being put on the side of not caring about animals and sound reason being firmly on the side of an equal consideration of interests for animals. Now, sentimentality being connected with women in our culture construct, Singer's original preface has been rightly and largely panned for some sexist and ageist representations (by the way, the most recent edition of Animal Liberation has removed all the prefaces, including the original one, except for the current preface). I also happen to think that sentiment and affect are philosophically more important than Singer does, but that's not the point right now.
So first speciesism serves a certain rhetorical capacity. Moreover, it seeks to displace species as an ethically essential category. Singer performs this function by arguing from marginal cases. In general we have a series of capacities that we claim all and only humans have, and that all other beings do not have. The problem, of course, is that is not really true. First of all, all sorts of animals have amazing capacities (and honestly, the evidence on this one has only gotten more true in the 35 years since Animal Liberation was first published), the ability for tool use, prohibitions on incest, language, denial and disavowal, the ability to paint and dance to a beat, etc. This something I sort of get into in this post. Not only are other animals really incredible, but there is also a great deal of diversity among humans (this tends to be the so-called marginal cases), and that means most capacities that we want to say are definite traits of humans tend to find humans who either never have that power, or at some point in their life have not had these capacities. So, part of what speciesism does is began to contest the boundaries of species. So, species may be real, but they are hardly given and coherent categories, they are not exactly actual. In this sense it might be better to think of species as something like sex. I think we would all agree that there are real and even important differences among the sexes. At the same time, the duality of sexes is kinda bunk. So, there are a multiplicity of sexes, but the coherency of sex, particularly a coherent duality, is a constructed reality (basically see anything by Anne Fausto-Sterling).
In this sense, the critique of speciesism isn't at all about erasing or ignoring differences or about propping up the human/other duality as is implied in the video above, but rather explodes difference. It is actually because of the level of difference (for example, the differences internal to the category of human, and the differences internal to the category of animal). It is actually because of the proliferation of difference that the critique of speciesism has any steam at all. Even in a thinker like Singer we have an explicit discussion of difference in the formulation of equal consideration of interests. This is not a formulation for equal treatment, for the same treatment and the same laws and all of that, but rather the unique interests of beings should be taken account of equally. Of course for many people who espouse a critique of speciesism there emerges certain questions of what allows one in a moral community, and sometimes a support of animal rights in a formal and legal sense. But none of those discussions are necessary to the critique of speciesism (and in this I have a bit of sympathy for Cary Wolfe, who gets criticized in the above video for supporting animal rights--when he doesn't-- and he gets attacked by certain analytic people for not supporting animal rights-- see The Death of the Animal). A critique of speciesism often creates a certain new community, a certain new commonality, but it doesn't do so through a reduction of difference, but rather through an explosion of difference that undermines the coherency of the very category of species. One last thing I want to deal with here is the relationship of speciesism and racism, because that is a central question in Kathy Rudy and Tim Morton's comments above.
There are any number of thinkers that argue that racism's formulation is fundamentally a question of determining who gets to be human. Think here of Foucault in "Society Must Be Defended", Balibar's work on racism, and the decolonial critique of humanism to be found in Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Sylvia Wynter, among others. Now, none of these thinkers push their work toward including non-humans into the ethical and political community. Indeed, many of them go on to argue for a new and true and real humanism after just a few pages before calling humanism a hitlerism. But for those of us who critique speciesism, I think you can see a certain conclusion. If racism is deeply and obviously tied to a boundary maintenance of this incoherent category of THE human, why try to fight racism by getting the category of the human right? Empirically, we've not been very good at figuring out what gets to count as human (for a more recent example, are Great Apes and dolphins human?). And if a being gets miscounted, placed as an animal or hybrid or pseudo-human or fully human when they are not, what is the big deal? Unless, of course, some of those are beings we are able to exploit, kill, and violate at will and whim. So, why don't we work toward getting rid of speciesism instead of creating a new humanism?
And that last point is a good one, I think. But I want to move away from things I may have argued in the past. It strikes me that racism can still function even in a world without speciesism. I think such racism would be weakened (and vice versa), but I don't think it is as easy as saying that racism is an extension of the logic of speciesism (or vice versa). These ideologies are certainly entwined, but I think it is important to see them as still discrete.

Animal Abolition and Prison Abolition: An historical perspective.

Over at the Animal Law Coalition, there is a post concerning a bill that will greatly expand prosecutors abilities in animal cruelty cases for GA. Considering I am still registered to vote in GA, I took my time to make some phone calls on behalf of this bill (if you are registered to vote in GA, you might want to take some time do the same). And while I think this change is important, I was somewhat uncomfortable at the same time. It goes to a broader conflict I have with the increasing police-ification of the animal rights movement.

As many of you know, not only am I am abolitionist when it comes to viewing animals as property, I am also a prison abolitionist. You know, I'm generally for empty cages, for everyone. So, it obviously bothers me that many animal abolitionists often support stronger prison sentences, and tend to get gleeful about locking up individuals. Now, I get it. When you think people are murderers and torturers, it's hard not to want them to get their just deserts, and we live in a society that makes you think that means prison. Or course, we also live in a society that makes most of what we do to animals not count as murder or torture. Rethinking some of these societal norms is probably a good idea, especially for the animal abolitionist.

It also bespeaks a great deal of privilege to think that increased presence of police and illegality leads to more justice and protection. Practically speaking, that's seldom the case. As Angela Davis phrases it in one of the better passages from Are Prisons Obsolete?

Why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who lived in the free world feel safer and more secure? This question can be formulated in more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make people think their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist? (p. 14)

Now, there are many animal abolitionists who come from either an anarchist tradition or a tradition that means prisons and cops don't make you feel more secure. But such people are marginal within a still relatively marginal movement. What is interesting is that this dynamic with an animal rights movement is not new.

I recently read Leela Gandhi's absolutely wonderful book, Affective Communities. I highly suggest it to anyone, especially the chapter on "Meat." In there, Gandhi distinguishes between two different turn of the century animal welfare movements occurring within the British metropol. On the one hand you had the socially semi-disgraceful group centered mainly around The Vegetarian Society, composed of anticolonial agitators, anarchists, socialists, feminists, gay activists, etc. On the other hand you had the respected animal welfare group centered mainly around the RSPCA (the royal part certainly indicts their level of social respect). This second group of mainstream animal welfarists were able to pass some of the first legislation on animal welfare.

These efforts finally bore fruit in 1822, when a historic bill, introduced into the Commons by Sir Richard Martin, member for Galway, succeeded in extending protection to "Horses, Mares, Geldings, Mules, Donkeys, Cows, Heifers, Bull Calves, Oxen, Sheep, and other Livestock." Henceforth anyone having charges of these creatures and caught wantonly beating, abusing, or ill-treating them was liable for a fine of between ten shillings and five pounds, or imprisonment for up to two months. (p. 88)

Many of the laws suggested or passed by the English Parliament about animals welfare, were dedicated to the bloodsports and pass times of the poor and working classes (and indeed, most of our laws about animal welfare in this country follow a similar model). The laws were meant not to (just) protect animals, but also instill into the poor and working class a examples in order to make them "better." Or, as the the RSPCA put it in their original meeting, their purpose was not only "to prevent the exercise of cruelty towards animals, but to spread among the lower orders of people.. a degree of moral feeling which would compel them to think and act like of a superior class." (quoted in Gandhi, p. 93) And if these laws, therefore, resulted in more policing and interference among these classes, well it wasn't an accident but a purposeful by-product discussed as much among the members of Parliament.
In this case the relationship between the respected animal welfarists and the early utilitarians does not come across as an accident. Rather, we see in utilitarianism a similar desire for hierarchical forceful obedience in order to produce a people that followed certain mores and norms (governmentality, in other words). We can see this in Bentham's involvement with prisons and James and John Stuart Mill's involvement and support of British colonialism.
And while I am not sure I would ascribe the obvious defects of the classical animal welfare movement to the people fighting for animal rights today, I would say that the modern penal system carries with it the indelible marks of its origins: those of coloniality, racism, and classism.
Those of us in the animal abolition movement have a duty to tread carefully around these legal instruments, and to refuse to support, at least more often than not, anything that expands the present prison industrial complex.
Which I guess brings me back to the GA bill. I'm not sure about this bill, but I also believe it is important to get other animals out of situations of neglect and abuse that doesn't currently exist. Which is why I think it is probably something to be supported. But I certainly won't hide the fact that such issues are complex, and I that I could be wrong.


As sort of an asterisk on the discussion of utilitarianism. I want to say that not only do I think we've seen a change the current animal rights movement, I think we have as we have as well in the current utilitarian philosophy, as well. It is also worth noting that Bentham supported a good number of liberal, even radical positions in his day. So, I think utilitarianism, especially the ways it was originally formulated were deeply messed up. I also sometimes think it gets a bum rap. But I don't have much to say (at this time) on this last point.

The perils and pitfalls of transnational adoption: Haiti edition

Three links, the first two from by brother, and the last one from Vegans of Color. The first one is an article about 'orphans' for sale for as little as 50 dollars in Haiti. The second one is an article about a group of Christian missionaries who abducted 33 children off the streets of Haiti, and were in the process of leaving the country with them. The last one is a statement released by Adoptees of Color on adopting children during a crisis, particularly in Haiti.

I hope that these incidents will bring greater attention to the problems of translational adoption. The continuation of racist and colonialist logics are often combined with overt neoliberal policies that turn children into transnational commodities.

On Foucault's "Society Must Be Defended", Part one of a biopolitics of racism

These series of lectures exist in-between, they act as a bridge. These lectures occur as a link between The Abnormals lectures and the Security, Territory, and Population lectures (from which the essay “Governmentality” was taken).They also come in-between two of Foucault’s most famous published works: Discipline and Punish, which was published in February of 75, and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, which was published in October of 76. Most importantly, “Society Must Be Defended” comes is a bridge between two theoretical notions: disciplinary power on the one hand, and biopower on the other. If I pause to highlight the place these lectures have in Foucault’s intellectual history, it is not merely to show that I know the secret handshake of the freemasonary of useless erudition, but rather reveal exactly what is at stake in these lectures. The bridge that Foucault builds between sovereign power, disciplinary power, and biopower has as its plinth race struggle and state racism. Precisely because the theoretical stakes are so high, and precisely because without the bridge we are likely to find ourselves in intellectual pitfalls, I hope you all understand this inevitably palimpsestic focus on the counter-history of the race struggle.
Until relatively recently, which is to say the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, all occidental history was sovereign history. To be more explicit, history was an important ceremonial tool of sovereign power. History serves as an intensifier sovereignty. It glorifies and adds luster to power. History performs this function in two modes: (1)in a “genealogical” mode (understood in the simple sense of that term) that traces the linage of the sovereign. And (2) in a memorial mode that celebrates and glorifies every action that the sovereign makes. Therefore history, in this full Jupiterian enterprise, acts in tandem with sovereignty’s juridical power as a kind of white magic which seeks to bind and unite a subject, a people, under sovereign’s rule.
This sovereign history is a particularly Roman history. You can see it manifest in the work of the annalists and also in the work of Livy. (For those of you that remember your Livy, he said he wanted to write his history from the foundations of Rome. By which he meant the morality of Rome. For Livy, it was the Romans unique moral being that accounted for their ‘greatness’). And this history could be considered Roman long into the Middle Ages, because, or course, people thought of themselves as Romans still. But as I pointed out earlier, this type of history reaches a crisis in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
What emerges is a counter-history of race struggle or race war. By race, it is not meant some biological distinction, but rather certain cultural, linguistic, and/or religious differences. For example, think of about the differences between the Normans and the Saxons following the Battle of Hastings. But it isn’t just an understanding of racial differences that emerges with the Norman and Frankish invasions, but also a new conception of history. It is a counter-history that reveals if there are conquerors, there are those whom are conquered; if land and treasure are acquired, it is also land and treasure taken; and if there are battles won for some, then there must be battles lost for others. In short, if there are subjects of history, there must be the subjugated of history. As Foucault puts it on page 72
The role of counterhistory will, then, be to show that laws deceive, that kings wear masks, that power creates illusions, and that historians tell lies. This will not, then, be a history of continuity, but a history of deciphering, the detection of the secret, of the outwitting of the ruse, and of the reappropriation of a knowledge that has been distorted or buried. It will decipher a truth that has been sealed.
This counter-history does not come from amid the light and brilliance of the sovereign, but rather from the shadows where the discourses of the subjugated race resides. It is not coincidental that Subcommandante Marcos refers to the Zapatistas as “shadows of tender fury.” History is no longer Jupiterian but rather Janus-faced. The white magic of sovereignty is replaced by a black magic that uncovers the sovereign power of enslavement.
This counter-history is not Roman, but biblical. The biblical history serves not just to chart the oppression of a conquered people, but also served the dual purpose of a promise of an eschatological victory for the oppressed. The history built the foundations for a discourse about the end of the conquers and the victory of the minority race that were forced into submission. Therefore under the façade of peace was this constant tension and threat of the race struggle, the great war that never ends. The State and all its tools, rather than being seen as the glorious unifier of people and guarantee of social stability was seen to have blood on its hands. The State was revealed to be an apparatus of constant oppression and military subjugation. Therefore this biblical historical discourse became the foundation for all occidental revolutionary rhetoric. Marx, in a letter to Engel in 1852, tells him that the basis for the class struggle was rooted in the French race struggle historians. But this is actually where the great change occurs.
When the rhetoric of the race struggle became replaced by the rhetoric for a class struggle, when race was specifically rejected as the focus of revolutionary struggle, it was actually in that moment that racism as we understand it was born. The State suddenly inverted the revolutionary discourse, filled the void where the race struggle had articulated the divisions of society. Power’s brilliant counterrevolutionary move was to produce this concern for racial purity that had not existed before. The State had first been legitimatised as a glorious unification of the social body, then delegitmized as an oppressive organ, only to find a new legitimization: the protection of the racial purity of society. At the heart of race struggle is a belief in the plurality of races, but at the heart of racism is the belief of the purity of one race. In short, racism is a discourse about “protecting” whole populations. Racism sees only one race that is important and true, all others become remainders (which eventually have to be solved for, as the Nazi’s showed). The State grounds itself in a discourse of defending society against racial otherness. It is not coincidental at all that it is during times of great social upheaval, during times in which the State’s existence is called into question, that we see the most vile and virulent discourse of racism emerge from the State.
So this counter-history of the race struggle is not a ground or guarantor of a libratory politics. To exemplify this Foucault ends his January 28th lecture with this question, “‘And what if Rome once more conquered the revolution?’” Or to state it in another way, “What if sovereignty acquires the counter-history?”. Considering counter-history is a biblical history, then, following Schmitt’s famous statement that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” we have the grounds for a biopolitical theology.