This blog post is the
first in a series of posts examining Frank Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black.
The next essay in this series will
hopefully address his reading of Jacques Lacan that he undertakes early in the
book. This reading is heavily indebted to readings and conversations with others, not to mention debate performances I have witnessed. Special acknowledgments go to Amber Kelsie, Damiyr Davis, Ben Crossan, Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Syndey Pasquinelli, David Herman, Terrell Taylor, and many, many others.
Frank Wilderson opens the first chapter of his study in
racism Red, White, and Black: The
Structure of Antagonisms in U.S. Cinema at what seems to be a common
starting point for many academics, especially those who tend to locate their
scholarly conversations in houses that go by various names like
“post-structuralism” or the now mostly out of vogue “postmodernism:” the
Holocaust. Alighting on the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose
ruminations on the Muselmann serve as
a kind of stand in for Western philosophy’s fixation on the intelligibility of
the event of the Holocaust if not, as Wilderson will claim, the intelligibility
of the suffering that renders it as a
thinkable event. This blog post will
interrogate Wilderson’s use of Agamben as a point of departure and argue that
contemporary dynamics of international violence suggest a reading of affinity
between the two.[1]
Starting at
the Holocaust as a point of academic reference enables Wilderson to undermine
it by pointing to the ways in which its historical uniqueness should be
regarded not as a taken for granted fact but instead as a political status that
serves to write over or perhaps frame out other modalities of suffering,
especially in the Middle Passage of American slavery and Native American
genocide.[2]
Why, Wilderson asks, are scholars comfortable with situating the Holocaust as
the central tragedy of Western existence when the dynamics at play in Europe
from 1939-1945—in which sentient beings were stripped of their humanity,
physically segregated, systematically used for labor, and gratuitously murdered
for no reason—have been witnessed not only elsewhere but also chronologically
earlier? Scholarly uptake of this particular Eurocentrism effects a positioning
of “the German/Jewish relation as the sine qua non of structural antagonism,
thus allowing political philosophy to attribute ontological—and not just
social—significance to the Jewish Holocaust.”[3]
To further
unsettle this fixation, Wilderson turns to the work of black theorist/insurrectionist
Frantz Fanon, drawing on his description of the Holocaust as a “little family
quarrel” to suggest that the Holocaust was a moment when Jewish bodies occupied
a position of “Blackness and Redness” rather than heralding the dawning of some
new, ontological regime of life management. Key to this analysis is Fanon’s
distinction between social and structural versions of violence, which Wilderson
frames as the difference between “oppression” and “suffering.” The Black
“suffers” while the Jew is “oppressed,” suggesting that suffering functions
ontologically to structure reality while oppression is a contingent state of
violation that may be recognized and interrupted by actors in civil society. To
give one example, today nostalgia reigns supreme for the America of “The
Greatest Generation” that is said to have liberated the concentration camps and
defeated fascism. Evidence for this is easy enough to find in the rhetorical
archive of presidential address given in the conduct of the war on terror,
where we find analogies throughout that conflate Al Qaeda with Hitler and
robust American citizens with G.I.’s rolling across Western Europe.[4]
For Wilderson, the fact that we can mark a starting and stopping point of the
Holocaust suggests its social rather than ontological character: no such
judgment is yet warranted regarding the treatment of the Black body.
The
language of positionality in Wilderson’s reading is a point of interest. How
can the Jew, for example, occupy the position of the Black and remain the Jew?
As Wilderson argues, “Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews, Africans
went into the ships and came out as Blacks.”[5]
The structure of his argument indicates that during the Holocaust Jewish people
did occupy the same position of abjection, violation, and invisibility that Blacks
occupy. No doubt Wilderson’s argument regarding positionality serves as a
strong rebuttal to critiques, on both left and right, of typical “identity
politics” characteristic of especially the “culture wars” of the 1990’s in
America. Multiculturalism, political designs scripted for inclusion,
affirmative action, and demands for “positive” representation of Blacks in
media and cinema: this conglomeration of social policies all mistake the
absence of robust Black participation in civil society to signal a contingent
failure of the political regime of liberalism rather than a deeper, structural
issue with how a regime of political life actually demands a negation of the
sentience of some beings so that others might live in society as what Aristotle
called politikon zoon, political
life.[6]
Indeed, my
reference to Aristotle is no accident given how operative definitions of life
circumscribe the political economy of argument circulation. In the same book (The Politics) where he gives this
definition of life he also offers a philosophical justification for slavery, in
holding that there are simply some beings that are suited to rule and there are
other beings that are suited to being ruled. Wilderson would hold that this
line of reasoning has yet to be interrupted in the West, and the insistence by
many on marking moments of “liberation” like the Civil War, legislation for
Civil Rights, and victories in war elides or, to say it more precisely,
produces the ontological continuity of existence as a thing possessed by all
but Blacks. Perhaps no better example exists in Wilderson’s book than in the
introduction where he refers to James Baldwin’s failed friendship with Norman
Mailer, who “wrote about ‘the terrible gap between [Norman Mailer’s] life and
my own.’” Mean that “His long Paris nights with Mailer bore fruit only to the
extent that Mailer was able to say ‘Me,
too” in response to Baldwin’s own stories about the depths of his experience of
exclusion and abjection in a society constituted by racism.[7]
What Wilderson is suggesting is
that ontological violence structures communicative exchanges so that Black
arguments never enjoy the force of presumption on their side. I say Black
arguments rather than “Black arguments from experience” because I hold that all argumentation is characterized by
the argument from experience. The
hierarchy of arguments, from best to worst, is not decided upon by some
objective external arbiter of rightness and wrongness. Rather, familiarity tethers
arguments to subjects, who mistake the inertia of intelligibility for a token
of “right” argumentation instead of as a mark of their own ideological affinity
for the given performative argumentative practices. Baldwin attempted to traverse the gap between
his world and Mailer’s, and failed, repeatedly, because much of what he lived
was simply incomprehensible to Mailer. Wilderson holds that racial antagonism
structured the gulf between the two in such a way that it cannot properly be
called “misunderstanding” but instead should be understood as
“incommensurability.” Baldwin came to realize that he was articulating his own
existence on a communicative plane that was structured in such a way that only
to the extent that his life experiences could be made to conform to existing
matrices of intelligibility possessed by White society would his life be
recognized.
Where external authority conditions
life on that life’s capacity to behave in a manner intelligible to said
authority, that life cannot be said to exist except as the conditional fuel for
the authority of the community which, by virtue of presumption, stands in
judgment of what communicative acts or are not worthy. Civil society’s authority, embodied by those who take its existence for
granted in their acts of judgment and communication to judge, comes from a
double movement of, “Me too” but mostly, “Not me” that simultaneously confirms
the capacity of the mass public to render judgment over the appropriateness of
argumentation while at the same time consigning that which is not intelligible
i.e. Black argumentation to a separate sphere.
Wilderson’s
argument has far reaching implications for those in communication studies who
remain interested in rendering accounts of how deliberative practices and
institutional action do or do not succeed in achieving certain goals, either
thought of in terms of constituting material benchmarks through traditional
metrics (legislative change, changes in legal interpretation) or in a more Between Facts and Norms sense of moving the
needle in terms of expanding the repertoire of forms and practices of
argumentation that civil society is
capable of recognizing as “political.” Wilderson has no compunction about
aligning himself with the academic movement of what is called Afro-pessimism
because in his view, the structural exclusion of the Black from society ensures
that efforts at expansionary inclusion emanating from the mass public serve
only to confirm the authority of that public to judge while at the same time routinely
failing to address the structural conditions of exclusion. I am cheating a bit
here by splitting them into two functions, actually. It is really the case that
the confirmation of the mass public’s capacity to judge perpetuates the
structural conditions of exclusion. Despite Wilderson’s decision to place
Giorgio Agamben in his crosshairs in the opening of his book, I believe that
Agamben’s account of the distinction between bare life and political life
offers an elegant supplement that explains the rhetorical mechanisms for the
production of the process Wilderson identifies.
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Agamben outlines his case for how the dispossession of populations comes to
function structurally as opposed to contingently. Working from the Aristotelian
distinction between life with the capacity for political speech, political
life, and life which is incapable of signifying, bare life, Agamben suggests
political actors utilize a rhetoric that elevates “the good life,” that is,
life which exists above the realm of pure biological existence and into the
realm of shared speech, politics. Elevating political life, however, requires
that political life be defined against some other version of life, and that
other form of life is bare life. Political philosophy has defended Western
political institutions on the basis not
of their capacity to protect a Hobbesian social contract, that is, the basis to
secure bare life, but instead on the basis to provide for the good life. Michel
Foucault engineered this turn in thinking politics in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, where he identified emerging tendencies
on the part of the government to rationalize interventions as means of enabling
populations not just to live, but also to live well and in a certain way. Such
rationales represent racialized thought because they discriminate between
various and sundry populations to the extent that some ways of living are
valued and prioritized over and above others.
By the time
he wrote State of Exception Agamben
was applying his thesis to the conduct of internal politics and especially the
war on terror. It should be noted that he does not think the war on terror is a
unique example of the politicization of bare life, only that it is one among
many available in what he says is now, following Walter Benjamin, a state of
permanent exception in which populations find themselves “bare” and thus
vulnerable to management, dispossession, and extermination at the hands of the
sovereign. These bodies suffer the violence of sovereignty, included only to
feel its force, but are otherwise excluded from participation. In this way a
simple topographical distinction between inside and outside is not enough, but
a threshold, “a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude
each other but rather blur with each other.”[8]
Let me give
an example of this process. Many of George W. Bush’s speeches in the wake of
September 11th spoke of the Al Qaeda and the nations that harbored
them as barbaric threats to Western civilization. At the same time that these
populations were described in these terms, America continued to conduct a
campaign of vigilant military attack on these nations, attacks which created
and intensified numerous political and infrastructural deficiencies faced by
countries which were often already struggling with developmental deficits that
indexed not only the legacy of colonialism but also their position on the
periphery rather than center of the global order. Existing cultural
differences, especially religious and ethnic, were played up in media accounts
of the condition’s facing women in nations like Afghanistan. At the same time
that political rhetoric emanating from the West suggested that these nations
were politically bereft and thus in need of Western military intervention,
sanctions, international scorn, and that military intervention worked to verify
the rhetorical account of these nations as backwards and outside of the world
of Western “political” life. They were inside sovereignty only to the extent
that they faced the exercise of sovereign violence but constitutively excluded
in all other ways.
So the
question: would Wilderson recognize the strife between Western Europe and the
populations in the East as a “family quarrel” following Fanon’s analysis of the
Holocaust? Would the position of Afghanistan be contingent in his view, i.e.
occupying a position of the Black but only until there comes to be a
recognition of something shared between Afghanistan and the West? Would this
recognition depend upon what Wilderson, building on the work of Sadiya Hartman,
would call the “fungibility” of the idea of violence as applied to the black
body? Those who are both geographically segregated from the West and also
marked ethnically will probably not be permitted to symbolically “enter” the
West anytime soon. And if the soft, permanent electronic euthanasia of drone
strikes is any indicator, civil society’s capacity to perceive the bodies of
those like the son of Anwar Awlaki is seriously denuded. While some Western theorists, chief among
them Agamben, are capable of ascertaining similar characteristics in the
Holocaust and the ongoing war on terror, one would be hard pressed to identify
this analogical mode of thinking as anything approaching dominant or ascendant,
which suggests a level of permanence to the position of bare life in the war on
terror as constitutively excluded.
This
example emphasizes that Wilderson and Agamben have strikingly similar accounts
of suffering. Both suggest that for certain bodies the difference from other
bodies is one of kind rather than degree. That is, for Wilderson the slave
is ontologically distinct from the body that is included in civil society.
Similarly, Agamben holds that bare life is in a position of abjection, subject
to the vicissitudes of violent sovereignty by virtue of an inclusion whose only
index is the body’s subjection to violence.
But there
is one important seeming distinction: while Wilderson and Agamben both render
the violence as ontological in the sense that it absolutely denies the humanity
and agency of those upon it is visited, Agamben reads the emptiness of
sovereignty’s authority—here I would say its rhetorical basis—as a sign of hope rather than the pessimism that
Wilderson suggests. As he says in State of Exception the lack of a
“substantial articulation” between violence and law, that is, the fact that the
relationship is established through tautology rather than through appeal to
some kind of external authority, suggests that the inability to distinguish
between violence and the law is itself a resource for political action, one
that could demonstrate that emptiness.[9] Wilderson
on the other hand believes that the investment in authority for authority’s
sake is evidence that there is no chance
for the slave to exist in the world because the slave’s existence is what makes
the world possible. As he says it, “No slave, no world” because of both how the
physical labor of slavery makes our existing world possible and also how the
symbolic figure of the slave secures, through various and sundry means, the
intelligibility of civil society itself.
Above I
mark the distinction as “seeming” because I think the attitudinal difference
between the two thinkers is much less than the shared explanation both give for
the way in which political action sediments hierarchies to the detriment of
bodies that have no access to those political worlds. Both Agamben and
Wilderson indicate that the authority of civil society is generated by
tautological exercises of sovereign power the ground themselves in their own
assumption of authority. Agamben suggests that sovereignty anticipates its own
success to close off alternative perspectives while Wilderson argues that anti-blackness
works as a paradigm by rendering a constitutively impossibility arguments and
actions which might testify to its own self-investment in authority. Wilderson
and Agamben both outline theories of political exclusion that argue some forms
of life are given priority over other forms of life, and the unintelligibility
of those other forms of life is the grist for the mill of civil society and
politics, respectively. Wilderson’s point regarding Agamben’s focus on the
Holocaust is a necessary one, but contemporary situations of global violence
also suggest that there may be a level of permanence to the state of exception
that argues more for a reading of affinity between the two rather than a
theorization of their opposition.
[1] I
am excited to interrogate further how Agamben is read by Jared Sexton, Achille
Mbembe, and others. I have not yet had a chance to do that.
[2]
Frank Wilderson, Red, White, and Black:
The Structure of Antagonisms in U.S. Cinema, Durham: Duke University Press,
(2010) p. 36
[3] Ibid.
[4]
For more see David Noon, “Operation Enduring Anslogy” in Rhetoric & Public Affairs
[5]
Wilderson, Red, White, and Black p.
38
[6]
Aristotle, The Politics
[7]
Wilderson 11
[8]
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception,
p. 23
[9] State of Exception, p. 87
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