Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity
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Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity
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| ISBN-13: | 9780252095290 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2013 |
| Series: | New Black Studies Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 429 KB |
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Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity
By Lindon Barrett, Justin A. Joyce, Dwight A. McBride, John Carlos Rowe
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Lindon BarrettAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09529-0
CHAPTER 1
The Conceptual Impossibility of Racial Blackness
History, the Commodity, and Diasporic Modernity
One formula for specifying Western modernity is: the historical environment that reports the threshold between the materiality of the body and the abstracted forces of sociopolitical coordination as the trace of subjectivity—the discursive constituting the relays of these relations. Michel Foucault presents this model by offering the concept of the episteme, the concept by which "[discontinuity] ... has now become one of the basic elements of historical analysis." In short, the historical disjunction of Western modernity remains its emphatic characteristic.
Assuming this model, in The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body, psychologist Alexander Butchart emphasizes the later turn of Foucault's work. However, Butchart identifies the historical disjunction of modernity in the co-implications of the ostensibly rational, classifactory discipline of the modern episteme with the emergent circumstances of the intercontinental exchange adamantly conscripting African and African-derived bodies for the formalization of the interwoven economic, social, political, and subjective articulations of modernity. Subtending the argument is the recognition that the partitioning and reorganization of the hemisphere of the Americas constitutes the fundamental, ongoing event of Western modernity. This event begins earnestly in the sixteenth century and remains the extended geopolitical episode that, as dramatically as it revises systems of world trade and the mechanics of state powers, revises the materiality of the body and the relations of the body to the discursive mechanisms by which it is socially apprehended and managed in the modern exclusive paradigms of personhood. Although the geographic, political-economic, and socio-psychic palimpsest is intricate, what is certain is that these coordinated transformations remain as racialized as they are far-flung.
The parallel micropolitical and macropolitical progresses of Western modernity illustrate the point. While human corporeality emerges at the micropolitical level as a discrete catalogue serving as well as obfuscating the economic and social management of mass populations, at the macropolitical level the transforming and emergent metropoles along the Atlantic coastlines of Europe and the "New World" forge their exemplary modern profiles by means of the immense surplus values depending on the depletion and the disordering of the political jurisdictions along the Senegambian, Guinean, and west-central African coastlines as well as the stark regimes of enforced labor in the Americas. In the words of the historian Walter Rodney, the peculiarity is the criterion by which almost no "human suffering was too high to pay for the monetary gain from trade in slaves and from the extension of capitalist production into the New World." Insofar as racial blackness forms the historical and enabling point of "dis/integration" for the paradigms of Western modernity and, in this way, seems an eccentricity of the modern, the violent historical forging of the African diasporic communities of the Americas discloses the conceptual impossibility to be, on the contrary, the reported beneficence of modern "civic animation," the consolidated macropolitical and micropolitical determinations by which the modern remains viable. For at stake originally as the "modern" is the animation of a conceptual form—the commodity—as the principle of economic (and general) rationality, in the face of the already fully animate individual and collective forms—in human proportions—of racial blackness. The perplexity is, at once, phantasmatic, geopolitical, economic, and racial, because the impossibility of racial blackness seeming to lie within the limits of the economic fundament of the modern West as well as the limits of modern social and psychic rudiments belies the signal importance of the emergent circumstances of the concept of racial blackness: the rise of the Atlantic system of trade on which the articulation of the modern depends.
Butchart, introducing his argument, writes: "Foucault argued that all methods of knowing the human body related to it not as a means of discovery against an object waiting to be known, but as a productive power towards an object that is its effect. The concept defining this productive relationship between method and object is 'disciplinary power.'" The argument understands that the infrequently examined proposition of racial blackness is fully insinuated in the historical contingencies developing disciplinary power for, as Butchart states, "[r]oughly coinciding with the European colonization of Africa, the age of Renaissance thought gave way from the mid-seventeenth century to the age of Classification." The Foucauldian declension that Butchart executes specifies racial blackness as fundamental to the cognitive and cultural events recasting Western notions of the body from "a complex interplay of invisible elements, virtues, and spirits that united it to the irreducible 'soul' and inscribed their signatures in the body's members" to "a collection of overtly perceptible external organs—noses, teeth, hands, the skin, the feet, the genitalia, the breasts and so on" and subsequently "a three-dimensional anatomical interior possessed of organs such as the heart, the lungs, the spleen, the kidney or the brain." This thesis takes for granted the European Renaissance and Enlightenment as residuals of the material as well as conceptual relations that place the emergent economies of the Atlantic arena as the chief concern of European acquisitiveness and contemplation, admitting, furthermore, that the materialities of African and African diasporic peoples are crucial to the interwoven economic, epistemological, and political constructions inaugurating the modern West. Put most simply, the material catalogue of the body as a conceptual point coincides with the material catalogue of the body as an emphatically consequential racial point.
Butchart's argument replicates and extends two preeminent principles of Foucault's theoretical paradigm: the "constructivist" conceptual turn that analytically equivocates the body as simply sentience and, second, the epistemic character of the notion of "disciplinary power," its consolidations signaling the modern historical disjunction. Cultural theorist Francis Barker in The Tremulous Private Body provides a summation of the first principle, the "constructivist" conception of the body:
However necessary it may be to isolate the body for analytical purposes, the body in question is not a hypostasized object, still less a simple biological mechanism of given desires and needs acted on externally by controls and enticements, but a relation of liaisons which are material, discursive, psychic, sexual, but without stop or centre. It would be better to speak of a certain "bodiliness" than of "the body." It is the instance of a suturing of discourse and desire to the organism ... and thus fully social in its being and in its ideological valency. Rather than an extra-historical residue, invariant and mute, this body is as ready for coding and decoding, as intelligible both in its presence and its absence, as any of the more frequently recognized historical objects. The site of an operation of power, of an exercise of meaning.
These constructivist tenets aim to isolate the appearance of the body in the discourses that instantiate disciplinary power, the developmental line that provides the temporal aspect of the Foucauldian paradigm. In Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, anthropologist and historian Ann Stoler profoundly reconfigures this temporal aspect by considering at the same time the openly spatial aspects of the European imperial expansion co-extensive with the historical elaboration of disciplinary power. In this way, Stoler turns the Foucauldian paradigm to an analytical posture that must insist that race be considered effectively. The aim, she states, "is not to isolate racism's originary moment, much less to claim that all racisms are fundamentally the same. On the contrary," she explains further, "I grant slippage among the projects that modernity, the enlightenment and bourgeois liberalism embraced to make another sort of point, one that appreciates both how racial thinking harnesses itself to varied progressive projects and shapes the social taxonomies defining who will be excluded from them."
Rather than self-evident forms of worldly agency, the human subject and the human body are precisely the enabling and exclusionary inventions of the modern episteme. To follow Butchart, the "epistemic space and the disjunction between epistemes cannot be explained through recourse to the human subject as a given and the human body as a constant." Put differently, as René Descartes argues with revolutionary effect in the mid-seventeenth-century in Meditations on First Philosophy, the human subject is not a "natural" phenomenon at all, but rather the confounding, animating abstraction always ascertainable by its contradistinction to the natural, as most immediately represented by the material agency of the human body. The period of this re-imagination is also the period of the annexation of the Americas and the policies governing the opportunities to raise and traffic enormous quantities of goods in the new arena of the Atlantic economies, which transform the significance of the premodern axes of long-distance trade. The economic values of the emergent Atlantic economies abruptly eclipse those of the traffic of the Baltic Sea primarily in timber and fish, the trade in primarily the luxury items of fabrics and spices (including sugar) exchanged across the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the transfers of silk, lacquerware, coral, pearls, horses, wool, linen, and aromatics moving across the Indian Ocean as well as through the vast intercontinental arena of the silk roads. The newly promoted European desires for sugar and other tropical products that circulate in transatlantic relays following the fifteenth century formalize in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the enormous trade circuit termed the triangular trade, fusing the formerly disparate economies of the Americas, Western Europe, and the West African coast from Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Windward and Gold Coasts, and the Bight of Benin, to Benguela beyond the Bight of Biafra, jurisdictions inhabited by Akans, Angolans, Ashante, Bambara, Igbo, Kongolese, Kru, Mandigas, Mende, Oyo, Vais, Yoruba, and others, who are hard pressed by the demands of the European modernity. In the triangular circuit of the new Atlantic economies, European manufactured objects are disposed of on the African coast in trade for slaves, who are shipped across the Atlantic as the requisite labor force for the massive production of the cash crops that in the final segment of the circuit are traded under the nationally protectionist policies of the European metropoles to serve the re-articulated desires of mass populations.
Because Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power diminish conceptualizations of modern power in terms of openly repressive forces, these circumstances mark the limit, or necessary point of supplementation, in Foucauldian paradigms—an issue that is increasingly recognized. For example, literary critic Lora Romero and postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe eschew also what Butchart has called the "recourse to the human subject as a given and the human body as a constant," not primarily to codify affirmative systems of knowledge as does Foucault, but to disclose the profound structures of violence embedded in the modern epistemic break. Lora Romero in Home Fronts, her examination of nineteenth-century U.S. literary domesticity and sentimentality, observes:
Conceiving modern power as the power to administer life rather than the power to inflict death would seem to require ignoring the genocidal animus which has characterized Western interaction with both Jews and people of color in the modern era. By emphasizing production, Foucauldian theory would seem unable to account for the racial holocausts that have punctuated the modern era and hence would seem necessarily to marginalize (if not to erase altogether) an important part of the history of Jews and the Third World."
In the article "Necropolitics," Achille Mbembe draws the concatenation of the slave trade, plantation slavery, and the colony to define the fundamental insinuation of race with the abstract reason of Western modernity, and writes: "In fact, in most instances, the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilization, even the extermination of vanquished peoples are to find their testing ground in the colonial world. Here we see the first syntheses between massacre and bureaucracy, that incarnation of Western rationality." These refinements of the already revisionary approaches of Foucault to the historiography and the macro- and micropolitical relays of Western modern geopolitical power highlight the material and psychic violences of modernity that the epistemologies of modernity (more and less begrudgingly) refuse to acknowledge as fundamental to their articulation. In addition, Mbembe makes the point in relation to the work of Karl Marx—the preeminent materialist challenge to the idealist tendencies of Western thought: "That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the [historical] calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples." The racialized body and, in particular, the African and African diasporic body (conflated under the sign of racial blackness), provide these keen material determinants of Western modernity that are nonetheless rarely acknowledged in those terms.
The conceptual obfuscation, or upshot, is that the economic boon secured and re-secured by Europe and its outposts at each node of the Atlantic system of trade, the boon radically augmenting European diets, shipping, and markets, massively introduces sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants into the European "New World" or, differently put, into the newest mechanism of European viability and, as forcefully, into individual and collective European imaginations. In the study A History of the European Economy, 1000–2000, economic historian François Crouzet glosses these transformations as follows:
Indeed, it has been maintained that Europe enriched itself and accumulated capital, thanks to its superiority in military and business technology, at the expense of the rest of the world, through the looting and mining of precious metals in America; the cultivation of plantations in the West Indies and the southern continental colonies by slaves (slavery is a theft of labor), on land stolen from Native Americans; and the gains of the slave trade. Though slavery is by no means specific to European expansion (it had existed for millennia in many regions, including Africa), the slave trade from Africa is a critical problem. It was established to provide manpower for plantations (mainly sugar plantations) in America. As plantations' slaves generally suffered a heavy demographic deficit, with a large excess of deaths over births, an increasing and massive transatlantic forced migration of labor took place: it is accepted that 11 to 12 million Africans were forcibly deported across the Atlantic from the 1400s to the 1800s. (About the same number was carried across the Indian Ocean by Muslim traders, but over a longer period). The average death rate during those voyages was 14 percent.
The effect of these economic transformations exceeds simple economic principles, witnessed, for example, by the more empirical turn of the aesthetic evident in seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting or, as dramatically, the development of the leviathan national bureaucracies calculating and intervening in the new circulation of the escalating Atlantic economic values.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity by Lindon Barrett, Justin A. Joyce, Dwight A. McBride, John Carlos Rowe. Copyright © 2014 Lindon Barrett. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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