Human Rights Poetry and the Writing of Disaster

With the grand jury decision not to indict the officers who shot and killed John Crawford, a 22-yr-old black man, in a Beavercreek, Ohio, Wal-mart (only four days before another young Black man, Michael Brown, was killed in Ferguson, Missouri), I can’t help but to gesture toward the way that the global reparative logic of human rights discourse—which I hope to say a few things about in terms of the archive, the intertext, and disaster—is informed by the capacity, as Umut Özsu points out in his also-recent discussion of the newly erected Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, to “nearly always ignore” socio-economic conditions and racialized state violence. Although this distinction between the civil/political and social/economic is often seen as a split within human rights discourse, Özsu argues that every instance of civil or political violation implies a racialized socio-economic violence that cannot be realized in the discourse.

Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, on John Crawford: “And the fact of the matter is, that the video not being released, the political apparatus in Ohio had weeks to criminalize John Crawford in death, the same way that Michael Brown was criminalized in death.” Although the shooting took place on August 5, in response to a now-altered 911 call reporting that Crawford was pointing a gun at customers (it was a BB gun from the store shelves in an open-carry state, and was never pointed at other customers), the Wal-mart surveillance video footage showing the shooting was only released this past Wednesday. And even though the special prosecutor identified Crawford as a “victim,” who did nothing wrong (he not facing the officers when they shot him and did not have time to react), as Robinson points out, in these weeks he was criminalized. It’s not that Crawford has been slandered or dehumanized in this period, even if he has been, that constitutes his criminalization; rather, his death is criminalized to the extent that his death was not made available to witness. The belated identification of Crawford as a victim, then, assures that the disaster, the injustice of his death would not be experienced on the streets, in public.

A critical discussion of human rights discourse turns on this question: How is it possible to have a victim but no crime? And yet we see time and again in cases of human rights abuses that the association of a victim and a crime misses the way that the disaster unfolds per “neoliberal measures of inclusive democracy” that follow a global mandate based on reparation. In Beavercreek Ohio, this occlusion is glaringly apparent in the multilateral operations that ensured that between the corporation of Wal-mart, the attorney general of Ohio, Greene County, and Beavercreek police, a closed circle of mutual protection functioned to prevent witnessing Crawford’s death as a disaster, a product of socio-economic conditions and racialized state violence.

“Since the disaster always takes place after having taken place,” writes Blanchot, “there cannot possibly be any experience of it” (28). Blanchot casts disaster as something that has always happened, which we have yet to have experienced. That this happens without our experience of it is the disaster. We might reformulate this: the (human rights) disaster takes place, then human rights (the disaster) takes place. Further, human rights takes away the possibility of experiencing socio-economic conditions of the disaster once the human rights disaster has taken place. In concrete instances, such as the case of John Crawford described above, the injustice is the disaster. The lag time pointed out by Robinson, the time between the death of John Crawford and this second death (statement from the family following the grand jury decision: “the family feels it has been victimized all over again”), highlights the way that justice has the first word, though it (or its lack) comes after.

In order to consider the limitations inherent in the role of witnessing in human rights discourse, I believe that we find ourselves—for better or worse—situated in the realm of poetry, but to be very clear: not human rights poetry as typified in the pervasive and humanistic association between poet and witness, in which the poet-witness produces the body of the victim, which characterizes what Bob Meister calls the extension of “Auschwitz-based reasoning into a new discourse of global power” (3). Human rights poetry of this sort is called upon to “bear witness” to atrocity, to catastrophe, to violence, following the global reparative logic of the European postwar (embodied in the 1948 Declaration on Human Rights).[1] It is only against this tendency that human rights poetry, as I would like to consider it, can ask its question: what corpi, what bodies, what words gives rise to discourse of human rights?

We can see this equation between poets and witnesses in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Agamben agrees with Foucault’s effort in the archaeology not to pose the question of the speaking subject, but his main point is to put forth the testimony in contrast to the archive. Foucault’s notion of the archive as a figure between langue, “the system of constructing possible sentences,” and corpus, which “passively collects the words that are spoken” (130), makes it possible to think about the “anonymous field…that defines the possible position of speaking subjects” (122). Agamben wants to clear a space for the speaking subject, but a specific subject: the witness, or the poet. He writes, “Poets—witnesses—found language as what remains.” But like Foucault’s discussion of the speaking subject, Agamben’s reconstruction of the speaking subject as witness seems to rely on the displacement and subsequent fetishization of the corpus, the text, the “poetic word,” which is “situated in the position of a remnant and can, therefore, bear witness” (161).

Human rights poetry, which casts off the role of the speaker as witness to always ask: Who is Speaker? marks the revenant rather than the remanent nature of the corpus, of the book, the text, the word. The revenant, because the disaster consists of that which cannot be experienced in the event of death. In poetry, one is tempted to say, this thwarted question returns: the speaking subject takes place not in, but as the “blank space from which I speak.” In contrast to Foucault, who wishes to ask about the conditions that produce the speaking subject and so comes to the archive as that which includes the very happening of language, via the statement, the possibility of language, human rights poetry proposes to think about how disaster arranges corpi in relation to discourses.

This discourse of the witness justifies itself by producing knowledge about the human, as was predominantly the case, for example, in a recent issue of Qui Parle devoted to the topic of human rights: the “mass intellectuality” of human rights yields new definitions of the “human,” of human “life.” This contains an extended tendency to see rights and genre as instances of law that contribute to our understanding of personhood or as Agamben notes, the human and inhuman. For example, in Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, Joseph R. Slaughter describes the common “humanistic social” vision of human rights law and the Bildungsroman, both “genres” contain a “shared image of the human person” (4).

Human rights poetry, the version I’m attempting to re-value, which raises the question of who is speaking, does not share this concern with the knowledge about the human person. It contains what Foucault might call otherwise “meaningless” sentences. He writes, “to say a sentence like this is meaningless presupposes that one has already excluded a number of possibilities—that it describes a dream, that it is part of a poetic text, that it is a coded message, that it is spoken like a drug addict” (90). For Foucault, a poetic text is able to give meaning to words, then, because it is able to index a still very functional human person. Consider this poem, then, which I confess to writing:

Map of 2014 Human Rights Risk Index 

Syria, Sudan
DR Congo Pakistan Somalia
Afghanistan Iraq
Myanmar
Yemen
Nigeria

This poem, which takes as intertext the caption to a 2014 Map put out by the corporation Maplecroft, presents a corpus of knowledge, words “passively collected.” To what archive, what discursive formation do they give rise?

To what belongs a list of nations gathered by a corporation in a poem written by a person who does not witness? If poetry, it’s because poetry arrests the production of knowledge about the human, not because there is something essential or particular about poetry as genre, or form. It concerns the capacity of the person who witnesses to create a space for experiencing the “(human rights) disaster” by refraining from choraling it all into a discourse of justice, of witnessing, and in this refrain, working to set out the terms of the first disaster, the terms that describe the socio-economic conditions acting upon what Denise Ferreira da Silva would call affectable bodies. Human rights poetry is not a genre, not a law, but the explication of the problem of how the corpus, the passively collected words, the text, rearticulates the position of the speaking subject.

The subject of human rights poetry is always passing out of existence; it is a non-witness becoming non-victim, a human being “criminalized in death,” and it is the space of waiting that the poet articulates as a means of experiencing disaster. Consider these lines from the Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail’s Diary of a Wave Outside of the Sea, which depicts the US-led intervention in Iraq in 1991, offering an account of the disaster that marked one of the United States’s first military actions in the post-Cold War period:

One evening…

No…One Morning…
No…I don’t know…One waiting…
Death passed before our eyes, as it did every day.

I was not waiting by myself;
the river was there, too,
and the smoke that rose from the explosions
and from the cigarette of a lover
who contemplated his loneliness
like a pawn in the corner of a chessboard.” (5)

The proposal here is that witnessing changes its tune when it becomes everyday. Slipping into waiting, the subject of human rights poetry shifts between what Denise Ferreira da Silva would call the transparent “I,” a witness, who registers a world “passed before our eyes” and the affectable “I,” who is acted upon by the passing of time (“One evening…No…One Morning…No…I don’t know…One waiting…”).

In this space persists the potentiality of victimhood; the witness persists, but in the disaster, through disaster, she waits, neither as witness nor as victim—but as corpus, something to be “passively collected” after the fact, about the disaster. The poem establishes the tension between this state of waiting, on the one hand, and the forces of intervention, on the other. But Mikhail is not thinking about his contradiction between the rhetoric of the witness, via intervention, and the experience of a potential witness-victim. She wishes to point to a space for the waiting of a body that eschews these positions of witness and victim because, above all, the “responsibility” that inheres between them is “a response to the impossible” (Blanchot 26). “Responsibility,” says Blanchot further, “is itself disastrous” (27). The word—the corpus, the text—intervenes in the archive as an intertext, as Blanchot’s disaster enters Mikhail’s text:

The disaster watches over us at night
—our recurring, endless night—
like a verb with no subject or object.

And look, here we are,
trying in vain to jump over it
—over the disaster—
so that we stumble from nowhere
every time.

We become acquainted with death at the wrong time,
and no one uses their “veto.”

You think, therefore you realize the disaster.

Maurice Blanchot, the French intellectual,
thought that while disaster removes the haven that is the thought of death,
and turns us from the grievous or surprising thing,
and makes us dispense with any will or movement,
it does not, however, give us an opportunity
to raise this question:
What have you done to realize [gain knowledge of] the disaster? (20)

In the poem, Blanchot’s words, which come from early on in The Writing of Disaster, “while disaster removes the haven that is the thought of death, / and turns us from the grievous or surprising thing, / and makes us dispense with any will or movement,” extend the terms of the waiting-processes. The disaster is not the waiting, or the bombing, or intervention, or a veto of intervention. It is none of these things and yet it involves each of them; it is the aggression or violence that cannot be experienced in each. What I’d like to note about Mikhail’s use of Blanchot is the way that the terms of disaster enter into the problem of witnessing that Mikhail proposes: the contradiction between mere thinking or being as a realization of disaster and the subject’s responsibility for realizing disaster.

At the same time that it is a testimony to the atrocity of Desert Storm, the poem struggles with the question that is not posed—what have you done to realize the disaster? Although the question seems to concern one’s complicity in the disaster, or one’s responsibility for preventing it—ultimately, it is a question about that which is impossible. To return to the question with which I began: what corpi, what bodies, what words gives rise to discourse of human rights? The words of disaster, which speak in and through waiting, will always be realized in the human person, but each instance of this realization, each “haven” taken “in the thought of death” crops out the socio-economic conditions of the non-witness.

[1] The ambiguities of witnessing have been theoretically grounded in Holocaust testimony, predominantly through Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony, in which they conceptualize witnessing as a crisis of literature, “insofar as literature becomes a witness” (xviii). The discourse of human rights assumes this literary function of witnessing, as the terms of Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, make explicit, in which victim and listener merge in the experience of witnessing in order to “co-own” the atrocity (Laub 57).

Note: This is an abbreviated version of a paper given at "Intellectual Properties," a graduate student conference at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, September 26–27, 2014.

cruel attachment and negative preference

In a recent lecture, “Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism,” Miranda Joseph disputed with the celebratory revival and appropriation of Bartleby; seeking a subject that was more “neither/nor” (neither capitalism nor revolution), a subject that is theorized following the terms of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” Jospeh opposed Bartleby’s negative preference with Berlant’s idea of negative attachment. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant also references Bartleby:

           

Cruel optimism is in this sense a concept pointing toward a mode of lived immanence, one that grows from a perception about the reasons people are not Bartleby, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it. (28)

I also think there is much to be critical of in the elevation of Bartleby as a figure of political resistance, and yet I think that the figure of Bartleby raises more questions than it answers about political subjectivity. To begin with, then, the primary question raised by Bartleby is the question of what it means to prefer. The story of Bartleby never resolves the ambivalence about preference that some would read into it; rather, it sets in motion the problem of preference as a political gesture. 

In my reading, this problem is also explored in Hannah Arendt’s theory of proairesis, which precedes or informs the distinction between the social and political. I’ve described all of this elsewhere, highlighting preference not as a form of activity, but as a problem for activity. Rather than seeing how Arendt problematically divides these “realms,” I was focusing on how preference not only exposes assumptions about ideas of (political, revolutionary) activity, but poses the question about how these models are formed in the first place. The question of preference does so because, as Arendt spells out, it is an issue of proairesis, literally of pro-airesis, of a choice before choice. It thus occurs at the intersection of one’s political activity and one’s social status, at the intersection of one’s capacity to produce one’s identity or attitude or to be produced (structurally, logically, institutionally) as an identity. Tracing out the consequences of some of Arendt’s observations, I have described how that faculty, that capacity, is worthy of being seen in its own right, not merely as an extension of the idea that in spectating or observing (or in judging) we are already taking action, as Jacques Ranciere formulates, for example, in The Emancipated Spectator.

An important part of this conceptualization resides in Arendt’s formulation of preference in “Reflections on Little Rock” as something has the capacity to intervene in the social realm. This is an understanding of preference as pre-political that I think is important to rethinking reified notions of political action that are understood as revolutionary. But an aspect that I did not initially explore is the fact that this presentation of preference in “Reflections on Little Rock” emerges in the context of the issue of school segregation and interracial marriage. And here, Arendt’s insistence on identifying school segregation/integration and miscegenation as things belonging to the social realm rather than the political is clearly in error. 

In her book Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana UP 2014), Kathryn T. Gines argues that Arendt’s distinction represents a severe limitation in Arendt’s thinking about the Negro question (which also rests on her understanding of anti-Black discrimination as a “Negro problem” rather than a “white problem”) and that this has consequences for her ideas about representative thinking and judgment. Gines argues that these shortcomings can be seen in light of her presentation of the Jewish question and the ways that this question is extended, although not explicitly connected to the Negro question.

Seen from this perspective, it’s hard to read Arendt’s essay, along with her other discussions of the problem of race in America, as something other than emissions of a form of white privilege that is little different from white racists of the time, as Gines points to. To consider the concept of preference from this perspective, however, allows for a consideration not so much of how racism emerges through preference, as Arendt is arguing it should (and should freely be allowed to), all the while, of course, not being able to see the contradictions and discriminations (those private, interested things) that she was applying to the political (the realm that she believes should be disinterested, a reading that Gines also thoroughly exposes the contradiction of in terms of her response to James Baldwin, refuting “love” as a political emotion (extension of this in recent debunkings of dwyl (do what you love)).

Rather, the conjunction of preference (via Arendt’s explicit and implicit formulations of preference as something that has the capacity to intervene in the realm of the necessary) and race allows us to turn the way that the “white problem” rewrites as “choice” things that are always mediated by necessity, always mediated not only by the economic necessity or social, but by the way that these political, institutional, and structural conditions get coded or written as bodily necessity. In describing this process, I am following Denise Ferreria da Silva’s formulation of the way that the racial already marks a place for the rewriting of the body via cultural difference. Although it’s difficult with Arendt, and one wants to be very clear about her problematic assumptions and ideas, I do think that she, like Bartleby, provides not so much a model in which these issues are resolved as the kind of nexus in which they can be perceived.

What becomes interesting about this to me is the way that “choice” remains very much at the center, conceptually and otherwise, of the problem, contemporarily phrased, of the “post-racial” or of “racism with race” and also in the critical elaborations of this paradigm. I’m thinking, as I loop back around to where I began, of the way that this emerged in Miranda Joseph’s lecture. Although gesturing to some of the ways that the financial crises of 2008 and 2009 disproportionately affected people of color and also gesturing critically to the discourse of fiscal “responsibility” that drives the terms of debt under capitalism, Joseph’s terms for understanding the problem of debt remain the problem of an “entrepreneurial” subject, a subject, who, as Arendt figures the black parent in “Reflections,” is “involved in an affair of social climbing” (194). Arendt’s whole point—that “free choice” be upheld—is discredited by the fact that segregation is not the same as forcing parents “to send their children to an integrated school against their will” (212). But her point remains important, abstractly, because it is this same version of “free choice” that remains powerfully imbedded in liberal desire.

Joseph highlighted this dynamic at the end of her talk when she identified the way that the desire for quality education and safety fuels middle-class decisions about home-ownership, namely by buying one’s distance from racialized poverty. What I thought was interesting about this conceptualization was that Joseph returned to Berlant’s problem of attachment as a way of talking about this very complex dynamic, in which the desires of white parents about the choice of associations can be seen not to produce race (as Joseph described) but to deploy produce a subject for whom raciality is something substantive, something essential.

My question, which has to do with how this complex dynamic could be understood, was recognized as a question about what constitutes this desire for distance from racialized poverty, and Joseph described (in terms that would also befit the parvenu) how African Americans that were showcased on Oprah’s “Debt Diet” were shown to also have the same desire, that is, the desire to distance themselves from their race, from racialized poverty. What is remarkable about this response is that the terms of “free choice” remain embedded even as the ideology of personal responsibility is brought into question. And it’s interesting that free choice emerges here, where race is identified by recourse to a projective structure (here, the Berlantian attachment to an object that inhibits one’s aims, that is produced as “other” and thus as “bad” or “cruel”) that seems capacious enough to include the “problem” of race as one of its possible “objects.” In this sense, Joseph’s slogan, to “seize the means of temporal production,” is even more explicit in its erasure of the inhering relationship between temporal production (the production of the entrepreneurial subject, for whom “choice” is a real possibility) and the production of others in space as racialized subjects. 

picture: Francisca Sutil, Mute 14 (2009/10)

the cunning of negative accumulation

It must be the affinity I associated with reading Denise Ferreira da Silva's Toward a Global Idea of Race that brought me to actually open Hegel's Science of Logic again (although the chain of connections that I right now have the luxury of making actually went from the question of sky coloration to the question of why sea water is blue to the idea of quantity transforming into quality) and from here to his description there of the transformation of quantity into quality. This is perhaps the most poignant part of the Science, the part of it I most remember from my reading of it almost ten years ago. In my post on Silva, I described how she identifies the duplicity of the moment in which the others of Europe are produced as global subaltern subjects, and that this Hegelian moment is related to this moment is indicated, textually, in Hegel's description, here, of the cunning, not of reason, but of "the concept [Begriff; notion]." The notion he is referring to is the notion of "quantity"; its cunning aspect is its appearing as an "indifferent limit," that is, its capacity not to signal that qualia is always already inherent in quantum. When we misapprehend this, Hegel explains, we feel embarrassment. He describes the moment:

At last the qualitative alteration is revealed: the head or tail is bald; the heap is vanished. In conceding the answer, it was not only the repetition that was each time forgotten, but also that the individually insignificant quantities (like the individually insignificant disbursements from a patrimony) add up, and the sum constitutes the qualitative whole, so that at the end this whole has vanished: the head is bald, the purse is empty. (21.332; "Specific Quantity," 290)

The "embarrassment"is nothing more than a contradiction, and Hegel aligns this logical problem with Aristotle's notion of elenchi, a refutation that rather easily leads to fallacy in syllogistic or deductive reasoning. It is worth nothing that Hegel's examples both entail the loss of a whole rather than the constitution of a whole (for example, adding drops of water to a body of water that changes from colorless to blue), since this initiates a logic of accumulation and dispossession (David Harvey, "accumulation by dispossession," cited in Chakravartty and Silva, "Accumulation, Dispossession, Debt"), which Hegel also signals by extending the example of the purse:

Quantum, when it is taken as indifferent limit, is the side from which an existence is unsuspectedly attacked and laid low. It is the cunning of the concept that it would seize on an existence from this side where its quality does not seem to come into play—and it does it so well that the aggrandizement of a State or of a patrimony, etc., which will bring about the misfortune of the State or the owner, even appears at first to be their good fortune. (21.332; "Specific Quantity," 291)

What I get from this (Silva's grammar sticks) is Hegel's positioning of the subject who observes (who misapprehends) the cumulative effect of subtractive projects. Forgetting you've debited your account is one thing; not getting that these cumulative debits add up is another. Hegel highlights subtractive processes here, we might say, because the dialectic writ large is a catalog of the additive moments, of moments in which the subject overcomes the loss of the transformation of quantity into quality because it does "add up" to a new whole.

The vanishing whole, however--perhaps better, the threat of the vanishing whole as an index of the inherence of dispossession in accumulation--signals the duplicity of reason via quantity, emphasizing how the production of the others of Europe, as an effect of modern reason, involves a similar misapprehension of the "indifference" of quantity. I don't, of course, follow Hegel's assertion that quantum and qualia are inherent and eternal extensions of one another, but I do think that this problem is the problem of thinking about the relation between individual instances of racialized inequality, death, and dispossession and the institutional, structural, or global dimensions of these acts. For while, as Hegel claims, it's only natural (or moreover, only human) to misapprehend the situation and think that the basic assurances of life are there, even though yet another individual is plucked from them, the knowledge of this loss is always retrospective. Unlike his description of the dialectic, Hegel does not here account for the recuperation of loss. This is interesting because the relationship posed here between the "whole" and the subtractive processes as something to be defended against reveals the extent to which the dialectical process is engaged with the production of the "whole"; in Silva's terms, I think, this is the production of "globality" (29) "as a modern context of signification, one that refers to a mode of existing before historicity, the horizon of life, that the ontological context transparency thesis produces."

What my reading of Toward a Global Idea of Race left open were questions about the way that so much non-truth can be produced about the global and why this does not, as is the case for Hegel's bald head or empty purse, result in the evacuation of this site as productive for reason. For how closely do the terms of quantity and quality map onto Silva's terms of interiority and exteriority? The problems that emerge for Hegel from the transformation of quantity into quality reveal how globality, like totality, as a harmonious sublation of quantity and quality, is an achievement for Hegel. Even where these relations are subtractive and not recuperated, they still allow us to imagine the heap, the head, the purse as an entity. In this regard, globality is an "embarrassment," a quantity about which an "indifferent limit" can be assumed. But what is the process of signification that for every sun finds a sun dog, a false sun, that does not just produce globality or reproduce the relations of globality but that reproduces globality?

on not extending transparency (denise ferreria da silva)

I have gotten to the end of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press 2007) and I feel much in its aftermath. In attempting to understand da Silva's argument in the past months, I have read through these notes on Seminario Permanente de Teoria y Critica a number of times, which I have found extremely helpful. 

Descriptively, da Silva’s writing is iterative, generating its logic; the experience of reading it often reminded me of reading Hegel’s The Science of Logic, although these are very different books, of course. The book is a study and critique of modern representation, specifically of how the racial has functioned as a “signifier of globality,” producing “the others of Europe as modern subaltern subjects.” She contrasts this project with the project of what she calls “post-theory,” which she understands as the valuation in postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism of historicity, or the deployment of “a good version of historicity.” She finds that this move reproduces the logic of historicity, which “relies on the modern construction of distance as a temporal metaphor to circumscribe the place of emergence of the colonized as a transparent I” (168).  Understanding that the project of modern representation is the project of the transparent I is key to being able to understand the duplicitous condition that produces “the others of Europe as modern subaltern subjects.” I use the word duplicitous to characterize this process because it denotes the doubleness (the being “twice affectable” that da Silva describes of the female slave in colonial Brazil (241)) but also the question of truth/falsity that science brings to the scene of modern representation. But this is also a duplicitous condition because da Silva suggests throughout the book that this process is informed by both “European desire” and by the “displacement” of race through the play of other key signifiers and strategies in modernity.

This points to the position held by the term “exteriority” in da Silva’s argument, which signals the overlap of the productive and reproductive in her project, by which I mean to point to the way that the subaltern subject’s exteriority is both assumed by and produced in the scene of modern representation. Da Silva describes how this logic informed early anthropological projects:

When deploying the cultural to incarcerate the others of Europe in their traditions and to safely keep post-Enlightenment Europe in the moment of transparency, these social scientific projects have already been approaching their objects as racial things. Not because these versions of these disciplines failed to refute the “original sin,” the writing of man as an effect of the tools of productive nomos, scientific reason in the guise of Spirit, but because, as they did so, they incorporated racial difference as a substantive trait of the human body. Had this not been the case, it would not have been possible to carve their separate niches in such a way as not to distinguish them from history. (150)

Da Silva describes this “incorporation” of racial difference as a strategy of engulfment, through which “racial difference” becomes a “substantive trait.” She describes how Boas (1911), who sought to classify the impact of “natural environment” on primitive races, supposed a fundamental difference between “civilized” and “primitive thought,” which was based on his finding that the “primitive mind” is determined by its environment, whereas the “civilized” mind, via Descartes’s efforts to secure the transcendental subject as its non-determination by exteriority (42). Thus it is the valorization of the interiority of the mind as what is “true” that occasions the displacement of “exteriority.” Because this exteriority, per Descartes, is seen to be based on  its identification as an “extended” thing, that is, as “body,” it allows for, in fact, inaugurates, the displacement of bodies that are not “minds,” that are not, in other words, containers of the transcendental mind. This gesture is already a gesture that is reproductive, or reconstructive, not just projective. By this, I mean to refer to the way that da Silva identifies the forward- and backward-facing aspects of the productive moment—that the others of Europe are “produced” as the reproduction of the transcendental I. Behind this is the moment in which race is transformed into the racial:

My first move is to describe the first moment of the analytics of raciality, the science of man, to show how, although it inherited the eighteenth-century naturalists' correlation between global regions and bodily and social configurations, it is the first project of knowledge to write post-Enlightenment Europe's particularity by deploying the apparatus of scientific reason manufactured in the account of productive nomos. Its arsenal does this when it transforms race (a term previously employed to describe collectivities in terms of blood relationship) into the racial (a scientific concept), the strategy of engulfment that produces the human body as an exteriorization of productive nomos. (116)

The moment that da Silva describes is key to modern representation, because it accounts for the transformation of a something descriptive (the manifoldness of human bodies) into a concept. This process of signification thus turns on the process in which the exteriorization of the mind is made manifold. Literally, it hinges on this moment, but this is also the moment in which modern representation, the working of the transcendent I, deceives or betrays, or can be seen as duplicitous in its movement of self-realization. It would be a stretch to call this moment intentional, in da Silva's schema, and yet, it also does not really seem sufficient to call it structural either. This is the problem that da Silva encountered, it seems, in trying to get to the limits of her own understanding, as she describes the development of the project:

Yet earlier I had failed to comprehend so many events! Events that are, to be sure, fully explained by what and how I know: another death of a black or brown youth at the hands of law enforcement, another death related to drug trafficking, another prison rebellion where many prisoners die, another suicide bombing, another legal act whose objective is to place more and more "others of Europe" in a state of illegality. When I learned about them, I got mad. Because that which enables my "understanding" explains away these events (and the fear they entail), resolving them in neat sociological formulas that write the deaths I hear about and the ones I can only imagine as events foretold....Haunted and mad, I engaged in the project of mapping the trajectory of the racial, that modern signifier that delimits all the murders producing the place where the lives, the social trajectory, of the racial subaltern subjects unfold. (261)

Here, da Silva describes how sociological or structural (institutional) analysis of race and racism deploys the logical gesture that "explains" away these deaths, which is, I think, a method that could similarly be ascribed to the explanatory gesture of biopolitics today. She begins the book with a discussion of Foucault, and specifically of the limit of Foucault's critique of "truth," which she attributes to his separation of the racial as a "symbolics of blood" from the "production of minds" (24). Thus, she finds that he does "not reach the place where European particularity is but an effect of the strategies of this productive ruler [universal reason]" (25).  She describes this as his inability (refusal?) to "relinquish" interiority. Thus, the question that occupies me, I suppose, is how to relinquish interiority. In what is arguably one of the more prescriptive moments of the text, and in its last lines, da Silva writes: 

We need to trace every and each articulation of raciality, including those that profess its irrelevance, trace at each moment how it rewrites the racial subaltern subject in affectability, producing statements that not only excuse the violent effects of this rewriting but also redeploy the transparency thesis. (267)

I think the operation that da Silva calls for here involves thinking about how one can talk or think about race without it being folded into raciality. Indeed, this seems to be Seminario Permanente de Teoria y Critica's question as well, phrased differently: "My question: if racialization is inevitably part of the modern paradigm, then is there is no way to revise it out of that paradigm?" For it seems that each "articulation of raciality" implies the relation in which "interiority" is not relinquished and comes to displace race, so that tracing such articulations would account for the displacement of race from the scene of representation and its revision as culture, etc,. I believe this still leaves, however--and perhaps this is the point?--the question of what race is, nonsubstantively: collectivities of blood relationships, symbolics of blood, manifoldness of human bodies. Is it the nonsubstantivity that is key, a "mix-up"? And finally, how is this related to the question of how to not extend transparency, how to not "redeploy the transparency thesis," a question I am always afraid to ask for fear that it also already always reproduces my own transparency. There is so much more to say about this book.

roundabout

-->

Is poetry also

like young babies and regressed patients

preverbal?

There are mix-ups

like subject matters

about which externality

and internality

cannot be decided

Is it called white privilege

these clean sheets:

|a horrid empty space|?

|a friendly expanse|?

|harmonious mix-up|?

Your white is not my white

pro/intro-jection is its mechanism

seeming already to decide

about privilege it has nothing to say

about race

projection of bad | object

introjection of good | subject

these aggressive renderings

sub/ob-ject leave

no space

for mix-ups

and silence becomes something to

include in conversations

it’s not enough to want to talk

about race

that’s what

being

preverbal means

not enough to want

to talk

enough to want

want