Broadly, the topic at hand today is post-humanism. One of the questions offered as a starting point: How might post-human art re-frame the classical figurations of political subjectivity?
My practice–between writing, making art, and curating–focuses on exploring this notion of “classical figurations of subjectivity” and how they are ruptured, with particular attention to blackness and the internet both. How does blackness rupture classic Western subjectivity–but more importantly, how has it always-already been the very rupture itself?–and likewise, how has the internet and digital technology done the same, often trailing after blackness, reproducing its structures and conditions among non-black subjects?
Additionally, I’m interested in the role of technologies in producing and reifying these “classical figurations” as well as in producing blackness as their outside–which I suppose, in part is why I am here. Photography, mass media, moving image….
In the past I have written about race and feminist image making on the internet, about memes and black cultural production, and more recently about the really big question around blackness and humanity, trying to articulate to myself whether or not, as British Ghanian theorist Kodwo Eshun notes, whether we as black people in America owe anything to the status of the human.”
I’ve largely tried to work through that by looking at the work of other black artists in the US and Europe, and trying to take up new approaches to their inquiry into blackness. So often critics, institutions, and historians begin and end their investigation into black artist’s work with the overly simplistic framework of “positive/negative images,” “combatting stereotypes,” or treating black art (art concerned with blackness) as the creative arm of Black liberation and civil rights efforts.
So today I want to walk myself through that question (How might post-human art re-frame the classical figurations of political subjectivity?) in light of my existing research concerns–lately: this question of the human–and take a route that winds through a few things in contemporary art that have been bothering me lately, which thanks to Danielle and the other organizers I now have a framework through which I can approach them: blackness and post-humanism. maybe this will become an essay from here, for now its schematic, underpainting, a skeleton….
When it comes to contemporary art discourses around identity, politics, identity politics, humanism or at best a liberal anti-humanism or multiculturalism continues to reign as a primary method for discussing artworks. This is the case in a number of ways.
- the artist is treated as an expressive, singular self (following in a western enlightenment ideal)
- HOMO ECONOMICUS We see ongoing use of ‘Man’ as a metric by which to measure everyone else. Even as he is rejected, he is still centered. Even thinking about the language of marginalization, where those marked ‘other’ are cast to the outer rim of some mythic center still held down by white, hetereo, cis masculinity. Further, this homo economicus, which as Dr Shaviro noted, is a utility maximizing entity. After neoliberalism those utilities to be maximized are not only external, but this ‘Man’ must also maximize himself. In art this means: experience, packaged and commodified!
- Ownership - cultural, intellectual property and appropriation are maintained as primary frameworks for discussing 'who gets to make what'
For example, in putting together this lecture I was reminded of a New York Times article about the most recent photography survey at MoMA, “Being: New Photography 2018,” which actually compares the show to Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibition, calling the latest MoMA show, “a long way from” is predecessor. In its title and throughout, the article lauds the exhibition for its humanism (article titled: “What’s new in photography? Humanism, MoMA says”). Of course that could be just one writers opinion, but MoMA’s press release states that the show “asks how photography can capture what it means to be human.” The works “call attention to how individuals are depicted and perceived” and “explore how personhood is expressed today.”
There are other examples of this sort of humanist approach from the last few years–some of my I don’t know if favorite is the word… are: the New Museum’s Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon exhibition, which was not expressly a photo show, but included many still and moving images that similarly claimed to call attention to the perils of representation. “Challenging representations of…” “dismantling reductive representations…”
I want to take a moment to say that I’m not saying that challenging representations is an unworthy task, but rather I’m interested in how treating this as a primary charge for artists and primary framework for artwork analysis limits discourse.
But a few annoying exhibition wall texts and press releases does not an argument make. There’s no evidence to show that the framework of “how personhood is expressed today” obstructs anything else when it comes to a show like being.
So, I’d like to inject blackness into this discourse around post-humanism in art as both a limit and a possibility and look at some instances in which blackness rears its head in contemporary art and slips with the humanistic aims of post-multiculturalism art discourse. But blackness doesn’t offer us a post-humanism that looks like vitalist, new materialist, osthuman future visions Blackness’ intimacy with death–social and biological through the constant threat of gratuitous violence– gives us something else. A posthumanism with death running through it.
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Humanism is a broad term with a number of historical instantiations with their own specific flavors. Today, it is my understanding that we’re working with a definition of humanism as a long-upheld western ideal, the human as a universal condition, with ‘Man’ at its center. This humanism descends from Enlightenment ideals–‘The Cartesian subject of the cogito, the Kantian “community of reasonable beings”, or, in more sociological terms, the subject as citizen, rights-holder, property-owner, and so on’. (Wolfe, 2010a, quoted by Braidotti in Post-human.’) Humanism is the ideology of the anthropocene, setting the human apart from nature and non-human actors (animals, plants, technology, and so on). Internally, within the homo sapien species, it is also a tool used to keep the hegemonic order of Western society (and its colonial outposts) by positing that there is such thing as a universal humanity and its criteria–though it sort of claims to be criteria-less–is a given subject’s proximity to ‘Man.’ This idea of ‘man’ emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, a secular and universal man to take the place of Judeo-Christian religious man.)
The constitution and maintenance of this man requires an ‘other’ through which to define itself; he needs a well-articulated negative space. Using the humanist toolkit, his subjectivity is marked out via “consciousness, universal rationality, and self-regulating ethical behavior,” and otherness is defined as his negative image. As those critical of humanism have argued, someone has to be the fall guy, branded as ‘other’ and reduced to less than human for any of this to sustain itself. Rosi Braidotti writes: “The dialectic of self and other, and the binary logic of identity and otherness [are]. . . “respectively the motor for and the cultural logic of universal Humanism.” These others are non-men, non-white, non-western, and/or less-able entities.
This universalizing framework succeeded in reproducing itself without much conflict for a few centuries, until around the 1960s when these ‘others’ succeeded in loudly and enduringly enough questioning its validity. Feminist thought, post-colonial studies, and poststructuralist thought contended, from a variety of angles, that this ‘Man’ upon which humanism hinged was not natural law, but historically produced and was fundamentally flawed–ethically, politically, and philosophically. ‘Man’ and the ‘human’ were prescriptive categories not descriptive ones–a prescription whose byproduct was violence. Further, these (new-ish) anti-humanist lines of thinking recalibrated posture toward ‘difference,’ such that it no longer meant ‘inferior.’
In her book “Post-Human,” Rosi Braidotti traces this historical movement in order to lay the groundwork for her argument toward a post-human approach to subjectivity. Through her discussion of the impetus for a critical posthumanism, it is apparent that part of her hope is to repair the reduction of certain subjects to less than human by exiting the human framework altogether.
I’d like to amend this approach to humanism and posthumanism (and Dr Shaviro’s talk and the conversation between Kevin and him began to get at this) and work through (a sort of pit stop) is this theoretical blank spot, gap, etc. in her account–as a stand-in for many prevailing accounts of humanist/posthumanist discourse-around otherness and the inhuman. Braidotti’s account of humanism exemplifies the larger trend in western European thought, however radical - collecting under one umbrella all forms of otherness when it comes to this task of forming the negative space amidst which Man as been constituted. In my view, this approach requires a minor but crucial amendment, which can be nicely summed up through Alexander Weheliye when he writes that: “In the context of the secular human, black subjects, along with indigenous populations, the colonized, the insane, the poor, the disabled, and so on serve as limit cases by which Man can demarcate himself as the universal human.”
Via Weheliye, my amendment is to note that while certainly all of these conditions serve as limit cases, blackness is absolutely necessary to count among them–at times Braidotti glosses over it, sweeping it into postcolonialism. While blackness is not the only limit case, it is one with notably global reach and permanent status. The sociopolitical situation of blackness globally has changed forms, opened up in some ways, tightened in others, but its logic remains the unthinkable violence of chattel slavery and everything that follows (afterlife of slavery, as Hartman calls it); further, in the context of American politics and visual culture, it is the limit case obsessively on our minds and tongues. In the west, blackness “designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot.” (Weheliye).
So this returns us to a question I noted earlier: Is blackness posthuman?
I think yes, basically. I know that there are some discomforts with the language of ‘post,’ which often seems to signal a completed project, or a moving beyond; but I think that if we can get past that hiccup, then theoretically, functionally, blackness and the posthuman have a relationship to one another worth exploring as we look for alternatives to a humanist approach to artworks.
how is blackness posthuman? Let me count the ways!
There’s an ongoing popular discourse in art, visual culture, and music around blackness and post humanism that primarily gets delivered through afrofuturist aesthetics–images of black cyborgs and aliens, the affinity between black people and technologies such as the turntable and a becoming-cyborg through melding with it in machine musical production. Afrofuturism imagines possible futures built on the outside-ness of blackness in the west, taking up the very real abductions, experiments, invasions that color black histories and building them into speculative fictions. These fictions are found throughout black cultural production–science fiction writing of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney. Funk, techno, and Hip-hop aesthetics.
But alongside this, there is a critical black post humanism that does not necessarily correlate to an afrofuturist aesthetic, though it does often intersect and cross-pollinate with it. “A specific tradition of black radical thought has long claimed the inhumanity—or we could say anti-humanism—of blackness as a fundamental and decisive feature, and philosophically part of blackness’ gift to the world.” This critical black posthumanism approaches blackness’ relationship to the human not as a situation of reduction –black people reduced, alongside other groups, to ‘sub-human’ status– but rather as always-already not-human, inhuman– as the bedrock that is part of the structure’s stability, but also outside of it. Or as Frank Wilderson says: “we give the nation coherence because we’re its underbelly.” This critical black posthumanism doesn’t necessarily call itself by such a name, but is found in black radical thought, post-colonial theory by theorists of the African diaspora, and most recently in a lot of writing that has become popularly known as afropessimism, by writers like Wilderson. His line of thinking, “posits a political ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way.” Unlike the human or even the sub-human, the inhuman slave has no recourse to ownership of self or the potential for self-determination that comes with being a subject as such. The slave is “the object to whom anything can be done.”
Of course, some will argue that since slavery is over, how could this relation–the constitutive divide between slave and human–persist? Emancipation should have rendered black people fully human in the eyes of the state, and only more progress has been made since. It’s here that Hartman’s phrase the “afterlife of slavery” is of use; Hartman argues that while, yes, slavery as a legal and economic system is technically over, its machinations persist–though differently realized, the structures remain in place. For instance, an obvious and material example: the prison industrial complex’s fulfillment of the political and economic goals of chattel slavery.
Another name for this phenomenon, coined by Orlando Patterson, is “social death.” Once easily identifiable in the position of the slave, in contemporary times social death persists as a state of “materially living as a sentient object but without a stable or guaranteed social subjectivity.” In addition to the inability to claim ownership over the self–and as we’ll see one’s image as well–the socially dead exist in but are not of civil society. For Patterson, the socially dead are “ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside.” It should be acknowledged that this concept has its correlates beyond the situation of blackness–can connect it to Agamben’s “bare life,” for instance. In, an American context, however, the black is quite clearly this permanent enemy.
So, in a sort of infinity loop: blackness is posthuman because it is socially dead and (post) humanism is possible and necessary because of social death?
Instead, we can look at moments were a humanist framework–a humanist ethic?–sputters and fails us, to try to sort through its limits. And this returns us to the earlier hooplah about social death and blackness and post humanism. There have been a handful of controversies in the contemporary art world in the last year or two over artworks that try to take up anti-blackness and violence as their subject; only to be met with rage and confusion from many (including myself!) I’ve spent a lot of time trying to pick through these events and the artworks at their center–namely: Dana Schutz’s Emmet Till painting, Henry Taylor’s Philando Castile painting, and Luke Willis Thompson’s Diamond Reynolds video portrait. I want to understand why everyone freaked out, on either side of things, and why things still feel unresolved. Anyway, this long winded description of the interplay between humanism, posthumanism, and blackness gets me to this: In these moments, socially dead blackness grinds to a halt the machinations of an art world trained only in humanist discourse. Humanism will always fail the Thing that is and the things that center the scandal of the black body.
Anyway, the first of these moments is the infamous Dana Schutz controversy For those unfamiliar, Schutz painting depicted Emmett Till’s corpse–a black child lynched in Mississipi in 1955–based on the famous and widely circulated photograph of his body at his funeral. Painted in Schutz’s signature style, the work, titled Open Casket, further mutilated his already mutilated-beyond-recognition corpse. Chaos ensued in the art world. On one side of it: In an open letter, artist Hannah Black called for the destruction of the painting, or at the very least its removal from circulation. Her request was met with accusations of iconoclasm and censorship. Coco Fusco fired back with a long essay on hyperallergic about the dangers of censorship; black cultural nationalism, the long history of white artists making anti-racist art, and validity of abstraction. Importantly, she returns again and again to the framework of “cultural property,” and the misguidedness of Black’s argument that Till’s image is not Schutz’s to use. Many other quick draw hot takes targeted this point; wasn’t Till’s corpse an “archetypal representation of American racism?” useful for “raising awareness”?
This notion of property and image rights fundamentally misses the point. While Hannah did issue a plea for recognition, it is my view that her letter’s real impact is that it models–along with its responses–exactly the dynamics of black life lived in social death that Wilderson and others have discussed. The Schutz controversy made clear that black people still cannot lay serious claim to our selves or our own images. The recirculation of the trauma of anti-black violence is deemed acceptable for the greater good. As Jared Sexton reflected following the controversy, “What is taken to be black is taken for granted, openly available to all.”20 Perhaps not always immediately available as raw, manual labor, black people and blackness continue to embody a speculative and semiotic value thirsted after by a white marketplace. Fusco’s article even draws comparison to the historical trope of depicting the suffering of “Christian martyrs [which] informs much representation of radicalized oppression.” Her argument makes a strange equivalency between belief and the mere accident of being born a certain color.
In the same exhibition, black American painter Henry Taylor presented a painting of a more recent instance of anti-black violence: the July 2016 murder of Minnesota man Philando Castile at a routine traffic stop. In Taylor’s painting–also based on source material captured by a camera–Castile lies unnaturally splayed across the drivers’ seat of his sedan. Taylor’s blocked out style perhaps less depicts than it gestures toward to live-streamed Facebook video posted by Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, who sat in the passenger seat.
Taylor’s painting was invoked throughout Schutz-gate as a sort of bad-faith counterpoint, meant to problematize Black’s focus on Schutz and bolster accusations of an unreasonable interest in cultural property. Detractors asked: Is TAYLOR allowed to represent the horrific violence of police brutality? Are ONLY black people meant to visualize these events? Many plead the fifth, saying that no comment should be made on Taylor’s choice, since he himself is black. Others argued that if Schutz must be taken to task then should Taylor–that the violence lay in the re-representation of the event, not in the image itself. Taylor’s most direct statement on the matter, in an interview in Cultured Magazine, convey that he is preoccupied with anti-black violence on an ongoing basis to the degree of mundaneity. Taylor: “every once in awhile I can’t help but react or respond sometimes. It’s not always emotional. But then you just play the video and it’s like, ‘Wow. Wow. Wow.’”
These paintings together, and the controversy surrounding them, displays an instance where the humanistic framework begins to short circuit. Let’s review:
2) The Humanistic anti-humanist diversity and difference framework loses purchase are as well, unable to totally incorporate these images of the black body under (more than) duress into its empathy and understanding matrix.
Schutz can only justify it by drawing a false equivalency between herself and Till’s mother, (Heidegger) and Taylor only through harking back to European history painting–already the inheritor of Europe’s humanist ideals.
3) Both try to use painting, the re-mediation of photography, to say “please care about this.” Failure of photography when it comes to blackness to repair violences.
Which brings me to another artwork , Luke Willis Thompson’s AutoPortrait (2017), a video portrait of Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of Philando Castile and videographer of the famous clip of his murder. The artist calls it a “a ‘sister image’ to the image of death” found in the original clip and Reynolds’ media presence around that time. Controversy arose as it became public knowledge–due to the work’s inclusion in the Turner Prize nominee exhibition–that the artist, Luke Willis Thompson, was a white new Zealander. Seemingly, the work was an attempt toward a reparative act, to work against the image of violence that circulated so far and wide, to give her ‘dignity.’ But there is of course the elephant in the room : a nonblack artist employing the image of a black woman in order to broadcast affect and comment on an experience not his on. It reeked of a sort of 1970s visual politic, offering “positive images” to combat the negative and stereotypical ones. But again, at the base of all this: what right did he have?
I read this article about the Turner Prize show, and it had the most concise criticism of the work. I honestly can’t sum it up any better so I’ll just quote it. Erika Balsom wrote, for Frieze Magazine:
“The heated controversy around these works has focused on the artist’s identity: what right does a New Zealander of white European and Fijian ancestry have to engage with this material, to profit from black suffering? There are, however, other ways of putting pressure on the artist’s decisions, found within the works themselves, in their misguided apprehension of the previously existing images they depend upon. autoportrait – a depiction of Diamond Reynolds, who in July 2016 livestreamed the police killing of her partner Philando Castile on Facebook – possesses two such points of reference. First, there is the format of the screen test. Immobilizing and objectifying, it is no template for filmic empathy. Reynolds is literally dispossessed of her voice, as Thompson mimics Warhol, an artist preoccupied with surfaces and commodities. Second, autoportrait implies that precious 35mm film is required to rescue Reynolds from the degradation and exploitation of digital image circulation, forgetting that online platforms have equally served to galvanize activism – and that Reynolds herself is one of their canniest users. She may have participated in the making of the film, but she does not need Thompson to restore her dignity.”
Balsom’s take on the work reminds me of a 1978 video by Los Angeles-based artist Ulysses Jenkins. In the work, Jenkins appears on a set accompanied by a stack of televisions, his face obscured by a plastic mask and sunglasses, neck wrapped in American-flag-print scarf, and sporting an Adidas t-shirt underneath a bathrobe, arranged such that only the “ID” of Adidas is visible. The video cuts between this scene and examples of blackface and racist stereotyping from American films and TV. Jenkins repeats a mantra as he settles into a wheelchair and wheels himself toward center stage: “You’re just a mass of images you’ve gotten to know / from years and years of TV shows. / The hurting thing; the hidden pain / was written and bitten into your veins / I don’t and I won’t relate / and I think for some it’s too late!”
While I agree with Balsom’s discussion of Autoportrait (2017), we must be careful not to too aggressively valorize Reynolds’ social media use, and instead allow for the complexity of Reynolds’ existence as a “mass of images”–here largely, images laced with trauma and fear–that have been ventriloquized for the greater social good, much like the images she captured of Philando, and like the photograph of Till’s corpse. It is not so much that Thompson’s portrait does not restore dignity to her–or that he should not have tried–but that it cannot.
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