The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.
—Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
Metaphysics—the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason. Which does not go uncontested.
—Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology”
My chosen epigraphs introduce, each in their own way, a defining feature of the enfleshed human subject that irreducibly distinguishes it from the conative or affective quality that new materialism would ascribe to materiality.Footnote 1 In the first, astonishing sentence of Moten’s In the Break, a text informed by but not necessarily aligned with new materialism, the defining feature of “objects” is that they resist. The evasive, passive-voice construction of Derrida’s “Which does not go uncontested” does and does not conceal an entity—a subject easily mistaken for an object—that contests a regime that would erase it. Resistance, contestation—in short, the agency of a subject that is also (under Western eyes) an object, both human and thing. Thus a liminal agency, which I insist on still calling agency.
This essay begins by asking whether the new materialism, as currently constituted, can say anything useful about race, given that the most widely read texts recognized as belonging to this emerging field pointedly do not. Put another way, this essay examines possibilities for the reading of the raced enfleshed human subject in and beyond the parameters of the new materialism.
The first section following this introduction locates the raced enfleshed subject as a latent (if not actively suppressed) entity in existing new materialist work. It focuses in particular on a representative example from Jane Bennett’s recent and celebrated Vibrant Matter, a narrated assemblage of material objects under the gaze of (as we shall see) a particular kind of subject. I confess that I will take certain liberties with Bennett’s “contingent tableau,” by presenting a series of counterfactual possibilities that her example either does not foresee or chooses not to pursue.
The essay’s latter half turns to questions of possibility, variations on what Fred Moten has called “black optimism”;Footnote 2 it asks not how a more benevolent (White) reading can exhume the raced enfleshed subject, but whether and to what extent we may read it exhuming or escaping or exceeding itself, with or without the benefit of a cynically bestowed and spurious membership in what Sylvia Wynter has called “the genre of the human.”Footnote 3 Within this discussion of possibilities for “black optimism” or “black operations” lies the question of whether a much older, precluded or occluded, voice is already in a sense speaking through the so-called materialist turn, challenging it as a way of further contesting its own (attempted, partial, failed) erasure from the metaphysical founding scene of the liberal humanist subject that informs the material turn.
Before proceeding to the so-called material turn and the particular, yet universalized subject that informs it, I should recognize in advance the impertinence of this initial question, specifically its expectation that a given intellectual project should or must address race at all. Why in fact should we expect all theoretical methods to address all research issues? Put another way: Should not the scholar’s means of inquiry be called forth and shaped by the object of that inquiry?
I present this opening question in advance of proceeding outside of what we might call the “dialectics of permission,” the unspoken directive (perhaps inherited, like so many other imperatives, from phenomenology, an inherited hermeneutics of reading) that we question a given text or discourse on its own terms rather than impose our own demands on it.Footnote 4 And yet, if the difference between theory and methodology (at least in the humanities) is at best strategic rather than substantive, it makes sense to ask some version of the question “Does theory A have anything useful to say about question B?” Because if the answer turns out to be “no” or “not much” or “maybe a little,” that in itself may provide the ground for future inquiry.
The new materialism’s implicit aspirations to a unified theory (particularly in its nonhuman iteration) make its apparent reluctance to engage race and ethnicity especially problematic. Perhaps the most explicit such aspirational statement appears in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, the editors of which stake their claim from the opening page:
A new metaphysics is not restricted to a here and now, nor does it merely project an image of the future for us. It announces what we may call a “new tradition,” which simultaneously gives us a past, a present, and a future. Thus, a new metaphysics does not add something to thought (a series of ideas that wasn’t there, that was left out by others). It rather traverses and thereby rewrites thinking as a whole, leaving nothing untouched, redirecting every possible idea according to its new sense of orientation.
“New materialism” or “neo-materialism” is such a new metaphysics.Footnote 5
Setting aside the problem of the very possibility of a “new metaphysics,” it is fair to ask whether this “new” metaphysics will be any better at recognizing, in the Hegelian sense [Anerkennen], its others than the one that has defined and governed Western thought for the entirety of its history.Footnote 6 Because hopefully, we can agree that to view all human bodies as more or less elaborately self-deluded materiality—as Rosi Braidotti puts it: “A sack of meat activated by electric waves of desire, a text written by the unfolding of genetic encoding”—while occluding that a great many of said “sacks of meat” have been historically and continue to be marginalized, disempowered, disemboweled, beaten, tortured, raped, murdered—in a word, dehumanized—is to enact a specific kind of whitewashing violence.Footnote 7 Any claim we make about how humans should be defined—what in fact constitutes the human—must be (arguably already is) kairotically bound. It is seemingly kairos—the subject’s embeddedness in time, in a particular time, and its resilience in prevailing despite the times—that Braidotti invokes two sentences later in the same essay: “A mobile entity, an enfleshed sort of memory that repeats and is capable of lasting through sets of discontinuous variations, while remaining faithful to itself.”Footnote 8
This enfleshment or embeddedness in the material, or as Braidotti describes it elsewhere, “the concrete yet complex materiality of bodies immersed in social relations of power,” does not strike me as a necessarily epistemic departure from previous iterations of the subject in poststructuralism, postmodernism, and so on.Footnote 9 The idea of enfleshment certainly borrows productively from theories of biopolitics first established by Foucault, and further refined in Agamben’s groundbreaking (if for some, problematic) Homo Sacer trilogy.Footnote 10 That new materialist scholars seek to challenge, augment, even realign these earlier iterations may yet prove a productive friction, a spark to dislodge humanism from the maw of the liberal humanist subject.
And yet, the rapid and rising tide of interest in certain kinds of nonhumanism, whether in projects such as new materialism, or more broadly and viciously circulated in political spaces outside the academy—in short, a radically proscribed notion of who and what qualifies as “human”—particularly in the face of movements such as Black Lives Matter, and intellectual formations such as global south studies—must be accounted for.
By way of starting to consider how current new materialist practices elide such questions—and in the process, preclude or occlude the presence of the raced enfleshed subject—we turn to an example from what has become a foundational text of the new materialism: Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.Footnote 11 A more integral reading of Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, and beyond that the question of its representative status in relation to a larger body new materialist work, lies beyond the scope of this essay. We can, however, examine the book’s thesis as it appears in the first chapter and is put to work in key examples later on, in order to locate glimpses of the unrecognized, but resistant and contesting human actant that lurks within it—an against-the-grain reading that would exhume, if not necessarily liberate, those enfleshed (entrapped?) voices. If, as Alexander Weheliye asserts, “the human emerges as a central object of knowledge” in Black studies—as it assumedly would also be in postcolonial or global South studies—it follows that this difference would inform, and irreducibly compromise, the liberal humanist subject that Bennett seems to take for granted.Footnote 12
By way of starting to read this dialectically both “central” and occluded, erased yet legible raced human subject, let us examine an especially salient example from the gallery of assemblages that Bennett curates in Vibrant Matter, one that raises uncomfortable questions about the erased or overwritten presence of the raced enfleshed subject while offering possibilities for recovering/reinscribing it.
Chapter 1 of Vibrant Matter (“The Force of Things”) offers a collection of seemingly random objects—some discarded items “in the grate over a storm drain,” an anthropomorphized stick figure from a Kafka story, a glass vial containing gunpowder residue—out of which Bennett inductively constructs a unifying narrative of “powerful, material assemblages with resistant force” under the defining banner of “Thing-Power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.”Footnote 13 For present purposes we will limit our counter-reading of these objects to the first of her assemblages:
On a sunny Tuesday morning on 4 June in the grate over the storm drain to the Chesapeake Bay in front of Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore, there was:
one large men’s black plastic work glove
one dense mat of oak pollen
one unblemished dead rat
one white plastic bottle cap
one smooth stick of woodFootnote 14
Bennett’s glimpsing of these items triggers a meditation on their perceptual movement “between debris and thing—between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity … and, on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings.”Footnote 15 In Bennett’s reading, the latter moment reveals the random grouping as an assemblage radiating “thing-power”; what enters consciousness as “affect” (she is “repelled” by the rat, “dismayed” by the litter) transforms in the viewer’s consciousness into “something else: a nameless awareness of the impossible singularity of that rat, that configuration of pollen, that otherwise utterly banal, mass-produced plastic water cap.”Footnote 16 Through this perceptual process of assemblaging (assembling-assemblages), the items come to constitute “a contingent tableau” in tandem—shall we say in dialogue—“with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me.”Footnote 17 This “tableau”—which now encompasses not only the items but, indispensably, the viewer whose gaze has so assembled them—elevates to the status of exemplar of “a culture of things irreducible to the culture of objects.”Footnote 18 What were random, discarded objects become, under the subject’s gaze, “vibratory … live presence … live wire.”Footnote 19
We could proceed to counter-read Bennett’s assemblage any number of ways, the easiest and least useful (if momentarily satisfying) of which might be to simply say that the assemblage’s “vibratory” signification is an obvious product of the viewer’s consciousness that hails [interpellates] them as an assemblage. Put another way, what Bennett suggests here, and Karen Barad elsewhere calls “the entanglement of matter and meaning,” elides how consciousness makes meaning out of matter.Footnote 20 But of course retreating into a nature-culture binary is not the point here. Rather, our exercise should be to more closely examine the actants in this subject/matter assemblage, perhaps expand it to encompass the larger suburban tableau in which it sits. In the spirit of experimentation, we might go as far as to alter one or another of the assemblage’s constituent variables to see whether doing so yields a glimpse of the kind of liminal enfleshed subject-thing I have been positing.
One curious element of Bennett’s assembled tableau is its strategic specificity. Part of what gives it its “vibratory” power is the seeming particularity of the interaction among objects, viewer, and location. The tableau emerges in a seemingly precise setting: a sunny weekday, summer, a storm drain, a storefront, a street, a city. But what of the larger cityscape in which viewer and viewed converge? A cursory Google search of “Cold Spring Lane + Baltimore” reveals a major road that runs East–West across the city, well north of downtown, intersecting and demarcating a number of neighborhoods along the way. Unless one is a native of Baltimore or otherwise familiar with it, one might well ask: Is this the kind of neighborhood where one typically finds such debris collected over storm drains? How common is it, for this particular neighborhood, to glimpse a dead rat in the street? Is part of what makes the rat “repelling” just its sheer novelty, or does the viewer generally find such objects offensive? We could also make certain assumptions regarding said viewer in the specific context of her location; we might assume, for example, that this is a neighborhood that a well-educated, white professional woman such as Professor Bennett feels perfectly comfortable visiting, if not actually inhabiting. My point is that reading a given assemblage in isolation from its larger context, in this case a suburb of a major Northeastern city from which we might glean more specific data—say, regarding crime rates or racial/ethnic demographics, or median household income—brackets the ways in which we can make meaning out of it. In Bennett’s narration, the seemingly specific assemblage is carefully curated in a way that disconnects it from larger systems of wealth/poverty, safety/danger, whiteness/blackness—in short, systems of power—that would open it up to alternate gazes, alternate humanities. How might, for example, a Pakistani deliveryman, or an African American woman who might work at Sam’s Bagels, feel (for this is also a matter of affect) about seeing the same items in the street—or about being in that neighborhood at all? How would, to extract just one item from Bennett’s tableau, that same dead rat signify under a gaze differently situated by race, gender, socioeconomic status—how “vibratory” it would be under an-Other gaze? In Bennett’s reading, we have no way of knowing because the abstractness of the narrative setting allows her to naturalize a very particular (white, academic, middle- or upper-middle-class) gaze and present it as generic—and thus universal. A more expansive, inclusive narrative setting of the same assemblage, one more attuned to the larger systems of power in which both humans and material objects circulate, would open a space from which an Other kind of enfleshed human—unseen in Bennett’s account but certainly more than visible all over Baltimore—could emerge from object-thingness and be seen in its own vibrant subjectivity. More importantly, this approach would open up the possibility of hearing the voice—seeing through the eyes of—a seeing but unseen subject-thing that could resist, could contest, the universality of a dominant reading with its own.
As the aforementioned examples suggest, we could carry this experiment a bit further by changing the identity of the viewer who comes across Bennett’s assemblage; we could simply imagine the same assemblage in a different part of Baltimore, for example among the blighted old row houses along North Bradford Street (many in the process of being torn down by the city) not far from the Johns Hopkins Hospital. We will return to North Bradford Street shortly; but for now, let us instead slightly modify Bennett’s assemblage, curating a different “tableau” that might just as randomly fall together over a storm drain somewhere in Baltimore. (I will add italics to indicate the changed terms.) Let us say we have:
two large men’s black plastic work gloves
one dense mat of waterlogged newspaper
one partly-eaten hamburger
one white plastic bottle cap
three spent shotgun shells
What now? Here again, much depends on the gaze, more specifically on the relation between viewer and the assemblage produced in and through consciousness. Would a viewer fitting Bennett’s general profile be equally “repelled” by the half-eaten burger or “dismayed” by the sight of shotgun shells? Alternately, would these objects suggest a different imagined relation between viewer and environment—one perhaps hinting at waste or affluence (someone who could casually throw away food) or danger (was someone shot here last night)? How would this alternative tableau “shimmer and spark” under an-Other gaze—that of someone whose first thought might be to take those gloves home or who would be hungry enough to pick up the burger? Someone for whom the sight of spent shotgun shells is so regular as to not merit a second glance?
But of course, we do not need to invent hypothetical assemblages in order to consider materiality in its relation to an-Other enfleshed human gaze. Baltimore offers innumerable such interactions, in every imaginable combination, every day. Here is one such scene, again from the 900 block of North Bradford Street, inside an abandoned row house in the process of being torn down:
“Watch yourself!” cried Donald Fonce, 45, whose aunt lived a few yards away on Eager Street, as he dropped a window sash from what used to be [an] upstairs window. Down came the mattress that a squatter had moved in … On the floor was a can of mixed vegetables, pried open with a knife.
Bernadette Buckson, 53, was tearing down the plasterboard in the tiny bathroom. Once, pulling down the ceiling in another teardown, $200 in cash floated past her head.
“Somebody hid that a long time ago,” Buckson said.Footnote 21
Taken out of the context of the Washington Post article from which I draw it, this assemblage—window sash, abandoned mattress and can of vegetables, a stash of money hidden above a ceiling board—does not by itself introduce race into the equation. What does move us in that direction is partly the setting—a row of abandoned and condemned houses being torn down—and partly their location within the city—a blighted neighborhood within walking distance of a more affluent part of town. The article identifies one man as an African American: a nearby resident who returned from a prison term in the 1970s to discover that “all the white folks were gone.”Footnote 22 This anecdote informs a larger description of a once racially mixed neighborhood that had succumbed to “the white flight that would open the street to African-Americans and the drug wars that would drive many of them away” (Hendrix). In short, the Post article provides what Bennett’s assemblage context does not: a larger spatial framing that accounts for not only a history of race, but an acknowledgment of the perceptual lived experience of enfleshed human subjects specifically in terms of race and class.
Read in this fuller context, what gives the sash-mattress-can-cash assemblage a “vibratory … live presence” is largely the presence of raced (Black and White) subjects viewing them and being viewed in turn by the article’s reader. Readers thus participate in a metaperceptual process of recognizing assembled materiality, including human actants, as in Bennett’s terms “a contingent tableau” in which items signify and interact “with each other, with the street,” but also and especially with the raced human subjects who discover them.Footnote 23 It is thus these individual raced human subjects that the article’s “tableau” recognizes as part of “a culture of things irreducible to the culture of objects.”Footnote 24 They too vibrate, and move in and away, and struggle to remain, and contest their erasure from the block and from history.
If time and space allowed, we could just as easily generate counter-readings of any of the other narrativized assemblages in Vibrant Matter, from the electrical power-grid that failed in 2003, to the efficacy of various foods, to Prometheus’s “adamantine chains.”Footnote 25 (What would such an assemblage mean, I am tempted to ask, to the chain-gang worker, to the slave?) Each case would underline the same point: that assuming even implicitly the universality of the viewing subject preempts the existence of other, less ideally positioned subjects whose gazes would reveal a constellation of equally relevant materialities—and the meanings of those materialities—unavailable to a generic Western (White) humanist subject. Weheliye correctly admonishes us to “remain cautious … about the complete disavowal of subjectivity in theoretical discourse, because within the context of the Anglo-American academy more often than not an insistence on transcending limited notions of the subject or identity leads to the neglect of race as a critical category.”Footnote 26 The new materialism’s general “neglect of race” has resulted, as in Bennett’s case, in preemptive, bracketed readings that themselves take their place among larger racializing assemblages that, naturalized as materiality, define enfleshed subjects along a hierarchical human spectrum (human, more or less human, nonhuman).
So what could the new materialism have to say about race? Is it enough for us to study non- or posthumanism in terms of digitality and automation given how machinic computing and decision-making continue to infiltrate everyday life in unprecedented ways? Or could we also productively include these admittedly urgent matters within a larger inquiry into the enfleshed body as a raced subject? We could easily, for example, envision the uptake and circulation of Black Lives Matter in terms of forces of excess that (im)materially overwhelm conventional political discourse and media cycles in disruptive and productive ways, via nonhuman assemblages informed by digital networks (social media, software/hardware) alongside human assemblages (labor, activist networks, political parties, and so on). And studies, from articles to book-length monographs, are starting to emerge that address the possible intersections of materialism and race to varying, if localized, degrees.Footnote 27
Whether such scattered texts represent incremental movement toward a larger examination of race and materiality or are merely outliers, the new materialism’s relative lack of engagement with race remains. Much of this problem is methodological, as a field that on the one hand explicitly rejects philosophical dualisms, yet also defines itself as “postconstructivist,” thus setting itself in opposition to “the linguistic turn and social constructionist frameworks in the critical interrogation of their limitations engendered by the prominence given to language, culture, and representation”—in short, as part of a dualism.Footnote 28 New materialism thus engages a rival Western philosophy, however identified (deconstruction, postmodernism, or some other formulation) in critique of its socially or linguistically bound constructions of the subject, the Other, the world, et al., without engaging—or arguably even seeing—its already internalized, naturalized, long-suppressed Other. (We may call this Other by any of a string of names in a genealogy: animism, idealism, Spirit, the Sublime, or some other Other.) Thus we arrive at the other dualism that unravels new materialist claims to “a monist perspective, devoid of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities (and sciences) until today.”Footnote 29
Simply put, the new materialism contains and belies its own constructivist-essentialist impasse; it aspires to mediate between two terms with which it remains entangled.
As continental philosophy has been able to demonstrate since at least as far back as Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego, Western ontology has always harbored within it that which it posits outside of itself; we need not look past the terms in the aforementioned parenthesis, which Sartre elegantly summarizes under the term “transcendental signified,” an Other that Western philosophy ceaselessly points toward without ever definitively knowing it (because, on its own metaphysical terms, it can’t). What presents itself as a unifying or “monist perspective” cannot but dialectically enfold matter with meaning—thus the center-for-center succession of terms such as God, Spirit, Sublime, transcendental signified, and so on, all of which, theoretically speaking, embody the same thing and nothing at all. (Or as John Lennon once put it, “Trying to shovel smoke with a pitchfork in the wind.”Footnote 30 ) Read in this context, the material and somatic realities that new materialism aspires to reveal will only generate another metaphor—“materiality”—as the latest in that line of center-for-center substitutions. Thus the nature-culture dualism that new materialism would deconstruct is itself the product of intra- rather than interaction: an intra-Western dialogue (and thus really, culturally speaking, a monologue), a masturbatory f(r)iction that only collaterally, instrumentally rubs up against a real Other, even then still mistaking it for a thing. Reclaiming “the primacy of matter”—another metaphor, and an old one at that—does not at all solve, or even really address, this problem.Footnote 31 As such, this new materialism seems to bear a suspiciously dialectical relation to an older materialism, one that might have forewarned its descendants to be wary of the negation (or in the old materialist parlance, the antithesis) that always already lies latent within it:
But a mode of production is not a “total system” in that forbidding sense; it includes a variety of counterforces and new tendencies within itself, of “residual” as well as “emergent” forces, which it must attempt to manage or control … Were those heterogeneous forces not endowed with an effectivity of their own, the hegemonic project would be unnecessary. Thus, differences are presupposed by the model, something that would be sharply distinguished from another feature which complicates this one, namely, that capitalism also produces differences or differentiation as a function of its own internal logic.Footnote 32
Substitute “discourse” or “methodology” for “mode of production,” “monism” for “total system,” and “new materialism” for “capitalism,” and the dialectical materialist’s admonition could not be clearer: Meet the new materialism. Not precisely the same as the old materialism, but certainly another turn on the dialectical wheel. If this be friction, it is seemingly less productive than reproductive of its own (echoed) primacy. And yet despite itself, a certain against-the-grain reading of new materialism, such as I have been attempting here, cannot help but suggest its own immanent counterforce or “heterogeneous” force “with an effectivity of [its] own,” a difference or differentiation that speaks from within its own materialist—that is to say, anti-animist—project.
New materialism emphasizes narrative accounts of agentic thrust, self-organizing nature, formative impetus, and so on, narratives in which matter is a coequal actant in the production of social environments, and even human life and lived experience. It crafts its narrative via the sleight of hand of terms such as agentic, processual, and self-organizing, which then become narrativized into the status of an active force (actant or impetus).
We may think here of agentic forces that are, arguably, self-organizing and appear to have formative impetus, even agentic thrust—the last a term that borders on but dares not call itself … agency. Here’s one: a hurricane. (They even get named.) Here are two more: a tornado and a tsunami. How does new material thought distinguish between these natural phenomena and other, manmade but potentially just as destructive, economic assemblages that paradoxically enjoy the status of legal persons? Corporations are people (my friend); they enjoy a legal identity separate from the human individuals who constitute them. Corporations can enter into contracts, own property, sue, and be sued. As a legal person, the corporation’s money is its speech, and it has the constitutional right to freedom of expression (e.g., making political contributions, to either individuals or, as is increasingly the case, other legal persons known as political parties or Political Action Committees [PACs]).
More importantly: Is it not a short jump from here to the question of whether and to what extent such thinking always already contaminates colonial-racist ideologies, which have historically posed as materially “real,” naturalizing race while disguising their own self-constructedness?
And so what can we say defines this human force—we will be careful not to refer to its “nature” or “essence”—which I will persist in calling agency, this force that animates the enfleshed materiality that persists within new materialist thought? Where can we locate it, active yet largely unheeded, within new materialist writings? We might begin with the terms that thinkers such as Jane Bennett use to describe matter, the same matter that it privileges over constructivist ontologies of the human and its (nonhuman) others. In the preface to Vibrant Matter—a book in which the word race does not appear at all—Bennett defines her project as calling “for the pursuit of several tasks simultaneously”:
(1) to paint a positive ontology of vibrant matter, which stretches received concepts of agency, action and freedom sometimes to the breaking point; (2) to dissipate the onto-theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination, and organic/inorganic using arguments and other rhetorical means to induce in human bodies an aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality; and (3) to sketch a style of political analysis that can better account for the contributions of nonhuman actants.Footnote 33
If in this passage we replace the italicized text, such as “matter,” “material,” and “nonhuman” with a different set of signifiers, such as, say, “blackness” or “brown” or “savage”—in short, with any of a wide range of terms indicating a raced Other—we might applaud it for its reinscription of heretofore marginalized subaltern subjects into the realm of legible humanity. What this little exercise reveals is the slippage between “nonhuman” material and other human “objects,” via the sleight of hand of terms such as Latour’s actant—which is pointedly not an agent (“Latour strategically elides what is commonly taken as distinctive or even unique about humans.”Footnote 34 And that is intentionality—agency.) In eliding this slippage between the material “nonhuman” and the nonhuman-as-thing, Bennett—and she is hardly alone in this—bypasses the unfinished work of acknowledging the agency of so many human beings that Western metaphysics has historically ignored, or rather reinscribed, as “nonhuman”—as “thing.”Footnote 35
To further the paradox of the furtive, insistent human Other lurking in the margins of Bennett’s text, the “formula” that she invokes on the following page, Deleuze’s maxim “ontologically one, formally diverse”Footnote 36 applies just as well—perhaps even more forcefully—to the unrecognized human Other as actant, who acts coherently and efficaciously under the dismissive gaze of the White Western subject, unseen and unregarded. Thus emerges the unresolved tension that, for a reader wishing to apply Bennett’s theory of “vibrant matter” to race and raced human subjects, permeates the entirety of a book that invokes the centrality of affect, but only as “impersonal affect or material vibrancy”—a theory of affect that engages nonhuman and “ontologically diverse actants” (e.g., commodities, natural forces, consumer products) but elides the unfinished business of embracing all of humanity as affect’s animating force.Footnote 37 We can perhaps read this most clearly in Bennett’s championing of anthropomorphism as a counter to “the narcissism of humans in charge of the world.”Footnote 38
The problem, of course, is that only some humans are—have ever been—“in charge of the world.”
One immediate consequence of taking “humans in charge of the world” as the subject-to-be-decentered is that this formulation necessarily posits the rest of humanity—the not-quite-so-human-as-to-be-in-charge-of-the-world—toward, if not into, a position analogous with Bennett’s “vibrant matter.” The attempted erasure of race from the new materialist subject ends up merely displacing the raced enfleshed subject, which becomes paradoxically legible via the mystifications of “vibrant” (agentic, processual, self-organizing) matter. (At least we get to be “vibrant”; as unsults go, one could do worse.) But methodologically speaking, it could do no other; as Weheliye succinctly explains, any “discourse that largely occludes race as a critical category of analysis … cannot provide the methodological instruments for diagnosing the tight bonds between humanity and racializing assemblages in the modern era.”Footnote 39
Weheliye’s immediate referents are “bare life and biopolitics,” which inform yet are not identical with Bennett’s new materialist readings. But his larger point more than applies here: a universalizing theory that does not account for race within itself willy-nilly cannot self-diagnose the racism that may have already contaminated it. Such a theory simply cannot explain why it does not itself function as a “racializing assemblage” in its positing of a raceless liberal humanist subject confronting “vibrant matter.”
One of the core aims of Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus is in fact to “disarticulate the modern human (Man) from its twin: racializing assemblages.”Footnote 40 Weheliye’s first step toward that end is a “heuristic model” of the human, one that substitutes “the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject” as “an ontological fait accompli”—which I argue is Bennett’s implied subject, and the one that informs most new materialist thought—with humanity as “imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain.”Footnote 41 Thus the submerged, subaltern subject unread as subject, and mistaken for “vibrant matter,” in Bennett and much other new materialist work reveals itself as an active, resistant, contesting agent of its own will. It is the liminal subject-not-subject that, in Moten’s and Derrida’s respective formulations, resists and contests historical and ongoing refusals or failures to recognize it as something more than flesh, or actant, or signifying monkey.
New materialism’s submerged, other “object of knowledge” would thus emerge as the enfleshed body of color, which in Bennett’s text occupies “liminal spaces … simultaneously ensconced within and outside of” the raceless, universalized liberal humanist subject.Footnote 42 Weheliye’s most significant contribution in Habeas Viscus is in fact the opening of possibility for a new materialism that accounts for enfleshed subjects as always already defined by “racialized assemblages”—a new new materialism that, as his work amply demonstrates, would necessarily look very different from what we see today. One dramatic departure available to pursue in such a project would be a radically more expansive reading of affect—in Sylvia Wynter’s terms, how the liminal subject-as-thing “feels” its race as part of its being-in-the-world. Reading race in terms of affect holds the potential of immeasurably expanding the range of new materialist readings of human relations to materiality—particularly to the materiality that the human necessarily inhabits. Reading race as affect would preempt the white subject’s tendency to “see” itself through its lived experience as standing “beyond” race in its formulations of the human, leading it to occlude race en route to assuming a universal human response to materiality.
The larger objective here, as in Weheliye’s work, is ultimately to replace “man” with a more expansive, inclusive vision of the human condition. Fred Moten trenchantly frames this possibility for the reading of the subject-thing that acts, and enacts its will, under the radar and beyond the reach of a Western dialectics of permission:
What if we bracket the movement from (erstwhile) subject to object in order to investigate more adequately the change from object to thing … What if the thing whose meaning or value has never been found finds things, founds things? What if the thing will have founded something against the very possibility of foundation and against all anti- or post-foundational impossibilities? What if the thing sustains itself in that absence or eclipse of meaning that withholds from the thing the horrific honorific of “object”? At the same time, what if the value of that absence or excess is given to us only in and by way of a kind of failure or inadequacy—or, perhaps more precisely, by way of a history of exclusion, serial expulsion, presence’s ongoing taking of leave—so that the non-attainment of meaning or ontology, of source or origin, is the only way to approach the thing in its informal (enformed/enforming, as opposed to formless), material totality? Perhaps this would be cause for black optimism or, at least, some black operations. Perhaps the thing, the black, is tantamount to another, fugitive, sublimity altogether. Some/thing escapes in or through the object’s vestibule; the object vibrates against its frame like a resonator, and troubled air gets out.Footnote 43
This lengthy passage presents a threefold approach for reading the enfleshed liminal subject-thing immersed in the world of objects (other subjects and/as “things”), which for the sake of brevity we can summarize as an entity that (1) despite not being granted a “found” value [Anerkennen], “finds things, founds things … against the very possibility of foundation”—which, in short, resists and contests its given status as “object” (thing); (2) is legible in the text of materiality only “by way of a history of exclusion, serial expulsion, presence’s ongoing taking of leave”—that is, only in terms of its absence as a subject, legible only as a spectral “actant” that inexplicably persists as a human agent against and despite the very “nonattainment of meaning or ontology” by which the text approaches it; and (3) in its drive to surpass its own unrecognized liminal positioning as subject-thing, comes to recognize itself—see itself—in terms of an Other “sublimity,” an Other humanity that exceeds and “escapes in or through the object’s vestibule,” leaving behind in the text that occludes it the (in a certain way) legible trace of its breath, the resonance of its materiality as “troubled air,” perhaps the scent of which its pursuer sniffs in the doomed effort to chase it down and again restore it to “ its place” as thing.
That this “troubled air” can and does escape is not, in the logic of Moten’s larger analogy, itself the object of “black optimism”—mere evasion of its own thing-ness is not enough. “The air of the thing that escapes enframing is what interests me,” Moten explains, “an often unattended movement that accompanies largely unthought positions and appositions.”Footnote 44 It is, in short, not the act of escaping but “the air of the thing” that escapes—that which vibrates, which breathes, in unseen and unexamined ways. It is the materialism of an unreckoned subjectivity-as-thing-that-resists.
Put another way: For Moten it is the very liminality that occludes the enfleshed raced subject within the universal text of “humanity” that enables the strategy by which we can read how the subject-thing eludes capture within that text, resisting—contesting—its entrapment/erasure within the text of “man” by the very gesture of exceeding/escaping that entrapment. It is texts such as Moten’s, alongside those of Weheliye, Sylvia Wynter, and others, that offer not yet a blueprint, but certainly a point of departure for reading future new materialist approaches to race.
None of the foregoing is to deny or ignore that cultural forms develop, as a sort of entropy, their own efficacy and trajectories independently of their human creators’ intentions. (The history of human ideologies would, in fact, yield no greater insight: systems don’t work entirely the way their originators intended, thus producing unforeseen effects.) But to read cultural forms, materially or any other way, requires at least the acknowledgment of a multiplicity of cultural subject positions and relations.
So, to return to my initial question: Does new materialism have anything useful to say about race? So far, not so much. But potentially—posed as a question of possible efficacy—yes, indeed it can. The question, as relevant today as when I first broached it in a very different form in a long-ago book, is not about choosing whether “to give voice to a thing-power” or “deny vitality to nonhuman bodies.”Footnote 45 Rather, it is to learn to hear—and not interrupt or bracket—the speaking but unheard voice of those subject-things already vibrantly inhabiting the material world.Footnote 46 We have a great deal of work to do toward that end, one applicable to arguably the majority of human beings on this planet. That work may well include, even require, a theoretical turn to the actancy of, say, an earthquake. Or a shoe. But surely that cannot be all.
