Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

"the body" was a term of critical fascination in lit studies, idk, 15-20 years ago?

heyo

https://granta.com/issues/granta-39-the-body-3/

xp to get rid of this nonsense about souls and bodies as vessels for something else

i think it's foucault's fault

There is a tradition within black America, that I quarrel with, that says: They can do things to our body, but they can’t really trap our minds.

This same dualism has historically been used to justify slavery by suggesting that the harm of slavery "only" happens to the body. From Seneca:

It is a mistake to think that slavery goes all the way down into a man. The better part of him remains outside it. The body belongs to the master and is subject to him, but the soul is autonomous, and is so free that it cannot be held by any prison....It is the body that luck has given over to the master; this he buys and sells; that interior part cannot be handed over as property.

Yeah but phenomenologically we don't experience ourselves as just bodies, even if we believe only our body is ultimately real, ya know? Also casting off the soul is nice and all, but I don't understand the necessity of this for emancipatory struggle. It's a huge paradigm shift but what's the payoff? How will this understanding help people fight injustice? It seems just as likely to do the opposite

Ah sorry, xp to flappy bird

think i've seen that use of 'bodies' traced back to douglass, as foregrounding certain things about the specific embodiedness of african-american experience and the constitution of blackness, i could be wrong w/ that vague detail but it certainly long predates postmodernism in some guise

I think there's some foucaultian biopolitics stuff in its genealogy too

Xp jmm, interesting passage. But materialist monism could also be used to justify slavery, e.g. people are just their social condition, there is no inherent right to freedom that society should acknowledge. The whole doctrine of human rights is founded on an implicit dualism, or an idea of an inherent value or dignity in human nature that makes things like slavery abominable. It's just hard for me to see either position as inherently progressive.

Or inherently regressive. The relationship between these kinds of questions and politics always seems obscure and indirect to me

i think using "bodies" instead of "people" or "subjects" is one of those things that attempts to reflect dehumanization but ends up seeming to enact it, at least for me.

Agree with this. Also, I don't think they're connected, but it links up in my mind with dudes who refer to women as "females," something that's always creeped me out.

xp yeah of course and i think douglass discusses how in even a lot of the white pro-african american discourse during and shortly after slavery (and beyond in different ways) is about how ~interesting~ it is that african/afrodiasporic culture didn't fit in the bounds of european/american rationality. so, yes, it is complicated

xps i don't think stoic philosophy has historically been used to justify slavery...?
more like the opposite if anything
provided techniques & language for humans to think of/ experience themselves as not slaves to another, subject to another's will, but masters of themselves, sovereign subjects
a way for the powerless to find/create/claim for themselves a space of autonomy (even if only in "the mind")
epictetus was a slave

i think using "bodies" instead of "people" or "subjects" is one of those things that attempts to reflect dehumanization but ends up seeming to enact it, at least for me. TNC's idea that it's about grounding the subject in materiality to call attention to the urgency of political struggle makes sense, but i think other writers who use it are less deliberate about their ontological positions. i guess also i am resistant to framing oppression as being at the core of identity: it's something that happens to people, and shapes them, but doesn't produce their subjectivity in some ultimate way, as postmodernists, i think, will sometimes claim as a challenge to the cartesian subject. so maybe i disagree with TNC's materialist ontology too

― Treeship, Wednesday, 15 July 2015 16:19 (24 minutes ago) Perm

My approximation of how black studies would respond to this is that the slave class--which is contiguous with the system now referred to as blackness--is denied a subjectivity; the Cartesian subject is a white subject. The structures of race are themselves ontological

i don't think deciding bodies have inalienable rights is any more of a leap of faith or any less defensible than deciding whatever spooky stuff you think is inside the body has them

my body is full of ghosts

http://www.incognegro.org/afro_pessimism.html

"Accumulation" is replacing "intersectionality" I am told

updates xls

...how?

Oops I mean "assembledge"--I just read accumulation in that piece I linked

lagOOOoooOOOoon

Idk man because sometimes the conceptual focus in critical theory changes over time?

the ghosts demand new words to feast on

I believe it's a deleuze/guattari deal

lagOOOoooOOOoon

― Trap Queenius (wins), Wednesday, July 15, 2015 1:03 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_macgdfyqFW1rwmb58.gif

https://sequelsprequels.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/tumblr_inline_n4pmyequek1svujri.gif

http://i.imgur.com/cPkwGfA.png

freddie backlash in full swing

I also misspelled "assemblage"--sorry working from my phone

ah ok

is it supposed to be in french pronunciation like "differance"

xps treeship otm upthread re tnc's anti-cartesian materialist ontology
i understand tnc's reasons for using this language, identifying person/self = body
but ultimately that reductive equation is no less metaphorical in its way, no less a philosophical fiction, than cartesian metaphors
yes it may be philosophically (or politically) clarifying in certain context, & powerful, used for deliberate reasons as tnc does,
but as pervasive locution--
imo maybe confused/confusing, maybe ultimately counterproductive

xps i don't think stoic philosophy has historically been used to justify slavery...?

Yeah, I plucked this passage out of a Bernard Williams essay without knowing its proper context. Looking it up, it's not exactly a justification. Seneca's arguing that slave and slaveowner are, in their essence, equivalent beings and that there are limits to what a slaveowner can "own" in a slave. The slaveowner can't compel crimes or treason since the slave is his/her own moral being. So you could say he's cordoning off what can justifiably be done to slaves from what can't, not justifying the practice as such. I'm not sure if he thinks it needs justification as such.

Roman slavery was p different from colonial-era slavery in some obvious ways

Is drash just ignoring my post or

(that's the same kind of reasoning clarence thomas employed in his recent opinion, i think. historically disagreements with stoic-style thought about things like slavery have stemmed more from their being insufficiently disposed to effect social change, possibly in light of being inappropriately satisfied with ethical ideals indifferent to the status quo.)

not ignoring, just crossposted
(have to think about it)

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/looking-white-in-the-face/

Postmodern theory tries to interrupt that expression at every stop, to put every word in scare quotes, to put our own presuppositions into question, to make us worry about the murderousness of “we,” and so to get in the habit of asking, “we, who?” I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

White is not “neutral.” “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.” Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by “reason” — and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

^all this, but also, it's a stylistic affectation

think this is otm. all my right-on activist buds are v. into using "bodies" as a way of describing the victims/targets of institutionalized racism/misogyny but the impression I get is there's a few rhetorical things in motion there beyond direct reference to the discourse in which the usage originated

kinda interesting, a little distracting to me but then again there's a lot of interesting thought/reaction to be had from moments of distraction

Xp deej, I read that caputo piece a while ago and have to say I don't really understand where you are supposed to go from the position he staked out. I agree with the idea that philosophical approaches that seek to define the self in a "vaccuum" - with little awareness of the various ways selfhood has been defined at different historical moments/in different cultures - deserve critique. But nonwhite cultures have rarely traditionally understood selfhood in the pure materialist sense. That is just as much of a western construct as the cogito. TNC even says there is a rich tradition of black americans using this idea of self-possession as a coping mechanism for living in a society in which they were not politically free. Is this just a mark of a complacent, or colonized subjectivity? I think that seems like an erasure of black history - to say that the western concepts they have always borrowed from and adapted are not truly theirs, and that their lives are best understood by suspending all of our ordinary categories in favor of a view that posits race, as you said, as an ontological category. I don't know what kind of progress lies at the end of that road. At this moment it seems like the struggle should be against the dehumanizing nature of structural forces like white supremacy and misogyny. Turning around and saying that maybe the concept of "human" needs to be overcome, or is complicit due to historical baggage, just seems really academic. Interesting analyses will come of this but I am skeptical that they will point us toward a more progressive ontology idk. I might lack imagination, or maybe I am just not radical enough

Like, if the point is just "we are not purely rational agents. We need to interrogate our positionality and how it informs how we think/interface with society" then i agree and am on board. But caputo seems to be saying more than that.

in that piece imo caputo isnt saying enough, in parts.

fwiw i think there's a longer tradition of this type of thinking, its not just starting from zero. frantz fanon & post colonial studies generally for ex

but then i find this stuff to be p convincing, to a point, if a bit deterministic
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wanderings-slave-black-life-and-social-death

they consider the slave to be in a state of 'ontological death,' actually, and posit that race is not a conflict but an antagonism; that western society is built upon the existence of a slave class

think about how insufficient ending the war on drugs would be at reversing the current paradigm ... think about michelle alexander saying the same % of ppl who were enslaved in 1860 are currently in prison or under court surveillance ... etc

http://i.imgur.com/Rwpe669.png

roasted

http://i.imgur.com/4sDAaJO.png

freddie gotgored

not a response to TNC:

Freddie ‏@freddiedeboer May 13
I think it was Mao who said "Political power grows out of the barrel of a sick burn."

fuck!

r they gonna fight

http://i.imgur.com/b7Euy0y.png

freddie's twitter pic looks like he's about to cry

This is a bad look for our friend freddie