Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom

Book info: Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Hardcover, 232 pages) – Duke University Press, 2014. Language: English.

Combining black feminist theory, philosophy, and performance studies, Sarah Jane Cervenak ruminates on the significance of physical and mental roaming for black freedom. She is particularly interested in the power of wandering or daydreaming for those whose mobility has been under severe constraint, from the slave era to the present. Since the Enlightenment, wandering has been considered dangerous and even criminal when associated with people of color. Cervenak engages artist-philosophers who focus on wayward movement and daydreaming, or mental travel, that transcend state-imposed limitations on physical, geographic movement. From Sojourner Truth's spiritual and physical roaming to the rambling protagonist of Gayl Jones's novel Mosquito, Cervenak highlights modes of wandering that subvert Enlightenment-based protocols of rationality, composure, and upstanding comportment. Turning to the artists Pope.L (William Pope.L), Adrian Piper, and Carrie Mae Weems, Cervenak argues that their work produces an otherworldly movement, an errant kinesis that exceeds locomotive constraints, resisting the straightening-out processes of post-Enlightenment, white-supremacist, capitalist, sexist, and heteronormative modernity. Their roaming animates another terrain, one where free, black movement is not necessarily connected to that which can be seen, touched, known, and materially valued. About the Author Sarah Jane Cervenak is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and African American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. WanderingPhilosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual FreedomBy Sarah Jane CervenakDuke University PressCopyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5715-5
ContentsAcknowledgments,
INTRODUCTION,
ONE Losing Their Heads Race, Sexuality, and the Perverse Moves of the European Enlightenment,
TWO Crooked Ways and Weak Pens The Enactment of Enlightenment against Slavery,
THREE Writing under a Spell Adrienne Kennedy's Theater,
FOUR "I Am an African American Novel" Wandering as Noncompliance in Gayl Jones's Mosquito,
CONCLUSION "Before I Was Straightened Out",
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,


CHAPTER 1

Losing Their Heads

Race, Sexuality, and the Perverse Moves of the European Enlightenment

In 2008 the British-born Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare put the European Enlightenment on display. Dressing headless mannequins in Victorian-era costumes made from Dutch wax (otherwise loosely known as "African") fabrics, Shonibare resurrected famous white philosophers and assigned them physical disabilities. The political economist Adam Smith has a hunchback; the chemist Antoine Lavoisier sits in a wheelchair; the mathematician Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil misses a foot; the philosopher Jean le Rond d'Alembert leans on crutches; and Immanuel Kant lacks legs to move upon. As the curator Rachel Kent observes, "Shonibare's alterations to these historical figures ... make rare autobiographical reference to the artist's own physical disability—he was left partially paralyzed after contracting a virus at the age of 19—and interrogate our concepts of reason and unreason within the present."

Shonibare's Age of Enlightenment installation is a display of disfigurement, deformity, and compromised mobility. In it we see headless, disabled philosophers engaged in the production of reason—for example, Kant writes at a desk while holding a globe (see figure 1.1).

Moreover, these decapitated bodies are cloaked in so-called African fabric, suggesting a relation between race, travel, mindlessness, and nonupright comportment at the heart of reason. What Shonibare reveals is, in fact, the Age of Enlightenment's hegemonic conceit. That is to say, even though the performative conditions of the Enlightenment's philosophy and attendant notions of the subject were deformed and amputated by these relations, the illusion of self-determination, given as intact heads and otherwise normative (able) embodiment, was nonetheless advanced.

As such, the maintenance of this performative illusion required other bodies to bear the unruly, disabled, "outer-determined" consciousness previously disavowed. People of color, in particular, figured as the embodiments of this unruliness and always already movable by forces outside their control. Even today, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, such performative assumptions tragically persist in animating post-Enlightenment's hegemonic disciplinary operations—operations that sanction the regulation of, among other things, public black kinesis. For da Silva the devaluation of black life is bound up with the "violent gesture[s] necessary to sustain the post-Enlightenment version of the [white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, and bourgeoisie] Subject as the sole self-determined thing."

This chapter's task is, in part, to elucidate the inherent affectability of such violent enactments of white (European) self-determination. More precisely, while this idealized mode of self-determination imagines itself as guided and regulated by "universal reason" from within, it asserts this ground by way of a deregulated, affectable trespassing. To be sure, this was a reckless roaming outwardly determined and mobilized by myths of racial and sexual difference. Moreover, because these performative contradictions, as Shonibare illustrates, originated along with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment concepts of self-determination, reason, and freedom, we must return to these originary theorizations. In doing so, the fraudulence of an inherent association between Enlightenment subjectivity, whiteness, male gender identity, able-bodiedness, and a putatively unaffected and self-directed straight comportment will be exposed and will lead to an interrogation of its contemporary, unchecked, illusory reenactments.

To begin, being straight and narrow is the idealized mode of comportment for those invested in enlightened subjectivity and signifies a kind of transparent, morally upright, law-abiding movement. By straight and narrow, I mean something akin to Robert McRuer's definition of compulsory heterosexuality. For McRuer compulsory heterosexuality constitutes a regulative apparatus invented to police "the disorderly array of possible human desires and embodiments." Significantly, in McRuer's definition, the reach of said apparatus exceeds the sexual in its regulation of all "possible" expressions of wayward desire; in that way compulsory heterosexuality attempts to reform (straighten out) the errancy of queerness and the queerness of errancy. Unruly bodies. Unruly desires. However, because the errant exceeds its reach, straightness must continually reinvent itself in order to sanction its own impossible movement. Put another way, in the interest of its definition, straightness crookedly moves by way of the very disorderliness to which it is otherwise said to respond. That said, while I want to valorize this disorderly, out-of-step, and antiregulative interior kinesis at the heart of wandering, I also want to make a distinction between that valorization and a critique of the crookedness at the heart of the Enlightenment's straight philosophy. On the one hand, what is interesting about wandering is that its opening up of desire alongside its resistance to bodily and intellectual management enables a "contingent universalization of queerness/disability." However, because such movement, integral to the functioning of reason itself, was figured as that which corroded idealized comportment, the force of such a disavowal took crooked form. The liberatory divergence from Enlightenment ideals was, by definition, crooked when it morphed from wandering into trespass. As Shonibare so insightfully illustrates, European philosophers often stumbled through the world without their heads, and such constitutive stumbling was violently trespassive. For the victims of these trespasses, the crooked expression of reason meant epistemological or actual dismemberment. Joan Dayan's discussion of René Descartes's vampiric fantasies powerfully anticipates Shonibare's exposure:

The thinker of Descartes' Meditations in 1640 sets the stage for the 1685 edict of Louis XIV: the making of enlightenment man led to the demolition of the unenlightened brute. The thinking mind's dismembering or generative proclivities dominated a passive nature or servile body. Descartes sits by the fire. He dismembers himself. He can play with asking what remains if he takes off his ears, his arms, and removes all his senses in his urgency to know what constitutes his identity: "Although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, I recognize that if a foot or arm or any other part of the body is cut off, nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind." The mutilation only aggrandizes this "I" that needs no senses and no body. Listen to Descartes's elation of discovery: "Thinking? At last I have discovered it—thought; this alone is inseparable from me.... I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason.... I am a thing which is real.... But what kind of a thing? ... —a thinking thing."

As Dayan continues to argue, Descartes's self-dissection, albeit imagined, was essential for the consolidation of the "white universal [Enlightenment] subject," for whom the body was said to be superfluous. Tragically, however, such dissection was also literally carried out against black bodies, under such bloody measures as the Code Noir (Black Code). Again, the hegemonic labor of recognized Enlightenment was, in keeping with the scene with Descartes, a mutilating expression of a methodological disavowal. Further, the reckless dismembering reverie at the heart of reason foregrounded a transcendent white subject as author while consolidating black people's status as objects to be written, beings for whom the mind was said to not be the governing principle.

In fact, in the face of slave insurrections, most notably the Haitian Revolution, slaves were read as having a perverted will. This notion of a perverse will at once depoliticized and dephilosophized black rage and desire, but it also missed the ways that the enactment of racist, sexist enlightenment itself was inherently perverse. If to be perverse means "to turn away from that which is good, right or true," then the enactment of hateful reason was exemplary. As I argued by way of Shonibare, the racialized and sexualized particularization of the Enlightenment depended on a perverse, errant, (im)possible movement despite its pretense to an undifferentiated straight and upright comportment. These were its performative contradictions as a certain kind of nonstraight and nonteleological movement (Descartes's dream, the Code Noir) was at once essential and unsound for the production of reason.

At the same time, this is a dream whose murderous course has been met by the philosophical interventions and rehabilitations of those trampled upon. As David Scott, Paul Miller, Sylvia Wynter, and C. L. R. James (among others) argue, the actual fulfillment of Enlightenment ideals was achieved not by its idealized subject but on behalf of its pathologized objects. While this contradiction is not without its own contradictions, it is important to acknowledge, for example, that the "universal human right of liberty [was] to be found in the Haitian Revolution" and not within either Kant's categorical imperative or Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract.

Still, the presumption of the absence of black will, or the imbrication of blackness itself with perversion and a perverse kinesis, was key to the racist consolidation of the Enlightenment subject. Further, even if theorized otherwise, the hegemonic discourse of race and sexuality as performatively perverse facilitated the Enlightenment's idealized subject's propertization of rational subjectivity while errantly sustaining its mythical conditions. This can be observed in the invention of race in the eighteenth century. Kant, the recognized Enlightenment philosopher, according to Robert Bernasconi, was the author of the "first theory of race worthy of the name"—a theory that scientifically figured race as a purposive differentiation. Significantly, such a theory formed out of a reading of explorers', missionaries', and settlers' travel reports (or more broadly, tales of intrusive wanderings). This leads me to ask: if it's the case that Kant invented a theory of race and that such a theory emerged from a methodological crookedness, what would it mean to think about race as corporeal trespass?

This is an interesting question considering that Kant once "claimed that people from Africa and India lack a 'drive to activity,' ... never becoming anything more than drifters." But if anyone is a drifter, someone with a promiscuous relationship to space, place, and principle, then Kant is exemplary. What an encounter with racial and sexual difference in Kant's writing produces is a kind of drifting—an intrusive itinerancy induced by the "terrible struggle between imagination and reason." Gilles Deleuze describes this "illegitimate use of the faculties" in Kant accordingly.

In many ways, understanding and reason are deeply tormented by the ambition to make things in themselves known to us. Kant constantly returns to this theme that there are internal illusions and illegitimate uses of faculties. The imagination sometimes dreams rather than schematizes. Moreover, instead of applying itself exclusively to phenomena ("experimental employment") the understanding sometimes claims to apply its concepts to things as they are in themselves ("transcendental employment"). But this is still not the most serious problem. Instead of applying itself to the concepts of the understanding ("immanent or regulative employment"), reason may claim to be directly applicable to objects, and wish to legislate in the domain of knowledge ("transcendent or constitutive employment"). Why is this the most serious problem? The transcendental employment of the understanding presupposes only that it abstracts itself from its relation to the imagination. Now, this imagination would have only negative effects were the understanding not pushed by reason, which gives it the illusion of a positive domain to conquer outside experience.

This conquering outside experience, essential in the production of myths about civilization and barbarity, rational comportment and impulsivity, reveals the ways that the struggle among reason, understanding, and the imagination was not only terrible but also, for many, tragic. Paradoxically, this conquering outside experience prompted Kant's writing the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) in the first place.

Indeed, Kant's critical philosophy emerged because of his refusal, according to Deleuze, to abide by a dogmatic rationalist "theory of knowledge founded on the idea of a correspondence between subject and object, of an accord between the order of ideas and the order of things." In opposition to this tendency, which Kant perceives as a crisis in philosophical thinking generally and a crisis in metaphysics specifically, he proposes his own Copernican Revolution. Kant's Copernican Revolution involves "substituting the principle of a necessary submission of object to subject for the idea of a harmony between subject and object (final accord). The essential discovery is that the faculty of knowledge is legislative, or more precisely, that there is something which legislates in the faculty of knowledge[.]" For Kant "we," not God, "are the legislators of Nature." Kant demonstrates this in his calling for the "tribunal" of reason, asking: what is reason and what is it capable of knowing about itself? How is the tribunal of reason the ethical scene of the Enlightenment?

Nevertheless, even while the tribunal itself importantly questioned an "epistemic model that takes as its model the colonization of the world (of experience)," the enactment of reason's colonizational roaming continually undermined the tribunal's ethical value. Arguably, Kant's wandering transported him from a critique of reason's epistemic promiscuity toward a wobbly, trespassive invention of race. The performative betrayal of reason's limits, as Kant makes clear, is its methodological condition. Through an engagement with some of his precritical and critical writings, I explore the ways that ideas of race and gender perversely enact the very mythical scene and unregulated performances which the Age of Enlightenment was said to straighten out.

According to Miller, after Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the mythic was the anti-Enlightenment, "a 'time', when the will was subordinate to the world." Because the mythos of racial and sexual difference instantiated a "lost plenitude" into which Kant dangerously wandered, he advanced the inherent whiteness of self-determination (of a non-drifting, if you will) to sustain the notion of Europe "being philosophically identical with itself." The illegitimate, affectable movement key to enlightened subjectivity, as da Silva, Gayatri Spivak, and others have shown, became externalized and figured as the kinetic (and fundamentally nonphilosophical and unenlightened) essence of the racialized and gendered.

In Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), for example, Kant's encounter with the "Negro" is nothing short of an empirical and epistemological wandering, where blackness is illegitimately and trespassively linked to stupidity. In the decades that followed the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant's thinking moved more "critically" to consider reason's relationship to dogmatic illusions, a relationship that demonstrates the fundamental discord between subject and object. Kant's critical philosophy, in fact, involved an interrogation of these ethically bankrupt relations, aspiring toward a system, as Curtis Bowman says, of "human freedom, both in theoretical and practical matters ... [where] the enlightened person is [at once] rational and autonomous, accepting nothing without a reason, never acting without a reason, always pursuing his or her freedom and the freedom of others." The person largely responsible for Kant's ethical reevaluation of the Enlightenment was Rousseau.

If Kant is the first author of a theory on race, then one might say that Rousseau prefigures the ethical waywardness of such a theory in his philosophizations of free comportment. In Rousseau we "agree to give ourselves up to the direction of the general will[;] ... [however,] we sometimes fail to follow its dictates because our private will, present in us as individuals, conflicts with our general will, present in us as citizens. This conflict comes about largely through our inability to curb our desires and instincts." This tension between the general will (shared agreement, through laws, of appropriate public kinesis) and private will (the refusal of such kinetic constraint) animates Rousseau's philosophy. Rousseau, like Kant, was often moved by desire, straying from the straight-and-narrow course of his political and moral philosophy and wandering along the racialized and sexualized interests of his private will.

Indeed, Rousseau's complicated ties to the Enlightenment move in his grappling with the nexus of disembodiment, self-understanding, and self-determination central to the work of reason and freedom. Whereas Rousseau, in The Social Contract (1762), advocates the suppression of the private in favor of the general will, Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime suggests that the "principled" enlightened man is often "moved at the same time by a secret impulse [while] tak[ing] a standpoint outside himself, in thought, in order to judge the outward propriety of his behavior as it seems in the eyes of the onlooker." While Kant and Rousseau agree that self-determination is only possible through alienation, both concede the essential though dangerous presence of a "secret impulse" that agitates against that disembodied estrangement at every turn.

(Continues...)Excerpted from Wandering by Sarah Jane Cervenak. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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