Shelley Walia

Professor Emeritus & fellow, English and cultural studies, Panjab university

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice, he is the worst. Aristotle, Politics

In times of a global pandemic nightmare, it is imperative to ask in the words of the French artist Paul Gaugin, Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? From the time of classical humanism, has the world progressed on matters of freedom and justice, or are we stalled or even moving backward? Are we now in the stage of the post-humanovertaken by the superhuman potential of controlling human behviour as well as using innovative medical technology and bioscience to extend life beyond unimaginable limits?

This question puts the traditional boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological, under interrogation. Civilisations over the last century have conspicuously moved away from the temper of renaissance humanism that began in the 15th century, striking a note of the inherently privileged status of the homo sapiens. Human potential became the Faustian worldview that represented the undying quest of humanity towards freedom and progress, even if it was at the cost of ecological disasters and unbridled human, animal and environmental exploitation.

However, in two ways, humanism went against the ethical interpretation of life. First, the emphasis was wholly on the human-centred or what is called the anthropocentricstatus of its cosmography, underpinned by the Eurocentric self-centred notion of its civilisational supremacy, that triggered the colonial scramble for the third world.

Secondly, technological development in the long 19th century enabled the European nations to make forays into Africa, the Americas and Asia, giving rise to the ideologically contested terrain of empire. Underneath the facade of free trade, peace and democracy, there existed a permanent state of war, manipulation and authoritarianism. Understandably, it could rightly be surmised that though there was a surfeit of academic lecturing and debate on the subject of liberalism in the centres of higher learning, the passion for overseas exploitation remained unquenchable to date, particularly in the case of a theoretical Pax Britannica followed by Pax Americana that paradoxically held out the promise of world peace through adopting the role of a global hegemon.

Humanism or the enlightenment project that steered the industrial age was destined to flounder right from the start. Obsessed as it was with the progress of the humans, the developed world callously went ahead with its violent politics aimed not only at the colonised, but nature and the animal world too. No wonder, we now have a world-wide crisis with the lethal virus emerging from the wet markets of our meat-eating humans. The question of the ethics of animal rights foregrounds not only the value of animals, but also what it is to be human. Our collaboration with violence and killing is apparent and more so is our unthinking submission to predatory market hypnosis.

During the course of a holiday in the Swiss Alps, Vaclav Havel, the former President of Czechoslovakia and an outstanding playwright, sees a lonely man on a street clutching his cell phone deceiving himself into believing that he is communicating with his dear ones. Havel asks: But does it enable people to know one another any better? Do they like each other more? I do not think so. Placing the central emphasis on the human realm, we have finally ended in becoming victims of science.

In short, humanism called for a new order that ended up in this quagmire of violence, disease and human suffering. Rational thought on free will, human motivation and individual growth propounded by humanism, culminated in the irrationality of the culture industry and the powers that control the very mind of the public. It is the post-human world of big corporations, unregulated banks and insurance companies that make key decisions not only on governing society, but also on the categories of inclusion and exclusion.

Such politics sponsors an ideology that contests any policy intended to mitigate human suffering or promote social progress. It is amazing that the unemployment of millions does not outrage the ruling elite. Operating through deceit and deception, the world of overwhelming consumerism, appeals only to common sense values with the motive of discouraging any scepticism or interrogation of the systems or the powers that be.

Moreover, the obsession with power through data has destroyed the inviolability of the individual. The modern techno-savvy age brings in its wake not just the blitz of information with no measurable increase in knowledge or wisdom but systems that aim at behaviour control threatening human nature with serious consequences.

Would we then like to create a society we actually want to live in? Are we prepared to go back to Huxleys designerbabies with varying intellectual and physical competence. As machines take over human time and consciousness, are we not leaving ourselves behind? It is clear that the free self-contained child of the Enlightenment seems all but dead. The human stands erased with its very foundations of reason and observation challenged. We become unrecognisable as humans. How then can we advance the task of renewing a common world in these dark times?

It is hoped that the humanist worldview would finally redeem the human race by holding on to its institutions of liberalism and justice. Understandably, medicine and technological engineering have made tangible advances. But it must be kept in mind that the understanding of the human progress is neither linear nor stable, it is fraught with complexity and disruption. Change is inevitable and has to be managed and channelled towards maximum benefit to humanity. The amalgamation of the human and the mechanical can be acceptable to the extent that the arrogant anti-narcissistic sentiment of triumphalism over nature and the living forms gives way to the re-evaluation of the non-human world. We are, indeed, not at the centre of the universe.

In a world where hostile sectarianism and apathy to hunger and the ecological crisis are grossly surpassed by new-fangled technological innovations, humans have to learn to accept responsibility for themselves and the world, and face the concrete and undetected threats that lie therein. The irresponsible, unrestrained course of civilisation, in which, to some extent, we all are complicit, is one of the contributory causes of the malaise of violence and oppression. Covid-19, with its contemptuous destructive supremacy might arouse humanity to a little introspection on the death of reason as well as on drawbacks and progress of science.

Originally posted here:

Civilisational crisis and post-human society - The Tribune India

SaturdayJul25,2020at12:01AM

July Fourth weekend I traveled to the Gettysburg andAntietam battlefields. In Gettysburg I was appalled at what I saw. Homeland Security had set up a command post and placed its vans close to various monuments in the battlefield, FBI vans were driving up and down the battlefield along with State Highway Patrol cars and lots of park rangers. Something was happening in Gettysburg and it was not the reenactment of the 1863 battle.

Over the last several years we have witnessed the disabling of American history and culture but to see it firsthand was shocking. I traveled to the Robert E. Lee monument and there they were: the protesters, anarchists and, of course, BLM. How America has changed since my parentsfirst took me to Gettysburg in 1963 as a young boy!

Rewriting a nation's history is frequently one of the firststrategies taken by a conquering force. Why? Because a people who do not know where they came from also do not know where they are going. While this phenomenon has occurred repeatedly throughout history, today it is happening to our beloved country. It is happening through the rewriting and/or reinterpretation of American historical records, in our national parks, monuments, memorials, landmarks, shrines and churches. In some cases changes are subtle, and in others, blatant. It's done through the removal of key historic pieces that dont support current socialist bias. It's also done through emphasis and de-emphasis of historical periods according to what fits a mode. In fact, the history of our founding period has been eroded and eliminated, almostto the point of oblivion, in our schools.

The time has arrived when we, the people, need to take control of this systematic destruction of our nation and our past. To reclaim our nation from the destructive forces of humanism, secularism and socialism we must retrieve the true history and past of our country, the good and the bad. We are at a crossroads as a nation for our very soul and each of us must determine where we stand for the future of America.

Kenneth Hammontree

Ashland

Read the rest here:

Letter to the editor: We must retrieve true history - Record-Courier

After Dartmouth and a surprising stretch as a stockbroker in Minneapolisan experience that goes mostly undescribed in Afropessimism but which Wilderson has elsewhere characterized as a kind of double lifeWilderson enrolls in the creative-writing program at Columbia. At night, he attends classes at the New School, where stream of consciousness is in vogue. That downtown influence still shows: Wilderson skids from one glint of perception to the next without much regard for grounding details or fluid transitions; in the middle of an anecdote, he tosses you down a chute and you find yourself stumbling through a thick tangle of theoretical jargon. He thinks vertically, in terms of hierarchies and structures; the horizontal time line is beside the point. He writes from historys humid basement, or from its even less accessible underground bunker, and the plants that bloom in his writing are less floral than fungalhis arguments and remembrances grow in tight groups, close to the ground and propped atop rotting anecdotal logs, all of them adding to the shroomy funk of the room.

Though Afropessimism may veer from the Black autobiographical tradition, the book doesnt escape genre altogether. It falls into a category sometimes called auto-theory, an attempt to arrive at a philosophy by way of the self. The most pertinent example is Black Skin, White Masks, by the French-Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, who worked up his theory of epidermalizationthe process by which the societal inferiority of Black people is grafted onto the skinby recounting his own experiences, along with a series of psychiatric case studies. Wilderson takes from Fanonand then exaggerates, literally to deatha critique of humanism as it has been practiced (or, more often, not practiced) in the Western world. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe, Fanon wrote. And yet, for Fanon, the process of decolonizationby way of inevitably bloody revolutionwas also a process of humanization. Decolonization, he wrote, in The Wretched of the Earth, is the veritable creation of new men.

For Wilderson, Fanons cup is too full. Other previously colonized peoples are indeed human, but not Black people. One of the bleakest aspects of Afropessimist thought is its denial that there is any meaningful analogy between Blacks and other nonwhites. When Frank and Stella try to explain their poison-induced injuries to a Chinese-American doctor, she turns them away, and Wilderson muses that Dr. Zhou is as much a master as Edwin and Mary Epps, the antagonists in 12 Years a Slave. In Wildersons view, people of colora term he uses for those who are neither white nor Blackare junior partners to whites in the enslavement of Blacks. One of the memories that recur in Afropessimism involves a Palestinian friend named Sameer, who, detailing life under Israeli occupation, describes the shameful and humiliating way the soldiers run their hands up and down your body, then admits that the shame and humiliation runs even deeper if the Israeli soldier is an Ethiopian Jew. This expression of anti-Black racism from a Palestinian is a cataclysm for Wilderson. Now he understands that, in the collective unconscious, Palestinian insurgents have more in common with the Israeli state and civil society than they do with Black people.

In the same vein, Wilderson describes a meeting that his father attended, as an emissary of the University of Minnesota, with several Native American leaders, hoping to resolve a conflict about reservation lands. Young Frank was in the audience, and someone sitting near him cried out, We dont want you, a nigger man, telling us what to do! The lesson that Wilderson takes from the episode is that the Native Americansraped and slaughtered on these lands, subjected to a genocide that enabled the Americas as we know them to existare sovereigns, and therefore human, while his dad, middle class, American, and Black, is not. In a previous book, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.Antagonisms, which grew out of his dissertation, Wilderson describes the Red, Indigenous, or Savage position as existing liminally as half-death and half-life between the Slave (Black) and the Human (White, or non-Black). In Afropessimism, even that gradation is gone. Wilderson overwrites history with the darkest, most permanent marker.

Every society has a murderous hierarchy: someones always knocking at the basement door, trying to get free. But life is prismaticits possible to be Black and degraded in America while also profiting from wanton extraction of resources overseas, oppressing millions of non-Black others, and living on land stolen from indigenous people. We are always joined in our sufferings, often by somebody we cant see through the darkness. We speak of solidarity precisely because the empathetic act of analogy is a way of acknowledging this complexity, and of training our ethical senses, again and again, to widen the circle of our concern. Any system of thought that has refined itself beyond the ability to imagine kinship with the stranded Guatemalan kid detained at the U.S. border, or with the functionally enslaved Uyghur in China, or, againI cant get over itwith the Native American on whose stolen ancestral ground you live and do your business, is lost in its own fog.

Black thought at its best has been a vehicle for and a product of analogy. Black Christians saw the liberatory potential in the story of the Hebrews rescued by God from beneath Pharaohs thumb and, still more, in the life of the Jewish Palestinian preacher Jesus, put to death by the colonizers of his homeland. Some of them looked to Latin America, where liberation theology blossomed; they created Black liberation theology, and forever transformed the flavor of American religion. A feeling of kinship with the colonized people of India, and with Gandhi in particular, helped make nonviolence a core practice of the civil-rights movement. A study of the revolutionary struggles in Algeria, Fanons great subject, helped to make the caseargued most famously by the Black Liberation Army, an influence on Wildersonfor the occasional necessity of violence. None of this is incidental: the impulse toward freedom is always seeking friends.

While he was studying at Columbia, Wilderson was in a long-distance relationship with a woman he had met on a trip to South Africa. After completing his M.F.A., he moved to Johannesburg. It was the early nineties, the end of the apartheid era. He became involved with the African National Congress, Nelson Mandelas party. He participated in political education and worked for a time as what sounds like a minor spy; eventually, he became an elected official in the A.N.C. Later, he broke with Mandela, siding with the partys more radical members. These adventures are the subject of his first book, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. The South African section of Afropessimism mostly concerns Wildersons brief employment as a waiter at an Italian restaurant.

He takes the job after getting fired from a teaching gig, essentially because of his political commitments. The restaurant, Marios, is owned by a white immigrant, and Wilderson works there alongside several Black Africans: an older waiter who tries to school him in the intricacies of racial manners under apartheid; two cooks who, he learns too late, are supporters of the reactionary party that opposes the A.N.C.; and a young woman named Doreen, who is casually harassed by the owner and eventually framed for theft by his wife, Riana. Everybody tiptoes around the whites except for Wilderson, who, by his telling, is a charismatic, bombastic presence. He meets, flatters, and befriends the Nobel-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer, a regular at the restaurant. He goads his Black peers into taking ever more brazen liberties with the whites. Why should they sit in the kitchen eating porridge during their breaks when the whites are out in the dining room, feasting on Italian? Owing to his obvious erudition and, above all, his Americanness, hes invited to join the whites one night. He drags the other Blacks along with him, largely against their will. He chows down while everyone else falls silent. Of course, he understands the situation. He sort of glories in it.

Continue reading here:

The Argument of Afropessimism - The New Yorker

Being black is belonging to a state organized according to its ignorance of your perspective a state that does not, that cannot, know your mind. Bryan Wagner

One: Legal Abstraction; Super Capitalism and Madness.

Systems of capitalism have historically deployed a type of abstraction that leaves humanity illegible, with Black and brown bodies in particular illegible through lenses of white supremacy. The state constructed a system of illegibility that Bryan Wagner refers to as legal abstraction. Legal abstraction was concretized by falsely representing Black being through newspapers, language, laws, paintings, space, slave codes and naming. This system was made operational through weaponized policing. As a painter, conceptualizing capitalism starts by thinking through abstraction as a comprehensive condition related to industrialization, slavery, globalization, patriarchy, space, but also liberation. Racial capitalism is capitalism, and in the face of legal abstraction providing the infrastructure to capital madness, I offer more Black imagination. I offer more acts of autonomy, self-defense, poetics, activism, creativity and more abstractions from the deep Black mindful architecture of Black being.

Two: Illegal Abstraction: Methods in Liberations and Abolition

That brings me to the question: As a painter, what does it mean to produce an illegal abstraction as dissent? To recognize that the illegal measures of action in a police state are actually the actions of moral grace against super capitalism. I offer illegal abstraction as a tool for the immeasurable presence of Black perception. A language that regards our methods of liberation as unpredictable, genius, improvisational, structural, hauntological, smooth and acute. I am certain that the beauty in Black indeterminacy, from sound to science, from architecture to migration, will continue to guide us toward liberation. Im interested in forms that are deeply spatial, generous and where the spectral presence defies the narrow proposition of life and death by the hands of industrialized white supremacy. A second question for my practice: If Blackness is already an architectonic developed out of liquidity (ocean/the middle passage), how can the work embody this phenomenon and offer sensation (sensoria) at the register of liberation?

Three: I Am Painting What I Am Doing and Doing What I Am Painting.

Legal abstraction is reinforced by the domination of a police state protecting systems of super capitalism. An abstraction of dissent needs to be named and practiced as a contribution to the traditions of Black radical imagination. I argue these issues through painting because of its ability to awaken truth between the mind and the brain. Its time for a new relationship with abstraction, an illegal abstraction developed out of the condition of new world-building toward liberation and revolution. An illegal abstraction where Black perception, ideas of scale, space, and the immeasurable are embedded in art experience. Art projects that are new conceptualizations of these histories and assert these by their presence. Objects that are not autonomous or referential, but phenomenal. Id like to address abstraction comprehensively in terms that are responsive to the breath/breadth of this unmeasurable presence of Blackness. We are always.

Closing: Now

In this moment of environmental precarity we will need to be both liquid and mountains, bird and lava. And it is the density of Black grace that will always be the thing that keeps us in our own humanity. Thinking through the histories of Black liberation, these are the victories that fortify my being in the objects I make. The paintings are true because the history of Black triumph is true. These are histories of illegal abstraction.

Link:

12 Artists On: The Financial Crisis - The New York Times