Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the affective-aesthetic matrix of desiring witnessing Margarita Palacios & Stephen Sheehi Subjectivity ISSN 1755-6341 Subjectivity DOI 10.1057/s41286-020-00106-9 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature Limited. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. Author's personal copy Subjectivity https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-020-00106-9 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the affective‑aesthetic matrix of desiring witnessing Margarita Palacios1 · Stephen Sheehi2 Accepted: 8 October 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020 Abstract In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect that informs ‘white innocence’ and its attempts at witnessing the pain of the Other. Engaging with the work of critical race theorists we put the artistic interventions of Hannah Black and Parker Bright critique of Dana Shutz’s Open Casket in conversation with Teresa Margolles’ Vaporization. In doing so, we explore the epistemological, affective, and aesthetic dimensions involved in the desire of whiteness to transcend its own matrix of race-power and aestheticization of black suffering. That is, instead of anti-racist and transformative, Schutz’s piece, in our view, remains caught within a Manichean subject/object relationship constituted by a curative relation of mastery and servitude that is inextricably contained with and by the ontology of whiteness. We argue that this dynamic of ‘pornotroping’ mobilizes an aesthetics of hailing and identification that reaffirms white innocence. Margolles’ Vaporization, on the other hand, compels us to engage the space, corporality, and epistemology of flesh outside of the subject/object divide, while confronting us with multiplicities of embodiment as experienced through art and social productions. Keywords White innocence · Hannah Black · Parker Bright · Gloria Wekker · Teresa Margolles, Vaporization · Pornotroping · Schutz’s Open Casket · Witnessing · Aesthetics, affect * Margarita Palacios m.palacios@bbk.ac.uk Stephen Sheehi spsheehi@wm.edu 1 Department of Psychosocial Studies, School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London, 30 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DQ, UK 2 Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies, Decolonizing Humanities Project, William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA Vol.:(0123456789) Author's personal copy M. Palacios, S. Sheehi (https://www.biennialfoundation.org/2017/04/winter-america-2017-whitney-biennial/). Introduction In 2017, the artist Hannah Black launched a campaign demanding the Whitney Biennial curators to remove Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket from the show, and calling for its removal. In her open letter, which was subsequently co-signed by several dozen artists of color, Black states, “White shame “is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist…. stop treating black pain as material”” (Black 2017). Open Casket is based on a photograph of the funeral of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy brutally lynched in Mississippi in 1955. Against the backdrop of activism and demonstrations against structural, anti-black police brutality in the United States, black-American artist, Parker Bright, initiated a small-scale, yet powerful, protest, standing in front of Schutz’s painting for hours. Bright, a black-American artist, intentionally obstructed view of Open Casket, wearing a T-shirts that read “Black Death Spectacle” and “No Lynch Mob” (Basciano 2017). The lines on Bright’s shirt make the connection between structural and, indeed, epistemic anti-black racism, the present and history of white supremacy, and the mechanisms of spectacle and spectatorship. Both Black and Bright specifically tell Author's personal copy Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the… us how the privileges of whiteness produce black suffering only to extract surplus value from it. In turn, the spectacle of their own [white] shame disavows complicity only to move toward “white innocence.” The term white innocence was coined by American legal scholar initially, Thomas Ross, who forcefully argues that white people in the United States are never considered guilty by merit of their skin, that is, they are always assumed innocent in a court of law and society in general (Ross 1990, pp. 2–3). At the same time, the reality of black people is always abstract, preventing them from access to fundamental rights of humanity in nineteenth-century United States. The “power of black abstraction,” as a rhetorical tool, “obscures the humanness of black persons,” removing them from “real and rich social context” and reduces them to racial tropes (Ibid, p. 6). In our paper, following the example of Sherene Razack and Mary Louise Fellows, we think about white innocence in the context of hierarchies, in the context of coloniality, race, gender, and sexual hierarchies defined by the social-historicalmaterial-epistemological assemblage of the coloniality of whiteness (Fellows and Razack 1998). Within this vein, we learn from Gloria Wekker’s work (Wekker 2016). In her study of the paradoxical relationship between force and denial of racialized aggression (at its intersection with gender, sexuality, and class), Wekker puts forward the concept of white innocence whereby she describes both force and denial within a binding structure of affect and a reservoir of accumulated knowledge. Together, she argues, they inform an enabling and instrumental “ignorance,” which “barely hides a structure of superiority toward people of colour.” In her work, she tracks how, in the Netherlands, “persistently, an innocent, fragile, emancipated white Dutch self is constructed versus a guilty, uncivilized, barbaric other” (Wekker 2016, p. 15). In her mapping of the “house that race built,” borrowing from Lubiano (1998), she names processes of white, the ways in which, for example, “forgetting, glossing over, supposed color blindness” function as means to maintain “an inherent and natural superiority vis-à-vis people of color” (Ibid, p. 15). In our view, the forms of forgetting, glossing over, and supposed “color blindness” serve as central psychosocial defenses of white innocence, namely disavowal (Verleugnung for Freud). What protesters of the exhibition of Open Casket were conveying is that white innocence not only manages to disavow the aestheticization of black suffering, but also, that this results in a pernicious reproduction of racial violence that reproduces white supremacy. As such, Black and Bright call out for this recuperative function that reproduce racialized ontologies and subjectivities. That is, instead of anti-racist and transformative, Open Casket remains caught within a Manichean subject/object relationship characterized by the curative relation of mastery and servitude, or perhaps better, being and non-being, that is inextricably contained with and by the ontology of whiteness. In this context, the image of the suffering-Other does not break free from the meaning that informs it, the historical conditions that produce it, or from the affect that supports it. Through the open spectacle of art, Open Casket kidnaps the affective power of black suffering and universalizes it in order to redeem the Self-Sameness of (white) Humanity. The problem that this paper addresses then is not specifically the psycho-dynamics of racialized, voyeuristic gaze (as theorized by Fanon and others). Instead, we Author's personal copy M. Palacios, S. Sheehi analyze the broader complex embroilment of white innocence’s epistemology and ontology with its supportive and enabling affective structure. Critiquing how whiteness as system of dualism (that characterizes Lacanian-Hegelian onto-subjective accounts, for example) is in-built into the perennial interplay between the (white) Self-Same and Other, we map desire’s productive as well as reproductive capacity to both recuperate and challenge the limits of the ontology of selfhood (“humanity”) structured on domination and exclusion; in other words, a humanity saturated by racial and gender hierarchy enshrined by coloniality and racial capitalism. More specifically, we learn from the work of Black critical race theorists in order to place the artistic interventions of Hannah Black and Parker Bright critique of Dana Shutz’s Open Casket in conversation with Teresa Margolles’ Vaporization. As we will argue in what follows, Margolles’ work does not deploy aesthetics of hailing or mechanisms of identification, but instead her work engineers a transformative experience of contamination, undoing, and opacity. We are arguing thus against dualistic, non-intersectional critiques of racialized, postcolonial subjectivity as presented within the current debates surrounding the limits and misrecognition of “identity politics.”1 In other words, we are attempting in this article to understand how racialized identities are expressed and mediated through subjugated positions that both lay in and out of realms of power. We consider then, through the commissure of Black, Bright, and Margolles, not only the imperceptibility and illegibility of “wounded attachments” that function as a productive space of subjectivity (jouissance) for the racialized subject, while also spotlighting how this place of difference elicits political anxiety of the unrepairable and compels a move to white innocence. To be more specific, this article contends that Black’s and Bright’s interventions are refusals to accept or be the object of the desire for redemption, collaboration, and recuperative forgiveness. Margolles’ Vaporization, on the other hand, compels us to engage the space, corporality, and epistemology of flesh outside of the subject/ object divide, by confronting us with the multiplicities of embodiment as experienced through art and social productions. Margolles work opens possibilities for us to think about fugitive moments of material, subjectivity, and social entanglements within institutionalized alienation that are otherwise re-metabolized by white innocence and the global art space. Our article offers a mapping of the epistemological, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of particular forms of desire; a desire at the heart of white innocence to transcend the matrix of race-power through a field of representation that seemingly 1 For example, Wendy Brown as set the tone for critiquing what become ideologically misrecognized “identity politics” as opposed to the politics of positionality. While she attempts to move away from a binary models of subject positioning (especially concerning white women), Brown’s concept of “wound attachments” represents a sophisticated, “color blind” theoretical “move to innocence” (Brown 1995). While she correctly locates how “identity politics” often does not take capitalism and the state into account of its positionality within “liberal democracies” (thereby naturalizing both capitalism and the legitimacy of state authority), she specifically sidesteps race and elides, unlike Stuart Hall who she engages, how coloniality and race structure identities in a way that reaches beyond class and exclusively gender experiences (ibid. 52–53). Author's personal copy Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the… represents it and a form of desire that seeks to mobilize difference. This mobilization if difference attempts to elicit solidarity and affirm the political and material realities of racialized bodies and the postcolonial condition without eliding political responsibility. Undergirding this cartography, we contemplate the complexities of race and desire through aesthetic rhizomes specifically as ourselves theorists of color (Latina and Arab, living and working in Anglo-American institutions located in countries built on white supremacy, colonialism, and neoliberalism). How do the interventions of Bright and Black, couched within a deep tradition of critical Black liberation tradition, offer us to think about the possibilities of affective-aesthetic matrix differently as theorists of color? With this in mind, we ponder what may be the productive forces that arise from the struggles of embodied experience that are exclusively articulated through the double-consciousness of being racialized against the simultaneous desire of whiteness to disavowal racial structures that construct that very desire. White innocence, pornotroping, and mechanisms of fantasy In 2001, Simon Gikandi considers the incommensurability of thinking about aesthetics. He asks, “If the aesthetic—and indeed the institution of art—stands out as one of the most prominent examples of a social category that acquires its normative authority through radical acts of exclusion, what happens to its framework when it is confronted with the idea of race?” (Gikandi 2001, p. 320). Gikandi compels us to consider that the assumption of aesthetic interventions as subverting or reinforcing racial ontologies and colonial epistemologies needs to be looked at from a wider perspective. In regard to the relationship between affect and the aesthetic, Rancière, not unlike Merleau-Ponty, has argued that the aesthetic experience produces a form of rupture, shaping a new “body and sensorium.” This thought explicitly places the “aesthetic experience” within “a political effect,” where “the loss of destination it presupposes disrupts the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations […] it is a multiplication of connections and disconnections that reframe the relation between the bodies, the world they live in, and the way in which they are ‘equipped’ to adapt to it.[…] It allows for new modes of political construction of common objects and new possibilities of collective enunciation” (Rancière 2009, p. 72). Ranciere’s contribution is noteworthy because he centers aesthetic experience within “a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible” (Ibid, p. 72). However, it is interesting that for Ranciere the idea of “common experience” remains unchallenged as per it undergirds the theorization of his axiomatic “aesthetic experience.” Reading of Rancière alongside various Black-American authors, such as Weheliyah (2014), Spillers (1987), Hartman (1997), Moten (2018), and Wilderson (2010) in concert with Black’s and Bright’s protests of Open Casket makes us question whether aesthetic interventions such as Schutz (that aims to function as auto-politicization and transformative political action) actually rupture racialization or instead reinforce white supremacy? Author's personal copy M. Palacios, S. Sheehi The aestheticized affective of shame and “self-consciousness” at the heart of Open Casket is the magical undoing of the difference that structures racial ontology, replacing difference with the misrecognition of the affective legibility of “common experiences.” The work of Saidiya Hartman is relevant here as she examines the complex nature of mobilized identification with the pain of the other, she argues the effort to counteract the commonplace callousness of black suffering requires that the white body be positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this suffering visible and intelligible. Yet, if this violence can become palpable and indignation can be fully aroused only through the masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear that empathy is double edged for in making the other’s suffering one’s own the suffering is occluded by the others obliteration. (Hartman 1997, p. 19) Hartman concludes that what concerns her is “the spectacular nature of black suffering and, conversely, the dissimulation of suffering through spectacle” (Ibid, 1997, pp. 19–21) If Black and Bright reveal how white innocence structures aesthetic interventions as a secular and moral means of witnessing “black suffering,” we read Schutz’ Open Casket within the framework of spectacular “pornotroping.” In her Sensual Excess, Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (2018), Amber Jamilla Musser embarks on a critique and an invitation. Her critique adroitly identifies how experience and desire for witnessing remain embroiled within “pornotroping enfleshment” (Musser 2018, p. 7). These terms, pornotrope and enfleshment, are coined by Hortense Spillers, who in thinking about the status of black male and female bodies in the context of transatlantic slave trade, argues that (1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality. (2) At the same time—n stunning contradiction—the captive body is reduced to a thing, becoming a being for the captor. (3) It is this absence from a subject position the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of otherness. (4) As a category of “otherness,” the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general powerlessness (Spillers 2003, p. 206). As Musser explains, pornotroping refers to the process of objectification that “violently reduces people into commodities while simultaneously rendering them sexually available” (Musser 2018, p. 6). In turn, enfleshment refers to the process of depersonalization and pure objectification, thereby ensuring a removal of black bodies from subjectivity in an unparalleled way within Western metaphysics, psychic formation, and sociability. The pornotroping, in Musser’s words, is to “acknowledge that some people circulate as highly charged affective objects, while simultaneously being positioned outside of the parameters of normative sexuality and subjectivity” (Musser 2018, p. 9). The concept of the pornotrope describes the social relations of domination and the psychic circuit of desire that characterizes racialization whereby non-white populations are racialized such that gender and sexual transgressions are “not incidental” (Ibid., p. 8) to the production of non-white labor but constitutive of it. Dana Schutz’s Open Casket betrays the mechanism of identifications, guilt, and disavowal within the liberal unconscious that make abject black bodies more than Author's personal copy Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the… a pivotal white supremacist tactic of domination, but dynamics and mechanisms that express themselves in the form of seductive aesthetics that hail on-lookers to collaborate with white supremacy’s ontological and epistemic logos (i.e., the construction of an universal ‘we’). White supremacist self-same produces the desire for transcendence, for white innocence, which can only pass through cathecting the racialized object of suffering it has created. Following Alexander Weheliye, Musser observes that the violence and projection require at their core “a subject who desires and who thereby objectifies and possesses others through this desire” (Musser 2018, p. 7). Not unlike the ways in which some have pondered the relationship between desire, genocide, ideology, and violence (Genogroup 2008; Glynos and Stravakakis 2008; Palacios 2009, 2013; Weisband 2018), pornotrope and enfleshment result from the deployment of agonistic and antagonistic narratives (of loss and the possibility of recovering fullness) and the libidinal-affective support of desire in relation to anxiety, hatred, and resentment. It could be argued that fantasy structures white innocence and liberal racial disavowal that function within violent white supremacist structures, which organize black and brown bodies as “material” for use, extraction, labor, and abjection. Here, as in the case of fantasy, race, sexuality, and gender play a particular role in the racialization of Others. This results from a projection and identification with the mastery of a racialized-qua-universalized [white] Self. Reading white innocence and pornotroping through mechanisms of fantasy allows us to identify the affective impasses and the structural femicidal-racist violence at play within the liberal desire for repair and “acknowledgement.” In our view, this desirous compulsion seeks to assuage the lack at the heart of the (white) Self-Same that naturalizes feminicidal-racial violence. Desire for acknowledgement, for repair, is yet one more “extractive” mechanism. It is an extractive desire that positions the sanctimonious and redemptive “witnessing” of “black suffering” as a narcissistic, self-effacing disavowal of the impossibility of difference that is produced though the violence of the very desire of the Other itself. The flesh of the pornotroped black suffering body could be read as recycled in order for it to be represented as “material” for Black pain, to cite Hanna Black, where it appears separate from the very dynamics that allow such an ethical-aesthetic process to occur. Refusing/interrupting totality and sameness: there is no “we”! This process of desire for innocence, we argue, is not abstract or immaterial. Bright and Black specifically call attention to its materiality. The process of disavowal as enabled by white innocence is a material process within settler colonialism and how whiteness and racial hierarchy undergirds it.2 We understand, at their core, the 2 Like Wekker, Sheehi has shown the violent psychological dynamics at the service of settler colonialism within processes of “mutual recognition” projects and “dialogue initiatives” in Occupied Palestine (2018). In examining dialogue projects instituted by Israeli and Western psychologists that intend to establish “humanizing” exchange between Israelis and Palestinians, Sheehi observes the “witnessing” pain and “mutual” suffering within the unremediated and disavowed asymmetries of settler colonial hegemony fundamentally perpetuate on-going dehumanizing structures of settler colonialism and its suffocating occupation regime. These dialogue initiatives are enframed by the same form of white, Author's personal copy M. Palacios, S. Sheehi interventions of Black and Bright present a demonstrative act of refusal. The refusal is not only the withholding of consent and a denial of permission to accept an aestheticized act of white innocence or a refusal to accept the gesture of self-flagellating ablution of white guilty through art. Rather, they refuse to accept the desire of the [white] Self-Same, a desire that cathects black bodies as objects of empathy or abuse. It is a refusal to be the cathected object of the desire for white redemption, collaboration, and recuperative forgiveness. Their interventions are a rejection of being reconstituted, yet once more, as an object of desire in order to give coherence and futurity to the affective universalism of “we.” What we are arguing is that white innocence operates within an epistemological and ontological framework where desire of the Self-Same is the binding glue to “coloniality of power” that structures aestheticized engagements with the matrix of race-gender-sexuality-capitalism. The desire for “humanity’s” repair (i.e., white repair) emerges from the crease where the Other inhabits and exists alone then as an object of violence and then repair or absolution. We offer this reading of white innocence in relation to the materiality of black suffering not as a pedantic or performative critique. We are seeking to map the mechanisms by which whiteness, as a relational process, adjusts itself in order to maintain its hegemony by “recognizing” harm done without destroying racial hierarchies but also by which this very process naturalizes not only the racialized body as cathected object of white desire but naturalizing the hegemony of that desire itself. In our view, this process of domination is perpetuated through particular types of knowledge-power based in the affirmation, production, and reinforcement of the dichotomy subject/object; order/chaos; meaning/psychosis; activity/passivity; rationality/ affect. In other words, desire coheres the project of totality. As argued extensively elsewhere, key sociological and psychoanalytic concepts have been complicit in the theorizing of feminized-racialized alterity and multiplicity as threatening to totality, thereby enforcing an epistemology based on subject/object dualisms (Butler 2006; Critchley 1998; Palacios 2004, 2019, 2020; Palacios and Plot 2020). In this sense, we see interventions such as Schutz’s as locked within the limits of representation and the repressive limits of the symbolic order (the Law) that defines the subject as “‘lacking,” a lack that can only be filled by a racialized-sexualizedgendered object. Yet also, this symbolic order regulates ways in which Black, Indigenous, and people of color scholars and artists may offer acts of resistance to this Footnote 2 (continued) colonial innocence as discussed by Wekker’s Dutch colonially informed racial structures of white innocence. Moreover, the fantasy of dialogues replicates the mechanics of white innocence, wherein it reconstitutes and naturalizes the disavowal that Zionism is a violent, colonial settler ideology and practice and that Israel is an Apartheid state. The call for “mutual recognition,” and “acknowledgement” within a “shared humanity,” therefore, normalizes Israeli settler colonialism and its regime of military occupation as normal, and it configures the desire of the Palestinians for liberation as a pathology. Like Bright’s and Black’s intervention, refusal of dialogue functions as a refusal of innocence and self-objectification; refusal acts, in fact, as a performance of self-affirmation. Fundamentally, Sheehi argues that these are the psychological dynamics, the “colonial extractive introjections,” that underpin Patrick Wolfe’s observations of, what we can say is, the psychotic impulse of the innocence of the settler, who erases the indigène only to take their place as the “true” natives of the emptied land. Author's personal copy Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the… Image: Vaporization. 2002. Installation view in ‘Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values’ at MoMA PS1. order itself. In these above-mentioned parallel paradigms that aim at totality, exclusion of feminine-racialized threat (Palacios 2020) appears as the precondition for the emergence of subjectivity and meaning (or perhaps, paraphrasing Wilderson, “the emergence of humanity”), as the search for the lost “object” of desire (to counteract anxiety and melancholia) inevitably informs exclusionary and antagonistic fantasies of plenitude. Such affective-aesthetic framework is deeply imbricated in the reproduction of violence and the pornotroping that accompanies its representation and attempts at “witnessing” as a form of racial contrition without reparation. Symbolic destitution in Teresa Margolles’ vaporization: undoing sameness and dualism Instead of totality, dualism and sameness we seek to pursue Fred Moten’s adjuration, following Edouard Glissant, to “consent to not being a single being” (Moten 2018). As non-black, racialized subjects of the Global South enframed by a shared Author's personal copy M. Palacios, S. Sheehi epistemology of coloniality, our critique of white innocence seeks cross racial solidarity in the work of black theorists to “consent to not being a single being.” We learn from their work to probe the overlapping parameters of the violence, limitations, and promises of the universalized “we” that cut across colonialized and racialized subjects, subjectivities, and experiences. In order to do this, we consider a radically different installation than that of Bright’s and Black’s interventions that drastically leans away from aesthetics of Shultz’s hailing of the universalized innocent viewer. While we recognize the contextual, historical, geographic, and political differences with Bright, Black, and Open Casket, we approach Vaporazición/Vaporization (2002) by Mexican visual artist Teresa Margolles relationally through an association of how art and aestheticized political interventions operate within a matrix of transnational, racialized, aestheticized institutional space. Vaporazición un-makes particular forms of subjectivity and experience of domination by refusing to re-consecrate the structural constitution of a universalized (innocent white) identity as performed through the international art scene in the metropolis art space. In this sense, one could argue that she offers a way of ‘vaporizing white innocence.’ Her well-known installation engineers an experience, where one wanders through a barely lit gallery, which is filled with a foggy mist. That mist was created from the disinfected water used to wash corpses in the city morgue of Distrito Federal, Mexico, where she once worked as forensic pathologist. If Schutz’s Open Casket operates along certain epistemological closure that reconstitutes the subject/object dualism of “I see/dominate/pity you,” Black and Bright alert us that it is precisely because the “I” of shame and guilt is the same “I” within a “we” that can only continue to objectify Black subjects and suffering as objects of desire. Contrarily, Margolles’s installation makes impossible for this self-referential closure to take place. She leaves behind in this installation any attempt at representing violence. If Black and Bright allude to the impossibility of representing black suffering through a prism of whiteness, Margolles’ refuses to represent violence of the “necropolitics” of the neoliberal Mexican state (Mbembe 2019). In doing so, the artist abandons any framework of totality and lack that mobilizes voyeuristic (phallic) enjoyment from which the Other is otherwise precluded. Exhibited at MOMA PS1 in 2002, Amy Sara Carrol argues cogently that reading Vaporazición should not be decontextualized within a formalistic and aesthetic reading of the embodiment of globalized art production but rather needs to be located squarely within a socio-political, aesthetic contexts of post-NAFTA Mexican art production, the Mexican state’s attempts to dismantle drug cartels (Carrol 2017, p. 131). Margolles’s work certainly operates from within the locality and heterogeneity of a particular political and corporal context. For us, we are concerned about the ways in which art commutes between contexts that are structured by global racial capital and epistemologies of “witnessing,” which seem inseparable from political economies of neoliberal individualism. The “levelling effect” of the international art space begs us to consider the longevity of Margolles’s installation that toured for more than a decade after its debut. Understanding Margolles’s work as an instantiation, in fact, of her participation within a Mexican artistic collective in the 1990s allows us also think about how “the life of the corpse” (Ibid., p. 132) anchors the Author's personal copy Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the… notion of “flesh.” The life of the unrepresented yet still material corpse simultaneously commutes between times, contexts, materialities, and localities, thereby allowing for new experimental (dis) encounters across and against subjectivities to take place. Margolles’s installation encourages us to think of a conception of aesthetics where matter—including quite literally, in this case, brown flesh—becomes a political agent (Bennett 2010; Benso 2000; Keenan and Weizman 2012; Palacios 2019). The mist of vaporization itself, far from being a passive receptor of a voyeuristic gaze, becomes active in the interaction, framing, interruption, and even contradiction of that subjective experience that fails to grasp/ingest it. A poignant description of this work stresses, for example, the “tension that Teresa Margolles creates between what is visible and what is invisible, between what is pure and what is contaminated and corrupted, between power and marginality and between life and death” (Coletta 2018, p. 1). More strikingly, Imogen Bakelmun refers to the irony of Vaporization, stating, “Vaporization thus articulates itself in this material semiotic of disinfection, purification and eradication. Indeed, not only was the materiality of the bodies symbolically abstracted through water but the water itself was then vaporized, pumped into the gallery in a hazy mist” (Bakelmun 2015, p. 2). In her view, the vaporized water was a gesture toward the tropes of incorporeality and ghostliness. However, the materiality of the mist contributed to her feeling of being “contaminated, compromised, invaded by the bodily particles of the dead”3 (Ibid, p. 2). What is interesting in both of these commentaries is not only the absence of race and the “foreignness” of the (dead) Mexican, atomized subjects. But also, what is illegible to these commentators is the impossibility that these radical subjects, even while ingested, still cannot be metabolized by their American audiences in metropolitan centers of the North. This raises the question whether we can speak of certain experience of symbolic destitution outside a matrix of imperial, (neo-) colonial, and racial power as enacted in the global neoliberal metropole. With this in mind, Vaporization could be read not only against Schutz’s Open Casket but also alongside Black’s and Bright’s political and artistic interventions. This reading of Margolles with Black and Bright aligns with Moten’s call (to refuse to be a single being), as it mobilizes an experience of “excess” that does not refer or 3 In the context of the study of political violence in Chile, Palacios (2019) argued that memorialization seem to be always displaced and challenged, not only by the politics of forgetting but also by a space of silence—absence—which is left when the naming of violence happens. It is this spacing, this interruption of knowledge and certainty, she argued, what conveys “an experience characterized by a paradoxical undecidability between the truth of the real, and the lack of certainty and even knowledge to represent it.” While discussing the affective force of Monumento Rieles, and more particularly of the nacre button attached to the train rail—an object that only insinuates its presence but that resists to be grasped by the gaze that attempts to possess it, Palacios argued that the button “in its humble literality, manages to destabilize symbolic closure (digestion) through its evasiveness, and in doing so prevents the reaffirmation of a type of ‘subjective omnipotence’ while resisting the colonizing operation of the gaze that wants to capture, frame and own it.” Instead, she continues, “this semi-invisible but material, tiny nacre-ruin offers back a truth without knowledge, a gap, a question, a silence. Its opacity consists in its resistance to becoming an epistemological object while at the same time it powerfully destabilizes the subject who encounters it” (Palacios 2019, p. 614). Author's personal copy M. Palacios, S. Sheehi result from “lack” (as in the framework of totality and fantasy as argued above), but one that favors an undoing of the epistemological matrix of white supremacy and its affective and aesthetic defense, namely white innocence. Reaching to Moten is not a capricious act of solidarity. He himself offers this connection in Stolen Life (2018). While scrutinizing Kant, Fred Moten offers an account of this excess explicitly as it is expressed in black art. “Black art,” he says, stages [excess], performs it, by way of things breaking and entering and exiting the exclusionary frame of the putatively ennobling, quickening representations to which they are submitted, paradoxically, as the very enfleshment of the un- or sub representable; by way of parts improperly rupturing the w/holes to which they will have never belonged or never have been fully relegated but by which they have been enveloped. (Ibid, p. 17) Moten is referring precisely the subjective-epistemological juggernaut to which we previously referred, but offers an understanding of black and, in the case of Margolles, brown art as emerging from an ontological space of fullness that goes either invisible or is denigrated because it inhabits the space of the Other, the lack that prohibits the universalized Self-Same to contain it. Interestingly, the mist of Vaporization compels us to rethink the concept of flesh and forms of sensual epistemology in a number of different ways. How do we, within the context of brown subjects of neoliberal coloniality, discuss, represent, and analytically approach “flesh” within the mainframe of the racial hierarchy of universal “humanity” that is further naturalized by neoliberalism and the global hegemony of whiteness within the neoliberal art world? How do we contend with the corporality of racialized subject within a neoliberal order of global empire that remains ordained by white supremacist monopoly of “being” without simultaneously erasing the particularities of blackness as a master signifier of abjectification? Relatedly, how does the experience of contamination address and depart from what has been erased by epistemologies and fantasies of totality that serve the double purpose to exonerate the guilty from continued systemic violence and erase the “other” into the Sameness of the universal? In other words, how does Margolles’ piece move us beyond a universalized racialized subjectivities without discounting the multiplicities and difference of embodiment that escape the hegemony of the way presentation, visuality, and relationality to the art object is mediated by an epistemology of coloniality and whiteness? Toward fleshy aesthetics of solidarity In returning to Hortense Spillers, the notion of the flesh emphasizes the limits of the knowability of black body by the objectifying gaze of whiteness. It suggests the boundaries and borderlands of how the materially extractive system of race plays out in the spectacle of the art space that aestheticizes suffering and the being of the Other(s). Musser’s work helps us to “flesh out” the productive tension that results by identifying the hegemony of racialized visuality and the material and ontological experiences that escape it. Musser observes that flesh operates within opacity and Author's personal copy Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the… illegibility, as forms of resistance. In her words, “This knowledge—what I call epistemologies of fleshiness—in order to insist on naming fleshiness as a space where ontology an epistemology come together—consists of selfhoods, intimacies, and interactions that are arranged multiply” (Musser 2018, p. 10). Theory and knowledge, in this case, emerge from flesh and are enacted by bodies; thought is thus through the body and its movements. Such propositions elicit a dialogue with the work of LaMonda Horton-Stallings. Horton-Stallings presents us with a rich, affective reading of concept of “funk.” She discusses funk not only a musical genre but as a modality of black experience, expression, and being linked to histories of blackness that connect body to labor to history (in North America and Africa) to corporality. “Funk,” she states, “produces alternate orders of knowledge about the body and imagination that originate in a sensorium predating empire of knowledge” (Horton-Stallings 2015, p. 6). Evocating an analytic to which we can think about Margolles’ vapor, funk surpasses the limits of subject/object dualisms and moving into what could be called an erotic epistemology or an epistemology of the sensual. It is within this framework that Musser suggests we think in terms of “brown jouissance,” which itself arises from her thinking through the excess of bodily or sensual experience. According to Musser, “black women are posited as the fleshy limit of theory” (Musser 2018, p. 9). Brown jouissance gives us ways to think about the possibilities of re-signifying that affective fleshiness, by showing us that which is not encumbered by discourses of sexuality, but that which traffics in sensuality, that amorphous quality of fleshiness that Spillers argues was assigned to the “captive body’” (Ibid, p. 9). What Musser is conveying is that, beyond the constraining and objectifying operation of the pornotrope, there is a flesh that is not tamed by and exceeds oppression. In turn, “brown jouissance” emphasizes the production of selfhood in relation to the social where Thing, Other, and Object converge to form subjectivity. Musser finds in Lacan and his notion of jouissance, inspiration to account for excess, or what she terms as “excess sensation,” that is constitutive of subjectivity as much as is lack. She rightly argues that “jouissance, especially phallic jouissance, is understood as something that, however, inadvertently, reifies the idea of sovereign subjectivity through an insistence on dwelling in this space of shattering, thereby emphasizing the dichotomy between subject and Thing” (Musser 2018, p. 13). If, for Lacan, jouissance is on the side of the “thing,” in her reading, brown jouissance occurs between Thing, Other, and Object, not taking place within the realm of subjectivity but in the “murkiness of flesh, self and sense.” She continues to say that “if brown jouissance is a reveling in fleshiness and its attendant web of meanings and possibilities, it brings us very directly to consider the opacity of the self and the set of relationalities and sensualities that emerges from there” (Ibid, p. 14). Musser’s framework of brown jouissance is invaluably productive for us especially when we counterpose it to stand in front of the Open Casket. Black’s and Bright’s interventions burst the placid space of innocent white witnessing that disavows the violence not only of a racial history but of a racial epistemology of aestheticization, desire, and witnessing itself. Understanding the subject/object dichotomy as relational, as Musser surely would agree, allows us to understand the dynamic nature of subject formations within agile hegemonic ontological structures Author's personal copy M. Palacios, S. Sheehi that bring together artistic expression, structural and spatial performance, and witnessing. Performance and witnessing were disrupted by, literally, the body of the artist Parker Bright and the uncompromising analytic of artist Hannah Black. These interventions speak to Margolles’ own refusal to allow such passive, “innocent” witnessing that facilitates the displacement of the unmetabolizable black and brown body. Against then the backdrop of the imperialism of particular subject formations (e.g., the imperialism of the Oedipal Family) and therefore the coloniality of modes offer for subjectivity expression and desire, Musser also allows us to consider how the plentitude of a brown jouissance—as a mode of thinking through desire in a number of racialized, transnational contexts—emerges from the space of the Other as a habitus for brown and black ontology that itself betrays the universality and hegemony of a totalizing system. Hortense Spillers critique of the process of “enfleshment”—the dehumanizing process that characterizes objectification and abjectification of black bodies during slave trade and beyond—is powerfully relevant to understanding the ways in which blackness is definitive of being for the colonial world itself as well as its neoliberal outgrowth of necropolitical post colonies. The “epistemology of fleshiness,” in Musser’s words (Ibid. p. 11), provides us with, in Spillers words, a “primary narrative” to think through the “excess” of the flesh of “others” that activates white innocence (Spillers 1987, p. 67). In no way, do we decenter blackness from the analysis of Spillers, Musser, and Moten. It is essential for us as theorists of color to stress the imperative in acknowledging and platforming that theories of flesh are squarely rooted and emerge from a history of anti-blackness and current reality of white supremacy. The “flesh” of blackness is not metaphor that can naively commute without context between racialized bodies of the Global South as whiteness, while relational, is built on anti-blackness. While racial capitalism functions on differentiation, we understand the centrality of blackness in defining the symbolic and material limits of “universal humanity.” As scholars deeply invested in the racial, anticolonial, and anti-authoritarian politics of the Global South, the concept of the flesh offers the realm of solidarity and multiplicity for those of us thinking through the relationality between lasting coloniality, racial capitalism, necropolitical neoliberalism, and embodiment within Empire and globalized racial capitalism. As the flesh escapes the traditional dualistic epistemological distinctions—where elements are perceived in their “separateness”—we are encouraged to think of dynamic assemblages, networks, of visible and invisible elements, human and not human, interacting and affecting each other. In this sense, we argue, the flesh offers a radical ethical notion of relationality from which the unevenness of power that surfaces so clearly to visibility in performances of white innocence and witnessing. Brown jouissance and resistance It is from this relational ethos that we short-circuit the affective-aesthetic matrix of innocent white witnessing that deflects from the ontological and epistemological violence that it belies. If we pursue Musser’ invocation of Lacan, we may conclude Author's personal copy Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the… that on the other side of brown jouissance is brown resistance. The body of Parker Bright that refuses the jouissance of white desire and obstructs of exculpatory white innocence is the gash that reveals the abode of the racialized Other—in space of the master(‘s) phallocentric lack—from which the plurality and liberatory jouissance of flesh emerges and abides. The limits, indeed violence and complicity, of thinking of witnessing within the context of racial anxiety are also made apparent by the powerful, disruptive intervention of Black and Bright. If Margolles teaches us ways to resist particular forms of racialized “witnessing” that erases difference in order to disavowal the structures of power that create and manage it, Black and Bright illustrate Fred Moten’s insights when he states that the “desire not to collaborate,” in fact, to act of calling out difference and extraction is an act of resistance to the object. Their act of resistance and refusal that suspends the “process of subjectification” within recuperative regimes of empathy and affect ascribe by the white universal (Moten 2003, p. 239). Understanding the epistemological and social space from which Spiller’s theory of flesh emerges, we are cautious of the dangers of instrumentalizing the theory of pornotroping for transnational racial critiques of coloniality at the expense of vacating its particularity with the black experience. A critique of white innocence then calls us to think about race, desire, subjectivity, and positionality, within and along the fault lines of the coloniality of racial hierarchy, which remains defined-epistemologically, ontologically, and materially—by the abjectification of blackness and universality of whiteness as constituent poles of the spectrum. In other words, locating the ideological function of white innocence, within its habitus of universal humanity, permits us also to consider how the flesh itself that is constituent of the “we” is not ideologically and socially same throughout this heterogeneity of the third-person collective. We have argued that in order to maintain its own coherence as well fantasies of its own transcendence, Sameness requires and produces desire because it is a Sameness that writes universal subjective-qua-white desire through invitation, hailing, seduction, coercion, and domination of brown and black bodies that, in turn, constitute the desiring “we.” At the same time, this leaves us at the huis clos of brown and black ontology, left exterior to universal “humanity” that ponders its own impossibility through the lack that is the habitus for brown and black ontology and the Otherness, which they inhabit as constitutive, supplemental objects of desire. References Bakelmun, I. 2015. Experimental Encounters: Teresa Margolles’ Vaporization. World Press https://felta cts.wordpress.com/waterfromthemorgue/. Basciano, O. 2017. 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Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. London: Duke University Press. Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Margarita Palacios is a Senior Lecturer of Social Theory at the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College University of London and Associate Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. She is the author of Violence and Political Fantasy (Wiesbaden, 2009), and Radical Sociality: Studies on Disobedience, Violence and Belonging (2013). Her last articles include “The Aesthetics of Memory: Ruins, Visibility and Witnessing” (The Sociological Review, 2019) and “A Critique of Populist Aesthetics of Homogeneity” (Theory and Event, 2020). Stephen Sheehi is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies and Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project at William & Mary. He also is an anti-racist, anti-fascist activist and active within the Palestinian solidarity movement. He is also the co-author of two forthcoming books: Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Theories and Practice of Psychoanalysis in Palestine (with Lara Sheehi, Routledge) and Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories (with Tamari and Nassar, University of California Press) as well as the author of Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860–1910 (2016), Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (2011) and Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (2004).