Afro-Pessimism and the Instantiation Thesis
If you've been following debates within cultural studies at all over the past few years you've probably heard about Afro-Pessimism. Being a controversial thesis it has been much discussed and often maligned and often unfairly. I am going to, in this post, criticise what seems to be an element of it -- but I do so partly because I think it warrants more attention from philosophers of the social sciences, and we're an odd bunch who I think pay attention to things when they are criticisable. But I don't want to contribute to the general pattern of misrepresenting it (though I do in fact almost entirely disagree with it as I understand it) and am very very very far from expert, so really I think interested readers should check out this introduction, and the associated text available here. It is on the basis of reading these, plus participating in or observing a number of informal conversations (and watching the odd lecture available online) that I comment, but I cannot stress enough that I am not actually expert on this and the scholars in that book would be a far better and more sympathetic source of introduction than me.
In an all too small nutshell, the idea is as follows. One begins with the idea of slaves as socially dead, drawn from the historical work of Orlando Peterson, and defined as follows: ``[t]he slave, as an object, is socially dead, which means they are: 1) open to gratuitous violence, as opposed to violence contingent upon some transgression or crime; 2) natally alienated, their ties of birth not recognized and familial structures intentionally broken apart; and 3) generally dishonored, or disgraced before any thought or action is considered.'' (Quotation from the linked introduction above.) Being socially dead in this fashion renders you a non-human, in the sense of being fundamentally dehumanised, not subject to the kind of rights and protections and due-respect that a human is, not being a subject at all.
In an all too small nutshell, the idea is as follows. One begins with the idea of slaves as socially dead, drawn from the historical work of Orlando Peterson, and defined as follows: ``[t]he slave, as an object, is socially dead, which means they are: 1) open to gratuitous violence, as opposed to violence contingent upon some transgression or crime; 2) natally alienated, their ties of birth not recognized and familial structures intentionally broken apart; and 3) generally dishonored, or disgraced before any thought or action is considered.'' (Quotation from the linked introduction above.) Being socially dead in this fashion renders you a non-human, in the sense of being fundamentally dehumanised, not subject to the kind of rights and protections and due-respect that a human is, not being a subject at all.
Black people remain socially dead in the above defined sense, indeed blackness, or the condition of being a black, just is conceptually the same thing as being socially dead in the above named sense. This because blackness, the condition of being a black or socially dead, is playing a certain kind of conceptual or psychological role for everyone else -- it is to be the figure that others define themselves against, that others affirm their humanity against by defining themselves in opposition to.
(This, again, certainly oversimplifies things. Read the introduction!)
Now, there are a number of things one might disagree with here. The psychological theory is, at the least, speculative, and the exact scope of the theory is always rather unclear to me. It sometimes seems to be asserted as a theory of global communal life after some point in early modernity. But whatever plausibility it has as a theory of goings on in the West seems to me to be massively decreased as a theory of the psycho-social life of nomadic folk in inner Mongolia. Do they really care that much about us black folk as to define themselves against us? Finally, my suspicion is that there is sometimes a degree of equivocation involved -- the theorist themselves often does not really seem to see blackness as so bad as all that. I'm also going to set aside my objections to the category of human (rather than sentient being) being the one we orient our rights talk around, since I don't think Afro-pessimists mean to endorse this really. But set that all this aside, and ask oneself why this idea is described as Afro-Pessimism?
Well it seems pretty pessimistic, right! Slavery never really went away in its essentials, black folk are fundamentally cut off from the category of the human with all the normative protections that entails, other folk's self-conceptions is founded on the possibility of gratuitous violence towards us. Not nice!
(This, again, certainly oversimplifies things. Read the introduction!)
Now, there are a number of things one might disagree with here. The psychological theory is, at the least, speculative, and the exact scope of the theory is always rather unclear to me. It sometimes seems to be asserted as a theory of global communal life after some point in early modernity. But whatever plausibility it has as a theory of goings on in the West seems to me to be massively decreased as a theory of the psycho-social life of nomadic folk in inner Mongolia. Do they really care that much about us black folk as to define themselves against us? Finally, my suspicion is that there is sometimes a degree of equivocation involved -- the theorist themselves often does not really seem to see blackness as so bad as all that. I'm also going to set aside my objections to the category of human (rather than sentient being) being the one we orient our rights talk around, since I don't think Afro-pessimists mean to endorse this really. But set that all this aside, and ask oneself why this idea is described as Afro-Pessimism?
Well it seems pretty pessimistic, right! Slavery never really went away in its essentials, black folk are fundamentally cut off from the category of the human with all the normative protections that entails, other folk's self-conceptions is founded on the possibility of gratuitous violence towards us. Not nice!
But actually this all rather under-sells the pessimism. For, there is also built into the theory another kind of pessimism about what might be considered a tempting reform or even revolutionary project, and it is this I wish to discuss and problematise.
One can imagine responding to the above narrative as follows. Ok, so, we take this idea of the human, and accepting that historically it has been defined against the figure of the black, we vow that henceforth we shall repurpose it to our new and more benevolent ends of <some more radical and cool sounding version of> making everyone be nice to each other. So now we are going to make it such that everyone counts as human (granting that this is not what the concept was initially or typically nowadays used for) and all are thereby due the respect this suggests, along with whatever material changes are necessary to concretely realise that.
Afro-pessimists are, if I have understood the claim correctly, committed to rejecting the coherence of any reform or revolutionary effort which takes this form. The category of the human cannot be extended to encompass (all? maybe any of?) those we now call black. Why? Well, here's where The Instantiation Thesis comes in. On a number of occasions in the introductory text somebody asserts something like this:
That's from the introductory essay. But in the linked text Wilderson makes a similar sort of remark on page 20, and Hartman (I think but am less sure) is committed to various versions of this claim throughout her first essay. The key idea here is a claim about conceptual necessity, that I think stated fully generally (and we shall come back to that) would be as follows: if X is a coherent belief/claim/concept/idea, then the antithesis of X must be instantiated. For X to make sense, there have to be some not-Xs. This, then, grounds the pessimism about the above reform, hinted at in the quoted passage, and which informal conversation suggests to me is one of the defining features of Afro-Pessimism -- you cannot make everyone human, that is simply impossible; if there were no non-humans there could be no humans, so you cannot extend the rights and normative status of the human to everyone.
The Instantiation Thesis, I take it, blocks the reformists' move by showing it to be an incoherent suggestion. Concepts don't work like that; you can reform who counts as human, but if you want some people to enjoy the rights and privileges of status as full human persons you can't make it such that nobody isn't human. We define black people as analytically those who are without (we mumble a bit and miss some subtleties about modal quantification in assuming that this means that roughly all the people or kind of people who actually are black now must forever remain inhuman -- I can forgive this!) and we say that there must always, as a matter of conceptual necessity, be black people, and the benevolent reformist project can't work.
Another concern might be that I am treating this like it is a metaphysical or conceptual claim, when in fact it is a psychological claim. Yes it is coherent to think about concepts or possible objects whose antitheses are nowhere instantiated, but just as a matter of fact people cannot do that. And it is this psychological claim that Afro-pessimists really mean to rest their anti-reformism upon. If so, again, I would consider it an advance just for this point to be made clear and defended as such. But, also again, it seems false to me - I don't really find it hard to understand the idea of a non-unicorn or a mortal Irishman, I think I can easily identify such things and describe properties of them, and even orient my actions around them where it is pertinent -- that someone is both mortal and Irish might well be significant! So, if this is to be the claim, I would like to know why it should be believed.
And without anything like the Instantiation Thesis I just don't see why Afropessimism couldn't prompt a sort of meliorative reformism (which may require revolutionary changes to the social order) as mentioned above. In fact, I think something like this may even be starting to happen in the popular sphere, as I have mentioned before that the 1619 Project seems to combine Afropessimist premises with a reformist (in this case non-revolutionary) liberal political bent. If the problem really is that blackness, or black people, are playing this global libidinal role of being the opposite of what's respectable and rights worthy - we could just not. We could stop that. Let's... let's stop that?
One can imagine responding to the above narrative as follows. Ok, so, we take this idea of the human, and accepting that historically it has been defined against the figure of the black, we vow that henceforth we shall repurpose it to our new and more benevolent ends of <some more radical and cool sounding version of> making everyone be nice to each other. So now we are going to make it such that everyone counts as human (granting that this is not what the concept was initially or typically nowadays used for) and all are thereby due the respect this suggests, along with whatever material changes are necessary to concretely realise that.
Afro-pessimists are, if I have understood the claim correctly, committed to rejecting the coherence of any reform or revolutionary effort which takes this form. The category of the human cannot be extended to encompass (all? maybe any of?) those we now call black. Why? Well, here's where The Instantiation Thesis comes in. On a number of occasions in the introductory text somebody asserts something like this:
``As a result, it is Blackness, and more specifically anti-Blackness, that gives coherence to categories of non-Black—white, worker, gay, i.e., “human.” Categories of non-Black must establish their boundaries for inclusion in a group (humanity) by having a recognizable self within. There must also, consequently, be an outside to each group, and, as with the concept of humanity, it is Blackness that is without; it is Blackness that is the dark matter surrounding and holding together the categories of non-Black. ''
That's from the introductory essay. But in the linked text Wilderson makes a similar sort of remark on page 20, and Hartman (I think but am less sure) is committed to various versions of this claim throughout her first essay. The key idea here is a claim about conceptual necessity, that I think stated fully generally (and we shall come back to that) would be as follows: if X is a coherent belief/claim/concept/idea, then the antithesis of X must be instantiated. For X to make sense, there have to be some not-Xs. This, then, grounds the pessimism about the above reform, hinted at in the quoted passage, and which informal conversation suggests to me is one of the defining features of Afro-Pessimism -- you cannot make everyone human, that is simply impossible; if there were no non-humans there could be no humans, so you cannot extend the rights and normative status of the human to everyone.
The Instantiation Thesis, I take it, blocks the reformists' move by showing it to be an incoherent suggestion. Concepts don't work like that; you can reform who counts as human, but if you want some people to enjoy the rights and privileges of status as full human persons you can't make it such that nobody isn't human. We define black people as analytically those who are without (we mumble a bit and miss some subtleties about modal quantification in assuming that this means that roughly all the people or kind of people who actually are black now must forever remain inhuman -- I can forgive this!) and we say that there must always, as a matter of conceptual necessity, be black people, and the benevolent reformist project can't work.
Here's the problem with the instantiation thesis. It's not true, and nothing like it is true. We have lots of concepts which we can make sense of even though their negations are not instantiated. I'm a non-unicorn and I am guessing so are you - this no wise proves there are unicorns. I'm a mortal Irishman, this does not mean that there is some immortal Irishman running around there. Even if I widened the catchment and said I am a mortal human, this would not in and of itself be proof of Christ's divinity. The table in front of me is (in the logician's sense) self-identical - this is not a proof that there are non-self-identical objects out there, nor does the fact that it is either red or not red prove that somethings are neither red nor not red... etc etc. This doesn't strike me as a problem with any particular way of spelling out the instantiation thesis, which perhaps some refinement could fix. It is just entirely false - we really don't need to instantiate the negation of a concept in order to make the concept itself intelligible.
Now the worry might arise that I have over generalised. People do not usually state the Instantiation Thesis in so general a manner, after all. Perhaps they mean it just for normative concepts, or maybe just in particular for the relationship between the human and the black. If this is so, I would consider it an advance for this to be made more clear and explicitly defended as such, because I do not see why these concepts should be an exception. I think, for instance, that to say of someone that they are omnicidal (guilty of murdering all lifeforms) is coherent and condemnatory, but that thankfully there have never been any omnicidal people or groups that I know of. So it is not apparent to me that normative concepts form an exception that render the Instantiation Thesis true, and it is not at all clear why the human/black dichotomy should be sui generis in this regard.
Another concern might be that I am treating this like it is a metaphysical or conceptual claim, when in fact it is a psychological claim. Yes it is coherent to think about concepts or possible objects whose antitheses are nowhere instantiated, but just as a matter of fact people cannot do that. And it is this psychological claim that Afro-pessimists really mean to rest their anti-reformism upon. If so, again, I would consider it an advance just for this point to be made clear and defended as such. But, also again, it seems false to me - I don't really find it hard to understand the idea of a non-unicorn or a mortal Irishman, I think I can easily identify such things and describe properties of them, and even orient my actions around them where it is pertinent -- that someone is both mortal and Irish might well be significant! So, if this is to be the claim, I would like to know why it should be believed.
And without anything like the Instantiation Thesis I just don't see why Afropessimism couldn't prompt a sort of meliorative reformism (which may require revolutionary changes to the social order) as mentioned above. In fact, I think something like this may even be starting to happen in the popular sphere, as I have mentioned before that the 1619 Project seems to combine Afropessimist premises with a reformist (in this case non-revolutionary) liberal political bent. If the problem really is that blackness, or black people, are playing this global libidinal role of being the opposite of what's respectable and rights worthy - we could just not. We could stop that. Let's... let's stop that?
Here's a counter-objection to your general rejection of the instantiation thesis, which I'm going to make as logically strong as possible by ignoring the question of the concept of 'humanity', before pivoting back towards it.
ReplyDeleteAttempting to view every concept as if there are necessary and sufficient conditions for its application that can be adjudicated and applied without reference to given instances leads us into a bunch of paradoxes whose attempted solutions have been traditionally grouped under the heading of 'semantic externalism' in the analytic tradition. These solutions range from the metaphysically silly (Kripke's analytic a posteriori (Naming and Necessity) and direct democracy of rules(Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language)) to the pragmatically subtle (Brandom's account of anaphoric chains). But the subtlest accounting of these issues has been carried out by those directly influenced by Hegel, so not just Brandom, but Lakatos.Mathematics is the closest we come to a discourse based on pure stipulative definitions, in which we can make a crisp distinction between analytic book-keeping and synthetic discovery (cf. Martin-Lof's work on type theory and its development in Homotopy Type Theory). However, Lakatos shows us that even here, on the analytic's home turf, the process of discovery requires dialectical concepts whose content is still unfolding, in such a way that it is not reducible to the working definitions operative in our current best research programs. This is a point made more forcefully by Lautman (and to some extent Cavailles) in the French epistemological tradition (though it was not developed due to them both being executed for their involvement in the French resistance). To give you an archetypical example, the concept of 'space' is not reducible to any of the syntactic frameworks that have been introduced to capture it over the history of mathematics (a point made within mathematics by another great Hegelian: William Lawvere). If you want a clear example of this, look at the history of topology, in which the Bourbaki group consolidated the early developments and articulated a standard point-set approach to spaces. This analytic conception of space was then challenged over the following decades by the formalisation of pointless topology within the the framework of category theory (i.e., Grothendieck and topos theory). We can see these punctuated moments in which the formalism becomes stable as expanding the analytic content of the concept of space, but it is all too easy to forget the intervening dialectical moments, and worse, to forget that there may be more to come.
This is where Lakatos's Proofs and Refutations shines, because it is all about the rational reconstruction of these dialectical interludes in the evolution of syntactic self-consciousness. Crucially, one thing that Lakatos identifies is the importance of concrete examples in the dialogical process through which the content of geometric concepts (i.e., polyhedra) is determined. These examples are in some sense intuitive, rather than formal. One draws a monstrous polyhedra on the board and asks one's interlocutor: "Why does this not count as a counter-example to the Euler conjecture?". In this moment the interlocutor must either abandon their hypothesis or struggle to delimit it in opposition to the counter-example, which is how we get the concept of 'regular' polyhedra, which is eventually analytically formalised, but is, albeit briefly, defined in opposition to a concrete instance. Such dialectical flashes occur throughout the history of mathematics, and form part of the historical excess which allow mathematicians to reach back into the tradition and articulate new paradigms opposed to those presently dominant. This is something like what Badiou means by an 'event': it's a brute example that forms the basis of a new truth-procedure, a line of thinking that might fail to produce anything worthwhile, but which is on that basis a real commitment (or 'fidelity').
ReplyDeleteIf such moments occur even within the fortress of analyticity that is mathematics, what might be expected of the evolution of empirical science, and worse, the articulation of those thick normative concepts which form the basis of our ethico-political communicative economy. The 'human' is something of a master concept here, and our contemporary inability digest its difference from the biological concept of 'Homo sapiens' is a case in point (https://deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/rationalist-inhumanism.pdf). I completely agree with your criticisms of afropessism as you have defined it, insofar as it amounts to the thesis that the very fact that the dialectical development of the notion of 'humanity' includes appeals to concrete examples of 'non-humanity' precludes us from seeing its history as an imperfect articulation of a commitment that we might ourselves take up and imperfectly improve (cf. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/52/59920/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-i-human/). Indeed, this is why I find afrofuturism far more interesting, insofar as it takes the same moment of historical abjection and alienation (the role of slavery in the genesis of the African diaspora) as something like an 'event' in the sense mentioned above: as a moment that is not merely overlooked and ignored, but constituted by a failure of mutual recognition that is instructive; a failure to be highlighted and appropriated by those who wish to revise and re-articulate humanism in a way that points towards a better future. However, this disciplined optimism is in some sense dependent on the same basic semantic conceit as its pessimistic twin. If we want not simply to bemoan the horrors of modernity, but articulate alternative modernisms that might correct them, we have to acknowledge the historical dimension of the content of our concepts, and its difficult if not intractable messiness. The concrete instances that obsess those interested in semantic externalism as as often negative as they are positive, even if they are in some important sense temporary.
These are all interesting thoughts and I think we come to the same place, so thank you for sharing! But it seems to rest on an opening dichotomy that I am not sure why we would agree with: namely, that there is the mode of things wherein we are so totally bound by the history of actual usage that we ignore real possibilities of alternative ways of proceeding, or we have something like a power of free stipulation and may meliorate social usage simply by declaring otherwise. In fact that's a false dichotomy, since we may presumably try to understand the history, sociology, and psychology of why people understand the world as they do, and build possibilities of doing better out of the material we find there, in addition to the concrete institutional and environmental changes we may hope to bring about.
Delete- or, rather, it doesn't rest on that dichotomy because at the end you call for getting out of it. So really what I wonder is: why did you think I buy into that dichotomy? I just agree with you!
I think we basically agree, but my point is that your argument against afropessimism can easily be interpreted as saying something too strong. I'm all for breaking with history (I'm on a big Paine kick after all!), but it's easy to overemphasise how easy such breaks are. There's a reason we don't often end up with completely sui generis frameworks in mathematics, and why there's so much controversy when things come close to this (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00998-2).
DeleteAn afropessimist might accuse you of glibly insisting that we redefine not just our vocbularies, but the sets of practices that they are entangled within, from scratch. I don't think this is what you're proposing, and I certainly don't think disagreeing with afropessimism implies this much (as afrofuturism demonstrates). I simply think that your position is made stronger by acknowledging the general point that terms defined in opposition to concrete examples do play a role in semantics more generally, and even political semantics specifically, and that this role might even be positive, as long as we're sufficiently careful/skeptical.
For instance, we might say that any republicanism that did not acknowledge the Haitian revolution is no true republicanism. This is not yet to do the difficult work of defining what true republicanism is, be it by appeal to history or by starting afresh, but it is a spur to such work, and on that basis in some sense part of it. I know there are plenty of people who've worked on this very problem, and that there are many strategies for solving it, but a neat way of encapsulating some of them is by saying that they take the meaning of the term to be defined in opposition to this example of failed mutual recognition (which is a double negation of sorts, oh snap).
Haha I guess they could, so in that case I shall say - I quite agree with what deontologistics has said here, and didn't mean "we could just not" to be a full proposal of a political programme lmao
DeleteI think the human/sentient being distinction deserves more than the quick aside you give it, because it's very common in animal studies to claim that literal non-human animals play exactly the role—whether conceptual or psychological—that you've sketched Afro-pessimism as assigning to black humans: they are the essentially othered out-group, who are thrown under the bus in order to sustain in-group equality among all the "humans" higher than they in the social hierarchy.
ReplyDeleteNotably, it's very common for marginalized humans to protest their oppression by saying that they are being "treated like animals"—implying that other animals, not themselves, are the "non-human", socially dead group who may licitly be exposed to gratuitous violence, torn from their families, and reflexively abased. (http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/01/treated-like-animals-guest-post-by-christine-korsgaard/) Essentially, this line of argument agrees that "if you want some people to enjoy the status of full human persons, you can't make it such that nobody isn't human", but argues that animals are "somebody" enough to fulfill this sacrificial role.
If this is apt, it brings the Afro-pessimism debate into direct dialogue with Will Kymlicka's "Human Rights Without Human Supremacism" (doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2017.1386481, available on Academia.edu). Kymlicka argues that it is not only conceptually preferable to oppose, say, solitary confinement on species-neutral grounds, but that as an empirical psychological and political point, reinscribing species hierarchies actually only makes dominant groups *more* likely to dehumanize human out-groups such as racial minorities. He's a "zoo-optimist" who thinks that moral reflection can convince people to shed their need for a scapegoated outgroup entirely.
All of which points to an intermediate level of generalization for the Instantiation Thesis: human/black, human/nonhuman, and in general in-group/out-group may have the following special psychological property (perhaps as a result of evolutionary psychology, or of the conceptual structure of kyriarchy): in order to provide the benefits that motivate key concept-users to keep them around (e.g. the wages of whiteness), they have to be instantiated with a certain amount of salience. There have to be Black and Brown workers bagging your groceries for you, slums for you to drive past and feel glad you don't live in them, juicy steaks on your plate to silently remind you that your life is valued more highly than a cow's. And the Afro-pessimism debate comes down to the question of whether the joys of compassion and solidarity can triumph politically over the mean pleasures of superiority.
Ah so the reason I didn't say much on it here is that I think ultimately Afro-Pessimists might actually agree with the critique of the very idea of the category of the human as the means by which we organise access to moral regard. After all, they are hardly endorsing the moral/conceptual order as they describe it! So I thought it would be confusing for me to focus too much on that here, because it might suggest I was attributing to the Afro-Pessimists this problem.
DeleteI agree with what you say though, and that means the point you raise at the end is very interesting to me! That would be a good argument for the (nearly) sui generis status of this particular case of the Instantiation Thesis. I think, to flesh it out, I'd basically need to see the psychological evidence for the underlying claim. So I think that if that evidence could be provided it'd make me at least rethink this, and wonder what sort of reform is possible here and how.
Great reply, cheers!
So glad you liked it, thanks!
DeleteMy focus is on animals, and I think meat psychology is a good case study. Because most people in the Global North have little daily contact with farmed animals (or public executions, or wars), one of the primary way they control the salience of the primal "killable/non-killable" hierarchy in their lives is by modulating their animal consumption.
And there is some empirical evidence that some humans, in some contexts, are motivated to bring meat into their lives when they want an ego boost. Specifically, two (independent but non-peer-reviewed) theses have found that if you (falsely) tell US and Canadian men that they have been rated "low-masculinity", they are more likely to order pizza with meat rather than veggie toppings—but not because they're more hungry, in fact if you *don't* give them the choice to manipulate meat salience they eat somewhat less. (Lipshitz 2009 https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/18819/1/Lipschitz_Lisa_J_200911_MA_thesis.pdf, Pohlmann 2014 https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/100470/1/Pohlmann_Attila_r.pdf). I admit this might be a pretty thin basis for rethinking your entire ontology of social hierarchy, though!
There's also "terror management theory" research, like Lifshin 2017: if you subconsciously prime US undergrads to think about their own mortality, they become more supportive of killing non-human animals in a variety of contexts. Not direct evidence on "instantiation", but supports the underlying idea that dominant group members, when psychologically threatened, sometimes take comfort in directing violence towards subordinate groups. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316324725_The_Evil_Animal_A_Terror_Management_Theory_Perspective_on_the_Human_Tendency_to_Kill_Animals)
Thank you so much for sharing, I hope readers to this post in the future see this convo and can follow through on the sources. Great stuff!
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