{"id":259,"date":"2023-06-28T15:16:55","date_gmt":"2023-06-28T22:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/women-in-theory\/?page_id=259"},"modified":"2023-07-24T15:00:24","modified_gmt":"2023-07-24T22:00:24","slug":"zakiyyah-iman-jackson-becoming-human-matter-and-meaning-in-an-antiblack-world-nyu-press-2020","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/women-in-theory\/zakiyyah-iman-jackson-becoming-human-matter-and-meaning-in-an-antiblack-world-nyu-press-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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\n Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World\n <\/h2>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy,\u00a0Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World\u00a0breaks open the rancorous debate between black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing,\u00a0Becoming Human\u00a0demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of blackness\u2014the process of imagining the black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero\u2014and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human\/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of \u201cthe human.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Zakiyyah Iman Jackson,
\nAssociate Professor of English (U. of Southern California)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n

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\n Forum Contributors \n <\/h2>\n\n\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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\n \n Penelope Deutscher \n\n <\/h3>\n \n \n
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Northwestern University<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n <\/div>\n \n

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\n \n Tavia Nyong\u2019o\n\n <\/h3>\n \n \n
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Yale University<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n <\/div>\n \n

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\n \n Joshua Chambers-Letson\n\n <\/h3>\n \n \n
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Northwestern University<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Penelope Deutscher<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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The many debates into which\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0intervenes include post-Foucauldian interest in the interrelation of power\u2019s multiple techniques and forms, a relationality to which Zakiyyah Jackson adds the term \u201contological plasticization\u201d (Jackson 2020, 71).[1]<\/a>\u00a0Jackson and others have pursued a question also explored (less richly) by Michel Foucault:\u00a0how<\/em>\u00a0these forms of power cohabit or inter-penetrate? More specifically, what role does the entangled relationality of diverse forms of power play in effecting racism\u2019s violence and ontocide? As used by Jackson, the term plasticity[2]<\/a>\u00a0refers to the \u201cdynamic motility of antiblack arrangement\u201d (Jackson 2020, 72, 73) and is routed less via Malabou than through Saidiya Hartman\u2019s use of the term to characterize concurrent recognition and denial of humanity under slavery (Hartman 1997, 119; Jackson 2020, 219, n. 2).<\/p>\n

Foucault, whose work contains a number of accounts of the interrelationship of different forms of power,[3]<\/a>\u00a0is also an intermittent reference. But for all that he makes mention of domination, as Jackson points out, he was far less inclined than have been Jackson (and others, including Banu Bargu, Saidiya Hartman, and Jasbir Puar) to understand the very inter-penetration of diverse forms of power (among these: sovereign, discipline, securitizing, bio- and necro-political forms of power, pastoral, neoliberal and debt governmentality, states of exception, ontological terror)\u00a0as<\/em>\u00a0critical to understanding the complexity of domination specifically, still less as the complexity of racial domination.[4]<\/a>\u00a0Also prominent in this emerging cluster of conceptual problematics is the Deleuzian term\u00a0assemblage.<\/em>[5]<\/a>\u00a0It, too, is annexed by a number of post-Foucauldian theorists to revisit domination\u2019s multiplicity of interrelated forms, all in a way that gives prominence to paradox and contradiction within this interrelationality.<\/p>\n

All these elements are at work, for example, in Banu Bargu\u2019s analysis of how disciplinary, sovereign, and biopolitical forms of power interact. Their very relationship should itself, she argues, be understood as a further, distinct form of power, \u201cbiosovereignty\u201d (Bargu 2016, 84). Moreover, to this nexus corresponds the similarly specific form of resistance she has termed \u201cnecroresistance.\u201d To the difference of Jackson, Bargu reserves the term \u201cresistance\u201d for concerted actions arising from individual or group agency (Bargu 2016, 83, 85-6). By contrast, in the diversity of resistant embodiment and resistant aesthetic production explored in\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>, Jackson broadens considerably the scope of resistance and the transformation with which agency is associated (now extended to the biology of antiblackness\u2019 biopolitical formations). Moreover, her interest in Hartman\u2019s use of the term plasticity allows closer attention to the materiality of domination\u2019s contradictory or paradoxical forms.<\/p>\n

When Hartman\u2019s\u00a0Scenes of Subjection<\/em>\u00a0speaks to how the immediate conditions for ex-slaves (new laws restricting freedom of movement, enforcing work contracts, deflating wages, necessitating debt, an extensive system of penalties, fines, debt, and arrest for minor infractions, and the extensive use of prisoner labor) undermined the ability to realize the promoted norms of autonomous individuality and self-improvement, it could be said that different forms of power, including disciplinary norms for the conduct of freedom and sovereign strategies of domination impose contradictory expectations. But this very phenomenon intensifies the viciousness of racial domination, in an environment that coerces and renders inevitable a \u201cfailing\u201d conduct of freedom that is also deemed blameworthy. Jackson amplifies the potential effect of turning to the term plasticity in this context. Here, she is not referring to a more general \u201cmovement and passage between the formation and dissolution of form\u201d (Jackson 2020, 226n39, citing James 2012) but to a more specific \u201cpotential that can turn against itself\u201d (Jackson 2020, 72, 73). \u00a0This potential has at least two overlapping dimensions: on the one hand, racial domination\u2019s drive to transform blackness maximally into a resource of extraction within the limits of viability (Jackson 2020, 10, also discussing Smallwood 2007, 36). On the other hand, Jackson gives attention to how the very multiplicity of forms of power effecting racial domination can also give rise to dissonance and conflicting effects. A coincidence of aims does not preclude a conjunction of contradictory techniques. And since \u201cpower only takes direction from its own shifting exigencies,\u201d (Jackson 2020, 10), the complex cruelty of domination will sometimes have \u201cchaotic results\u201d (Jackson 2020, 10).<\/p>\n

This is explored in\u00a0Becoming Human\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0brilliant reading of Toni Morrison. Insofar as sovereign domination both aimed to reduce slaves to animality while coercing sufficient humanity to extract productive work and reproduction,\u00a0Beloved<\/em>\u00a0speaks to how its own technologies can undermine this aim: an enslaved man might come to be mesmerized by the greater autonomy of a rooster, in a competition concerning prestige and masculinity whose incoherence is also eloquent. It engages and confuses the hierarchical binaries of gender, animality and humanity it also supposes. \u00a0Scene of torture might destroy the capacity for interaction, speech or work. Brutal conditions intended to animalize might produce a form of maternal care whose expression is infanticide, disrupting control or profitability.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

Jackson revisits black maternity differently in \u201cOrgans of War.\u201d Discussing the relationship between racial violence, debilitated environments, and the biological milieux of reproduction, she argues that the necropoliticized reproductive environments of racial domination should not just be seen in terms of debilitated effect. When the biological materiality of racism in the United States has included higher adult and infant mortality, or the increased likelihood of cancer, \u201cbiology\u2019s agency is not prior to or independent of the biopolitical order but\u00a0embedded<\/em>\u00a0in biopolitical systems\u201d (Jackson 2020, 199). The toxic environments of antiblackness also produce bodily environments, with the result that the latter are not only the passive recipients of power\u2019s effects. Rather, Jackson describes biological environments in which the \u201cvery agency of the body produces the conditions of possibility for the racially disparate gutting of bodies by reproductive tumors and cancerous cells\u201d (Jackson 2020, 199).<\/p>\n

So, when Jackson specifies, \u201cIf the aim is to argue that blackness is nothingness and to demystify the machinations that make blackness appear as something, my aim is the opposite: I maintain that blackness, and the abject fleshly figures that bear the weight of\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0world, is a being . . . and I aim to reveal and unsettle the machinations that suggest that blackness is nothingness\u201d (Jackson,2020,85), a number of interventions into contemporary debates are clustering together at this point. Jackson\u2019s lexicon includes being, matter, and power. Where ontocide would refer to racial domination\u2019s capacity to effect blackness\u2019 status of non-being (an ontological status in which being is intertwined with forms of power associated with domination and sovereign decision), Jackson\u2019s agreement that racial domination requires contradictory and mutually unsettling forms has a different result:<\/p>\n

Antiblackness \u2014 if it is a system rather than a ground \u2014 will have to confront\u00a0that\u00a0<\/em>which exceeds its structure of stable replication and confounds its adaptive operations, which are the very conditions that generate mutational possibility. (Jackson, 2020, 214)<\/p>\n

This is to locate subtle forms of resistance at the level of biological formations. Racial ontocide\u2019s contradiction between being and blackness (Warren 2018), also works though contradictory effects arising from the sometimes conflicting techniques required by a plurality of forms of power. These techniques are corporeal (at once presupposing and producing the bodies that are molecular, individual, and multiplicities). To locate contradictory effects within the capacity for mutation is, for Jackson, to excavate something other than non-being. When racism relies on multiple techniques of power coalescing as a corporeal relationality, that relationality can also be understood as a form of mutual interrogation. The recent critical reflection in Miller\u2019s\u00a0Embryos and Alphabets<\/em>\u00a0(Miller 2017) on new materialist theorization of biological agency that still assigns \u201cintelligent\u201d agency elsewhere, might see an alternative in Jackson\u2019s account of the paradoxical biology and contradictory reproductive environments of racial domination. In\u00a0Becoming Human,\u00a0<\/em>to speak of the paradox, contradiction and even the chaos of corporeal forms and states can also be a means of acknowledging them to be astute.<\/p>\n

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NOTES<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a>\u00a0\u201cSlavery\u2019s technologies were not the denial of humanity but the plasticization of humanity,\u201d (Jackson 2020, 71).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a>\u00a0See Jackson, 2020, 10 and 71-3 for her differentiation from Malabou\u2019s usage of plasticity.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a>\u00a0 See particularly his College de France lectures:\u00a0Security, Territory, Population<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Society Must Be Defended<\/em>. In\u00a0Society Must Be Defended<\/em>\u00a0Foucault mentions the \u201cpenetration\u201d, \u201cpermeation\u201d of these forms of power, in\u00a0Security, Territory Population<\/em>, he refers to their coincidence and also to their transformation, taking up, redeploying, reactivation of each other (Foucault 2003, 241; Foucault 2007, 8-9).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a>\u00a0 While emphasizing in a footnote that\u00a0 she is \u201ctheorizing what Foucault would not, namely domination,\u201d Jackson points out that while for Foucault domination is a calcified form poorly adapted to analyzing power\u2019s multiple relationalities, he does sometimes \u201callow for some modicum of relational capacity and distributed agency to exist in domination\u201d (Jackson 2020,\u00a0<\/em>234).<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a>\u00a0Used, for example by Bargu (2016), Jackson (2020), Puar (2017), and Gago (2017).<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a>\u00a0Adding to the dialogue, Weinbaum speaks to Morrison\u2019s (deliberately \u201ctrue but not factual\u201d) choice in\u00a0Beloved<\/em>\u00a0to have Schoolteacher abandon Sethe, and her sons, deeming them to be past the point from which value can be extracted, as contrasting with the historical account of Margaret Garner who was recaptured along with her sons, and returned to slavery (Weinbaum 2019, 90).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bargu, Banu. 2016.\u00a0Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons<\/em>. New York: Columbia University Press<\/p>\n

Foucault, Michel. 2003.\u00a0Society must be Defended: Lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, 1975-76.\u00a0<\/em>London: Picador.<\/p>\n

Foucault, Michel. 2007.\u00a0Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France 1977-1978<\/em>. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n

Foucault, Michel. 2014. \u201cBio-history and Bio\u2010politics,\u201d\u00a0Foucault Studies<\/em>\u00a018 (2014): 128\u2010130.<\/p>\n

Gago, Ver\u00f3nica. 2017.\u00a0Neoliberalism From Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economics<\/em>. Durham: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n

Hartman, Saidiya. 1997.\u00a0Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America.\u00a0<\/em>Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. 2020.\u00a0Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World<\/em>. New York: New York University Press.<\/p>\n

James, Ian. 2012.\u00a0The New French Philosophy<\/em>. New York and London: Polity.<\/p>\n

Miller, Ruth A. 2017.\u00a0The Biopolitics of Embryos and Alphabets: A Reproductive History of the Nonhuman<\/em>. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

Puar, Jasbir. 2017.\u00a0The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability.<\/em>\u00a0Durham and London: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n

Smallwood, Stephanie E. 2007.\u00a0Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa American Diaspora<\/em>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n

Warren, Calvin. 2018.\u00a0Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation<\/em>. Durham: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n

Weheliye, Alex. 2014.\u00a0Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human<\/em>. Durham: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n

Weinbaum, Alys. 2019.\u00a0The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery<\/em>. Durham and London: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Tavia Nyong\u2019o<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0arrives at a time when we urgently need to rethink the humanist and posthumanist terms that constrain even our most radical proposals to overthrow the present order. Although critical theory has long been skeptical of anthropocentrism, and although political praxis has become increasingly attuned to the existential threat of the anthropocene, (post)humanist discourse in general has failed to unflinchingly confront the antiblackness that underpins discourses of the human. Even more devastatingly, the interventions of black feminism have yet to be fully acknowledged as critiques of the universalizing tendencies that seek to constrain their relevance to the local and identitarian. Zakiyyah Jackson\u2019s\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0takes up this necessary task. At a theoretical level, it holds the promise of breaking open a quickly calcifying debate between critical race studies and (post)humanism over the polemical uses of the figure of the animal as a target of humanitarian concern. At a political level, it renews the scope and urgency of black feminist study as\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0critique of an antiblack world. And it accomplishes both its theoretical and its political task by intervening decisively into the philosophy of plasticity\u2014a term which has grown almost into a critical fetish in recent years\u2014and grounding it in the speculative and abolitionist project of black studies.<\/p>\n

Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0achieves all this with both care and rigor, attending to art and literature that are, in Christina Sharpe\u2019s resonant phrase, \u201cin excess of the matrix of antiblackness and its constitutive forms of the human, animal, gender, and matter.\u201d At a moment when the matter of black life is again shaking the neoliberal order to its core, proving once again that spectacularized pain and suffering can never, in and of itself, redeem the humanist project,\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0is a deep dive into the radical alternative imaginary through which African diasporic aesthetics challenge and displace white supremacist and Eurocentric hierarchical orderings of the human. In so doing, Jackson joins recent thinkers like Denise da Silva, Jayna Brown, Alexander Weheliye, Fred Moten, and Kandice Chuh, all of whom have argued powerfully against the pursuit of sovereign individuality as a remedy for historical and present-day dehumanization, and have instead looked to a radical aesthetic grounded in social and relational figurations. Jackson\u2019s detailed readings of speculative art and literature advance this project through her singular and virtuosic erudition: hers is an intelligence that encompasses without recapitulating, that explains without reducing, and that, above all, affirms the complexity of life without succumbing to a vague or sentimental vitalism.<\/p>\n

For a long while now, the black radical tradition has asked the question: how do we live with the seeming permanence of antiblack violence? One recent answer has been to embrace world-annihilating forms of nihilism and pessimism, and to seek to wield these forms of negativity to extricate black critical thought from any lingering residual attachment to either liberal or radical humanism.\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0intervenes within this contemporary debate over critical negativity by decisively insisting that the terms of the debate must include sexuality, reproduction, and gender. But it insists equally that these terms cannot be thought of in humanist or white-normative frameworks. The speculative turn that Jackson makes is therefore not one into escapist fantasy, as skeptics often assume. Black queer feminist speculation, to the contrary, is a crucial form of thought experiment, a necessary propaedeutic to any future collective project of unbecoming human.<\/p>\n

But what can aesthetic forms like speculative fiction teach us about the violence of liberal conceptions of the human in racial capitalism? How can we possibly think or imagine when the policeman\u2019s boot is on our neck?\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0understands this crisis as a crisis of meaning, and enjoins us not to surrender our critical faculties in the face of annihilatory violence. We can see this violence at work in the present moment, in which the \u201csovereign\u201d rights of \u201ccitizens\u201d to peacefully assemble are being invidiously contrasted with indefensible and criminal acts of looting and the destruction of property. Violent police suppression of protest is being justified as necessary to preserve the sanctity of property relations that, Jackson reminds us, are grounded in the property relation that was slavery. In her reading of Octavia Butler\u2019s story \u201cBloodchild,\u201d Jackson charts a path beyond this liberal humanist subject, showing how Butler \u201creplaces it with a radical conception of subjectivity that sees generative possibility\u201d in the relational (Jackson 2020, 140). Butler\u2019s tale of interspecies symbiotic dependency between humans and an insectoid alien species, Jackson argues, dismantles the ruse of the \u201cself-determining and self-defining\u201d subject, showing it to be grounded in gendered fantasies that \u201creject the master\u2019s authority but not the property relation\u201d (Jackson 2020, 143). In the place of this self-determining and autonomous individual, Jackson\u2019s reading derives a black feminist political ontology from \u201cBloodchild,\u201d one in which \u201cthe political is now the ever-expanding processual field of the relational dynamics of life in ceaseless flux and directionless becoming\u201d (Jackson 2020, 157).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Joshua Chambers-Letson<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Vertigo. A disordering, whirling sensation. A loss of equilibrium, loss of bearing, loss of a foothold\u00a0in the world<\/em>. The loss of a world coming undone. Vertigo, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson describes it in\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u2019s second chapter, is \u201cthat sense of unhinged reality, a communion with death and that realm which exceeds life [and] seems to threaten a total loss of self as incommensurable metaphysical frameworks and sensory maps meet\u201d (Jackson 2020, 114). But, here, this sense of \u201cunhinged reality\u201d is not merely some abstract conceptualization of \u201cbeing in the world\u201d: it is the sense of blackness, or even black people\u2019s experience of being within a world constituted through the registers of antiblackness. As Jackson describes it in her reading of a speculative novel by Nalo Hopkinson), vertigo is a state that \u201cfunctions as a metaphor for the \u2018onto-epistemological\u2019 predicament of black mater, as mater, as matter under conditions of imperial Western modernity or the conception of Man within the terms of a taxonomical telos\u201d (Jackson 2020, 83).<\/p>\n

The density of this passage requires a slow unpacking, but notice first how the encounter with Jackson\u2019s prose may produce a vertiginous effect for the reader (or listener). In both of these quotations one becomes entangled within beautiful, dark, difficult and revelatory language from a theoretician who is fully in grasp of her powers such that the experience of reading\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0affects a vertiginous pull towards the letting go of an idea of the world in which matter and being are determined by and determinative of antiblackness. Giving up on an antiblack world will, indeed, produce a sense of vertigo. But, as the work of one of Jackson\u2019s chief interlocutors (Octavia Butler) routinely reminds us, the teleology of\u00a0this<\/em>\u00a0world (which is to say, of this antiblack world) is almost certainly on a collision course with catastrophic annihilation. Vertigo, as an alternative to a telos that keeps black life on a trajectory towards death, becomes a constricted but no less immanent condition of possibility.<\/p>\n

The vertiginous pull of\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0is not a fall into the abyss of nihilistic negation. It\u2019s the experience of accompanying Jackson as she weaves together a new language for speaking of the way that, as she writes, \u201cblack mater holds the potential to transform the terms of reality and feeling, therefore rewriting the conditions of possibility of the empirical\u201d (Jackson 2020, 39). Working with interlocutors that include Hopkinson, Butler, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Audre Lorde, Wangechi Mutu, Toni Morrison, Frank Wilderson, Alex Weheliye, and Saidiya Hartman, among others, Jackson insists that antiblackness is not just a thing-in-the-world, it is the environment: an \u201cecology of violence\u2014pervasive and chronic\u201d (Jackson 2020, 208). Antiblackness isn\u2019t just the air we breathe, or can\u2019t breathe (depending on the circumstances), it is also the particulate, molecular stuff of being-in-an-antiblackworld.<\/p>\n

Playing with the aural resemblance between matter (referring to a thing, a physical substance, a concept, and, ultimately, the\u00a0stuff of being<\/em>) and mater (the mother),\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0insists that blackness and the black mater(nal) are not simply sites of negation or the constitutive limits against which Man and his order of dominion is defined.[i]<\/a>\u00a0Through a critique and deposition of the \u201cprevailing conceptions of [and racialized cleavages between] \u2018the human\u2019 [and the animal]\u201d within Western science and philosophy,\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0shows us how \u201cBlackness has been central to, rather than excluded from liberal humanism: the black body is an essential index for the calculation of degree of humanity and the measure of human progress\u201d (Jackson 2020, 46). Mere inclusion or recognition within the ranks of humanity will always be insufficient (may, indeed, reify the very onto-epistemological order that constitutes itself by and through antiblackness), insofar as black being is used as a matrix and metric for the definition of the orders of humanity (quite literally, within the taxonomic charting of a continuum between animal and human life in the history of Western science). Nor will Jackson will not let us rest in an abstract articulation of blackness that delinks it from the experiences of black people and black femmes, in particular. Indeed, where blackness is a central antagonism at the heart of liberal humanism, \u201cblack female flesh\u201d and the black mater(nal)function as the paradigmatic, zero-sum ontological index on, against, and through which (depending on how she is needed) Man is defined such that, \u201cthe black maternal figure functions as a signifier that apportions and delimits Reason and the Universal\u201d (Jackson 2020, 108).<\/p>\n

Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0rigorously and principally insists that this world is not only insufficient for the fostering of black life, but is in fact a necropolitical order that maintains itself by fixing black being on a telos towards death. Where antiblackness is a constitutive component of the making of the world as such, Jackson will not settle for merely changing or reforming\u00a0this world<\/em>; she wants something else entirely. But this is not to be mistaken for the howling of that immature, greasy haired, white leftist boy anarchist (or graduate student) as he stages his call to tear this world apart with no care for how many black people pay the cost or bear the burden of his oedipal rage against his father\u2019s machine: a machine built by coerced black labor, using black blood as its fuel.<\/p>\n

Where Xena Warrior Princess battled the chthonic gods of a dying Hellenic ideology, Zakiyyah Warrior Theorist goes toe to toe with the death-dealing prophets of the En-White-enment (a history of Whiteness universalization and hegemonic dominance as embedded within, but not fully contained by or reducible to the Enlightenment). Battling the bros of imperial Western modernity\u2014from Hegel and Darwin to J. Marion Sims, Hans Haeckel, and Heidegger\u2014she slays left and right as she reveals their production of and universalization of Man (and the taxonomic orders of \u201chumanity\u201d and \u201canimality\u201d that follow from Him), in order to show how these epistemological and ontological systems fix black matter and the black mater(nal) as the \u201cenabling condition\u201d of an antiblack concept of the world as such. The word \u201cfixes\u201d may be misleading, as Jackson defines the appropriation of black(ened) humanity in modern imperial Western thought as a form of plasticity, whereby \u201cblackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter, such that blackness is produced as sub\/super\/human at once, a form where form shall not hold; potentially \u2018everything and nothing\u2019 at the register of ontology\u201d (Jackson 2020, 3). This experimenting with blackness, and the black mater(nal) is both literal and figurative\u2014as is paradigmatically exemplified in J. Marion Sims\u2019 brutal experimentation on enslaved women during the founding of modern gynecology. The impassioned demand to make a seat at the table for black people in this world reveals that the seat has always been there. The seat is the cornerstone of the table, in fact: in it sits Henrietta, Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey as Sim\u2019s experiments on their flesh with no anesthesia applied. A reading of\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0makes it clear that asking for standing in the world will only ever reconstitute the world. What\u2019s needed is a sense of vertigo.<\/p>\n

For many white people in this occupation we call a country, the feeling of the last week, of the last few months, and of the last few years has been, precisely, the vertiginous experience of losing one\u2019s footing in a world spinning apart. One could almost say, \u201cwelcome,\u201d but this is\u00a0not<\/em>\u2014this moment is not, no matter how much they post on Instagram about it, about white people\u2014nor is the feeling of vertigo being experienced by the nonblack world the same mode of vertigo described here: though they\u2019re not unrelated.\u00a0Becoming Human\u00a0<\/em>reflects the fact that for black folk living in the wake of slavery\u2019s historical rupture, this vertiginous sense dates back at least four hundred years. It is the very experience of blackened being and being not that makes possible the telos of imperial Western modernity.\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0is thus a love letter to and for black people, whose vertiginous black powers keep opening up the possibility of possibility for blackened being. As Jackson writes, in language with which I\u2019ll conclude: \u201cVertigo, here, is a measure and means for the disordering and inoperability of a metaphysics that takes the black mater(nal)\u2019s nonrepresentatibility as its enabling condition\u2026 Vertigo is both the apprehension of unlived possibilities and the salvific irruption into consciousness of discredited sensation, of other ways of living, other modes of life that provide a dizzying sense of vivifying potentiality\u201d (Jackson 2020, 120).<\/p>\n

\n

NOTES<\/p>\n

[i]<\/a>\u00a0Through her engagement with, and deconstruction of the work of the paradigmatic philosophers and scientific minds of \u201cimperial Western modernity,\u201d Jackson\u2019s text (to use her own description of Hopkinson\u2019s novel) \u201cperforms a critique that shatters the globally hegemonic metaphysics of the world\u2014indeed, of a world relation\u2014[and] that transversally voids\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0black and\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>animal and their respective worlding(s).\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\n\n \n \n
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\"\"<\/p>\n

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson<\/strong><\/h2>\n

REPLY<\/h3>\n
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\n

Iwant to express my gratitude to Tavia Nyong\u2019o, Joshua Chambers-Letson, and Penelope Deutscher for their thoughtful reflections on my book,\u00a0Becoming human: Matter and meaning in an antiblack world<\/em>\u00a0(Jackson 2020). It is an honor for my work to receive this manner of attention, and I have learned a great deal from their generous engagements. This forum requires brevity, so I have decided to approach the task of responding by continuing the conversation and taking up a few of the keywords that called out for further comment, in particular humanitarianism, plasticity, and representation.<\/p>\n

In the book, I stressed that the categories of \u201cthe human\u201d and \u201cthe animal\u201d are not sequential but co-constitutive. Since its inception, which some have attributed to Descartes and his cohort, \u201cthe animal\u201d has been conceived of with black(ened) people as an integral part of the term\u2019s meaning and function: blackness distributes value and undergirds a racially striated and hierarchical mode of life vis-\u00e0-vis the self, world, and environment. Similarly, the mode of life we call human has foundationally imagined black(ened) people as integral to its hierarchical delineation of reason and sensorium, as an at times nullified form, but more commonly as its \u201clowest\u201d form: deviant, pathological, teratological, and criminal, and thus a human form without entitlement to rights and protection. Sense and reason are both hierarchically arranged via the relational violence of antiblackness. Thus, the mythic function of blackness is not simply to define by negative relation but to give form to both categories: human and animal, such that black(ened) people are constitutive of both categories, especially when the two are hierarchically opposed or teleological.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Becoming human<\/em>, I reinterpret Enlightenment thought not as black \u201cexclusion\u201d or \u201cdenied humanity\u201d but rather as the violent imposition and appropriation\u2014inclusion and recognition\u2014of black(ened) humanity in the interest of plasticizing that very humanity, whereby \u201cthe animal\u201d is one among many possible forms blackness is thought to encompass. To be included in such a way is to be dominated and circumscribed precisely as Chambers-Letson notes: \u201cMere inclusion or recognition within the ranks of humanity will always be insufficient (may, indeed, reify the very onto-epistemological order that constitutes itself by and through antiblackness), insofar as black being is used as a matrix and metric for the definition of the orders of humanity (quite literally, within the taxonomic charting of a continuum between animal and human life in the history of Western science) \u2026 The impassioned demand to make a seat at the table for black people in this world reveals that the seat has always been there. The seat is the cornerstone of the table, in fact: in it sits Henrietta, Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey \u2026\u00a0Becoming Human<\/em>\u00a0makes it clear that asking for standing in the world will only ever reconstitute the world.\u201d I argue that when one examines the history of science, law, and philosophy, black(ened) female flesh persistently functions as the constitutive limit case of \u201cthe human\u201d and is its matrix-figure, due to the central role reproduction plays in determining species demarcation and the racialization of that function. In other words, the threshold of the human has been determined by how the means and scene of birth are interpreted. The black female figure was, and I argue remains, the fulcrum of categorical distinction writ large.<\/p>\n

Ontologized plasticization is not interchangeability, replaceability, or exchangeability. It is not the conceptualization of how a good or asset is understood as being of equal value to another. If we consider the history of antiblackness, for instance, we might recall how a slave was commoditized alongside, and made exchangeable with, a cow or a horse. This familiar image is related to fungibility, our thinking on which is indebted to Saidiya Hartman\u2019s indispensable\u00a0Scenes of subjection<\/em>, but ultimately \u201cfungibility\u201d is not what I mean by ontologized plasticization (Heartman 1997). As a concept engaged with the new materialisms, I am interested in what is called hylomorphism or the form-matter distinction. Ontologized plasticization, in my work, is a conceptualization of form itself rather than a conceptualization of how a form is taken up within the logics of law, economic markets, or political economies. In other words, it is not a conception of the commodity and its uses. It is a conceptualization of property\u2014but of the properties of form.<\/p>\n

Ontologized plasticization is not defined as the unnatural ordering of man and beast. It is a mode of transmogrification whereby the fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter\u2014a form where form shall not hold\u2014such that blackness is produced as human, subhuman, and suprahuman at once. The \u201cat once\u201d here is important: it denotes immediacy and simultaneity. Blackness, in this case, functions not simply as negative relation but as a plastic fleshy being that stabilizes and gives form to \u201chuman\u201d and \u201canimal\u201d as categories\u2014precisely via blackness\u2019s inability to access conceptual and material stability other than that of functioning\u00a0as<\/em>\u00a0ontological instability for the reigning order. To put it another way, my concept of plasticity maintains that black(ened) people are not so much dehumanized, cast as nonhumans or as liminal humans, nor are black(ened) people framed as animal-like or machine-like or simply exchangeable with these nonhuman forms; rather, they are cast as sub, supra, and human\u00a0simultaneously\u00a0<\/em>and in a manner that puts being in peril because the operations of simultaneously being any-thing and no-thing for a given order constructs black(ened) humanity as the\u00a0privation and exorbitance<\/em>\u00a0of form. The demand for willed privation and exorbitance that I describe does not take the structure of serialized demands for serialized states but demands that black(ened) humanity be all forms and no form simultaneously; human, animal, machine, object, and\u2026.<\/p>\n

In other words, plasticization, here, is a mode of ontologizing not at all deterred by the self-regulation of matter or its limits, nor by what Catherine Malabou has described as \u201cthe fragile and finite mutability\u201d of the form we call black (Malabou 2010). Black studies scholars have often interpreted the predicament of black(ened) being in relation to either liminality (movement from one state to another state) or interstice (being in between states) or partial states (Spillers 1984; Wynter 2003; Weheliye 2014). What I am suggesting is that these appearances are undergirded by a demand that tends towards the fluidification of state or ontology. This demand for statelessness collapses a distinction between the virtual and the actual, abstract potential and situated possibility, whereby the abstraction of blackness is enfleshed via an ongoing process of wresting form from matter such that antiblackness\u2019s materialization is that of a de-materializing virtuality. We must think critically about the enthusiasm for ontological slippage in much recent posthumanist, ecocritical, and speculative-realist critical theory when that very imagination has been conditioned by both a racialized phantasy of bound(ary)lessness that recognizes the protean capacities of the flesh only to boundlessly exploit it and what Deutscher searingly and aptly describes as \u201cracial domination\u2019s drive to transform blackness maximally into a resource for extraction within the limits of viability\u201d and if by chance beyond viability, it typically incurs no consequences for the extractor. What is at stake is the definitive character of form, its determinacy or resistance, which is potentially fluidified by a willed excess of polymorphism and the violent estrangement of form from matter.<\/p>\n

Regarding the function of blackness in humanitarian discourse, raised by Nyong\u2019o, a rather immediate image comes to mind: the book cover of Anna Sewell\u2019s\u00a0Black beauty\u00a0<\/em>(Sewell 2012). In the nineteenth century, with slavery increasingly under pressure from both abolitionists and the multi-scalar rebellions of enslaved people on behalf of themselves, legal reform emerged as an alibi for the irremediable. Terror was subject to regulation rather than annulment. This legalistic approach would calculate and legitimate the\u00a0humane\u00a0<\/em>use of force. Thus, palliation sheltered brutality by providing it an alibi: morality and related fictions of gentility and kindness. White bourgeois domesticity now rendered as stewardship and care was given a carte blanche mandate to domesticate all those thought incapable of governing themselves, in particular the enslaved and animals. Enter Sewell\u2019s\u00a0Black beauty<\/em>,initially subtitled, \u201cThe autobiography of a horse.\u201d The subtitle drew its inspiration from the slave narrative genre, a point underscored by its marketing as \u201cThe\u00a0Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>\u00a0of the horse\u201d in 1890 by George Angell, lawyer and founder of the United States\u2019 second animal protection organization (Grier 2010). Drawing on many of the literary devices of Stowe\u2019s novel, Sewell firmly established the potency of slave abolitionism as an analogue for animal advocates. Advocates for the humane treatment of animals took direct inspiration both from abolitionism as a rhetorical platform and its related literary genre. These same advocates also embraced strategies of reform popular among slaveholders and white abolitionists\u2014in particular, a palliative approach to white domination and violence, albeit differentially articulated. The figure of the slave was and continues to be the ur-text of the humanitarian and the humane, commonly instrumentalized by law and advocacy campaigns and quickly dispensed with in efforts that seek to reform. Law denied the rights of motherhood to the enslaved even as it assigned her a peculiar kind of reproductive function, to be the model for commoditizing life over and over again: animal life, artificial life, the corporation, intellectual property and\u2026 and\u2026. Thus, the instrumentalization and containment of the slave\u2019s cataclysmic claim is essential to the maintenance of the existing order.<\/p>\n

One last point. I maintain that our (human) being does not precede what we say about ourselves, or what is said about us. Bios and mythos are not sequential (Wynter 2001). When biology and culture are understood as sequential, we will inevitably find blackness, in particular Africanness, embalmed in the past, in an earlier stage of development. The myths we produce, the stories we tell, the images we create are inextricable from what they purport to reference, even when they are composed by societal phantasy and perception is arranged by antiblackness. Representation is not re-presentation or mimesis; it is a doing, a making, a worlding that in turn makes us. In\u00a0Becoming human<\/em>, the term I use for this is \u201cmeasurement.\u201d Antiblackness is an aesthetics that cuts the material realm of reality. To evoke Dionne Brand, antiblackness introduces a \u201ctear in the world\u201d that is determinative of world and flesh (Brand 2012). And if black(ened) people have functioned as tools for this order, it is important to remember that tools are always excessive to how they are defined and used by a human perceived as sovereign and masterful.<\/p>\n

\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

Brand, Dionne.\u00a02002.\u00a0A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging<\/em>. Vintage Canada.<\/p>\n

Grier, Katherine C.\u00a02010.\u00a0Pets in America: A History<\/em>. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Books.<\/p>\n

Hartman, Saidiya. 1997.\u00a0Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America.\u00a0<\/em>Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. 2020.\u00a0Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World<\/em>. New York: New York University Press.<\/p>\n

Malabou, Catherine.\u00a02010.\u00a0Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction<\/em>. New York: Columbia University Press.<\/p>\n

Sewell, Anna.\u00a02012\u00a0Black Beauty<\/em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1877).<\/p>\n

Spillers, Hortense. 1984. \u201cInterstices: A Small Drama of Words.\u201d In\u00a0Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality<\/em>, edited by Carole S. Vance,\u00a073-100. Boston, London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul.<\/p>\n

Weheliye, Alexander G.\u00a02014.\u00a0Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human<\/em>. Durham: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n

Wynter, Sylvia. \u201cTowards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What it is Like to e \u2018Black\u2019.\u201d\u00a0Hispanic issues: National identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America<\/em>\u00a023 (2001): 30-66.<\/p>\n

Wynter, Sylvia. \u201cUnsettling the Coloniality of Being\/Power\/Truth\/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation\u2014An Argument.\u201d\u00a0CR: The New Centennial Review<\/em>\u00a03 no. 3 (2003): 257-337.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":306,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-259","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nZakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World - Women in Theory<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/women-in-theory\/zakiyyah-iman-jackson-becoming-human-matter-and-meaning-in-an-antiblack-world-nyu-press-2020\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World - 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