Return to Article Details The Production of the Black Body in American Necropolitics

Introduction

George Floyd’s killing by a police officer who kneeled on his neck for about nine minutes culminated a series of brutal violence against and murders of African Americans under police custody. They all caused anger and generated outrageous reactions from American society, African Americans and anti-racist organizations, consolidating the actions of the Black Lives Matter movement in America and throughout the world. Two types of distorted interpretations of this event – namely, that George Floyd was a drunkard and actually died because he had an overdose, and that Black Lives Matter movement is a racist one since it emphasizes the “black” at the expense of “white” or all the other races, and therefore should be replaced by (an opposite or, at least, alternative) “White Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter” movements! – show the profound misunderstandings existing in public opinion and society in relation with the Black-White relations, and the deep, internalized anti-Black racism operating in American and global society.

This article clarifies the interpretation of racism through underlining the centrality of the black body and the relevance of such materialist concepts as blackness, embodiment, bare life and production. In this sense, unlike the more prevalent cultural studies analyses revolving around the concept of “representation”, our analysis will theorize the effectiveness of (and will adopt) the concept of “production” in interpreting the biopolitical/ necropolitical relations created among and through categories of race in history and society. For that matter the article will provide a fresh reading of racism, of the resurgence of anti-Black hostilities around the world, and of the recent, reinforced societal and institutional attacks on African Americans – through the lecture of Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason (originally published in French in 2013) and some others of his contributions, including the seminal “Necropolitics” article from 2003 (later included in a collection of articles, re-titled Necropolitics) and the more recent Brutalisme (2020) applied on various instances of Black-White relations in American history, culture and society.

A Theory of Body Production

In cultural analysis the adoption of “a theory of production” departed considerably from the Marxist theory, maintaining from its original interpretation only its material determinants and the relational power mechanisms. In fact, as a series of post-Marxist critics have already noticed, Marx elaborated rather superficially on the notion of mode of production, limiting its interpretive potential to very general typologies, as expressed through the broad “feudal”, “capitalist”, “socialist” or localized “Asian” modes of production. Expanding further on this paradigm, it has been suggested by such authors as Henri Lefebvre (“the mode of production of space”) or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (“biopolitical production”) the necessity to draw on the mechanisms of production in a variety of other spheres, other than the economic one, such as the legal, political, micro-geographical or cultural spheres, so as to fruitfully expound a series of aspects otherwise little visible in society. In so doing, our essay explores the possibility for a radical critique of racism, alternative to the Marxist analysis of racism, which normally posits its focus in a critique of capitalism by seeing race relations as part or form of broader capitalist relations. Accordingly, it will be acknowledged, that a series of other components of social (including race) relations are relevant, an idea which will be developed through an emphasis on the body as “product” of these relations.

This interpretive suggestion is already conceptualized in what various cultural and feminist scholars called “the production of the body” (Butler 1999; Orzeck 2007; Wilson 2012; Yancy 2017 among others), and in what, more specifically, Achille Mbembe – drawing on previous theorizations put forward by Hannah Arendt (“the human condition”), Frantz Fanon (“black skins, white masks”) or Michel Foucault (“biopower”, “biopolitics”) – analyzed as “black condition” in the interpretation of the production of the black body.

The black body is not an objective biological reality; it is a matter of perception, language, social labeling and racial politics. The black body is conceptualized, imagined, portrayed, depicted, stereotyped, mocked. It is part of an enormous diffusion of scholar, literary and media discourses and references to facts, scenarios, opinions and truths. It is aestheticized and feared, accused and defended, claimed with pride or hidden under masks. It is therefore subject to a complex production of forms and meanings, which is ultimately impacting onto the real social and political lives, and consequently a production of reality. This is more than “representation”, it is “production”, since only with this second concept one may fully conceptualize and understand the factors, the mechanisms, the power relation and the outcome of such a complex practice. As Kalpana Wilson clearly states: “I suggest that we need to consider not only the discursive production of racialized bodies but equally the racialized material production of bodies” (Wilson 2012, 111). Thus, we talk not just about representation, but about production, meaning not just discursive production, but material production, i.e. an approach which finally would be able to acknowledge the productive forces that builds the materiality that we call “body” and to show how they create such factual effects in people as suffering or dying.

The slow murder of George Floyd, striving under the uniformed knee of a police officer, filmed with the smartphone, is part of this production. This act is not isolated, but is one in a series of practices which had already had its glorious climax in the procedures of public lynching of the African Americans who used to annoy the respectable American society by mid-19th to mid-20th century. More recently, many other killings of Black people in police custody, including Elliott Williams’s (2011), Eric Garner’s (2014), Michael Brown’s (2014), Freddie Gray’s (2015), Elijah McClain’s (2019) or Manuel Ellis’s (2020) preceded George Floyd’s death, but this latter became somehow symbolic, due to some specific circumstances, among which: George Floyd was tightly kept under control through direct bodily physical pressure until suffocation; he was filmed agonizing for several minutes; it was lately found that he was an acquaintance of the police officer (they were once co-workers). Eventually the kneeled posture has become a reverence for Black people killed in custody and a symbolic gesture against racism, while the desperate cry “I can’t breathe” has been consolidated as slogan of anti-racist protests. Accordingly, George Floyd’s death was perceived somehow as a more ritualistic and a more symbolic one than others, but in the same time capable to throw light on how, actually, the other murders and forms of violence against Black people were equally symbolic and functioned as well as rituals, carrying on messages with deep meanings and implications.

One of the strongest meanings in this production is, surely, that of the feared body. The black body has been constantly admired and feared in the evolution of societies and arts, of moral and aesthetic codes. Since in politics and exceptional situations – well epitomized by the police interventions – there is no place for arts and aesthetics, the securitization of the black body becomes the principal concern. Nevertheless the feared, potentially dangerous body cannot be fully understood without its dialectical counterpart, the ‘admired body’, since a series of acts, actions and practices of black body production can be easily explained through instances of control. Controlling the black body, in its dual phenomenality (admired and feared) is, actually, the ultimate strategy and solution for keeping it safe. “I admire it aesthetically or because of its performance in sport, dance or music, but I want to keep it under control, so as to avoid becoming part of my life too much, because this may be dangerous for my family, for my marriage, for my neighbors and friends, for the white American nation” is the reconstructed message that this interpretation entails. The black body is feared at the very instance when it is admired (even if normally not acknowledged), and therefore already represented as a dangerous enemy even before starting to act socially. Racism exists, at least partially, because of this phenomenological-psychological mechanism. And this renders a definitive consequence in the preoccupation with having the supreme control over the black body: the control of its existence, of its life and death – which is part of another useful conceptualization for the matter of black body production: necropolitics.

The Necropolitics of the Black Body

In the logic of this (needed or desired) control, the submission of the black body is preconceptualized in its very bodily appearance. In the sense of black body production their obedience is (has to be) inscribed in black people’s bodies. That’s why the image of George Floyd dying under the knee of the police officer sparked so much revolt – the officer’s posture was a manifesto, stating more overtly than before something like: “despite the equal rights that you claim, bothering us a lot with that, you are under our knee, we control you, we are above you, we are superior and we have the possibility to decide whether you survive or die”. As George Floyd eventually died the message was accomplished, suddenly reinstaurating the tragic history of slavery and the Black codes, including the brutal discriminations, punishments and horrors well-known by Black people from their families, for which the “knee on his neck” became the equivalent device of the chain and leash,” the most important signs of subjection […] in the dialectic of the Black Man and his master” (Mbembe 2017, 153).

Talking about state racism, Foucault explicitly depicted racism as “a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (Foucault 2013, 74). This “necropower” allowed Mbembe to reformulate biopolitics as necropolitics, so as to more suitably explore the structural, institutional, social and daily practices of racism.

"Under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer? Is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political […] makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective?" (Mbembe 2019, 66)

This conceptualization of the right to kill in relation with an “enemy” is fully acknowledged from histories of colonialism and slavery, American slavery included, and its subsequent epochs through which the “political conditions” to discriminate, segregate, humiliate, offense, aggress and – lastly – kill constituted a continuous construction of “practical conditions”, more or less subtly provided by legislation, normalized behavior, everyday attitude, social practice and broad acceptance. These stages and normative elements constitute the fundamental structure that allowed the production of the black body in America.

The relation of the American mind with the Black body was from the very beginning a productive one. The packed black bodies carried in sunless bellies of big boats, by sea, and sold in slave markets after arriving in America were assessed primarily through an economic logic: the powerful, forceful, solid, resistant body was preferred for lucrative reasons. Concomitantly, the same, chosen body was perceived as menaceful: acting to escape, to break the chains, to fight the master, to kill the whites. For that reason, it had to be permanently watched and regarded with suspicion; it had to be strictly controlled and continuously punished. “Violence, [became] an element in manners, like whipping or taking of the slave’s life itself: an act of caprice and pure destruction aimed at instilling terror” (Mbembe 2019, 75). As Frederick Douglass recalled:

"Mr. Hopkins could always find some excuse for whipping a slave. It would astonish one, unaccustomed to a slaveholding life, to see with what wonderful ease a slaveholder can find things, of which to make occasion to whip a slave. A mere look, word, or motion, – a mistake, accident, or want of power, – are all matters for which a slave may be whipped at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied? It is said, he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he speak loudly when spoken to by his master? Then he is getting high-minded, and should be taken down a buttonhole lower. Does he forget to pull off his hat at the approach of a white person? Then he is wanting in reverence, and should be whipped for it. Does he ever venture to vindicate his conduct, when censured for it? Then he is guilty of impudence, – one of the greatest crimes of which a slave can be guilty. Does he ever venture to suggest a different mode of doing things from that pointed out by his master? He is indeed presumptuous, and getting above himself; and nothing less than a flogging will do for him. Does he, while ploughing, break a plough, – or, while hoeing, break a hoe? It is owing to his carelessness, and for it a slave must always be whipped." (Douglass 2009, 82-83)

This strategy, which is inherent to the institution of slavery, permeated the tribulations of history through time, and could be found in later forms of discrimination, segregation and hate against Black people in American society. It is a tactic that still surfaces at times, including recent times, in various power-relation-based institutions such as schools, jobs and police.

The black body was caught into a mechanism of libidinal economy (Mbembe 2017, 116), not only because slave trade meant an exuberant practice of possessing and exchanging bodies with money or goods, but also because of the “frantic pursuit of desire and enjoyment” (Mbembe 2017, 40) provided by the total command over the Blacks’ bodies and the actual, “forbidden”, sexual relations established on plantations between Whites and Blacks. The complete control over the Black bodies resulted in a “tremor of senses” (Mbembe 2000, 104) diffused in the many forms of sexual possession for the sake of own pleasure of some planters and their family members, men and women alike, or simply as manifestation of power through violences, abuses and cruelty by the same. These are hidden, undocumented, “shameful relations”, only very rarely recognized, indirectly, through different treatment received by the hardly ever recognized children resulted from such relations. This hidden, shameful, dishonorable history of America surfaces at times, as well, with psychoanalyzable pulsions of penalization and annihilation of the social or physical bodies of nowadays Blacks reminding those abject enslaved bodies that were once objects of desire and brutal perversities of the “respectable White society” which made America.

This “neurotic and playful dimension” (Mbembe 2017, 119) existing historically in the Black-White relation is reflected in contemporary racism in the guilty conscience which takes the form of blindness, masquerade or denial, and in the disdaining attitudes against Black peoples’ claims, which take the form of mistrust, derision and spectacles of hate.

"The [Black] body […] is an apparently formless form that incites surprise, dread, and terror: “Look, a Negro! Mama, look, a Negro, I’m scared!” He exists only through his inspection and assignation within a skein of significations that are beyond him: “I was responsible not only for my body but also for my race and my ancestors”. For the Black Man to be seen and for him to be identified as such, a veil must have already been placed over his face, making it a face “bereft of all humanity”. Without this veil there is no Black Man. The Black Man is a shadow at the heart of a commerce of the gaze. Such commerce has a gloomy dimension, almost funereal, for in order to function it demands elision and blindness. […] Race, then, exists only by way of “what we do not see”. Beyond “what we do not see”, there is no race. The pou(voir), or seeing power, of race is expressed first in the fact that the persons we choose not to see or hear cannot exist or speak for themselves. When necessary, they must be silenced. But their speech is always indecipherable, or at least inarticulate. Someone else must speak in their name and in their place so that what they say makes complete sense in our language. As Fanon, and before him W. E. B. Du Bois, has shown, the person dispossessed of the faculty to speak is constrained always to think of himself, if not as an “intruder”, then at least as someone who can only ever appear in the social world as a “problem”." (Mbembe 2017, 111, with quotes from Fanon 2008)

Various tactics were developed across the American history and culture in order to manage this “problem”: the Black American problem. What is noteworthy in this perspective is that even the apparently unharmful procedures ended up in demonstrating the insidious construction of the Black body and the insidious control over the Black existence as brutal mechanisms of disguise, enclosure and annihilation. In some of the most popular entertaining shows ever existing in American culture, the Blackface minstrel shows, African American characters were not only portrayed as stupid, childish, incapable of normal social behavior, but also played by white actors who painted their faces black, wore shabby clothes, spoke broken English, and moved disarticulated. This suggested not only that African Americans were unworthy of American society (as the characters showed), but also that they were incapable of representing themselves artistically and culturally (as the entertainment production established). Through this degrading theatrical form, White America not only developed a spectacular framework through which it completely (and “safely”) controlled the representation of the Other, but also exercised symbolic control over this representation. They publicly demonstrated that they had power over both the socio-political status of black people (the racial discrimination, which was legal at the time) and their abilities, feelings, and expressions, meaning that they were in command of the mode of production and representation of the Black body. That was a direct, public, popular and applauded demonstration that the Whites had absolute control over the Blacks. This structural idea remained stuck in the American mind, and if that mode of production of the Black body generated it, a critical assessment of this mechanism must therefore reveal and deconstruct it.

The experiences of slavery, legal discrimination and spectacles of derision extended their legacies and enduring impacts over the lives of Black families and their descendants, over the guilty consciences of White people and their descendants, and over the Black-White socio-psychological relations till today. Slavery established the unquestionable truth that Black lives did not matter. The Jim Crow laws and Blackface shows stated explicitly that Black lives mattered less and signified less than the Whites’ lives. Any instance of racism today, any behavior reminding that history today reinstils this idea. And that’s even more outrageously when this is demonstrated in the most brutal and ultimate practice, as necropolitics, through killing the black bodies.

Obviously, White lives matter as well, and certainly all lives on Earth matter. But only when acknowledging that – according to the production of black body and necropolitics sketched above – some lives (Blacks’ lives) matter less, or doesn’t matter at all, one may understand the accuracy and force of the “Black Lives Matter” slogan. Its powerful message resides at the same time in its emphasis on “matter”, suggesting concomitantly the ideas of “materiality” (corporeality) and “importance” (significance) of the lives (of Black people).

Unmasking the Mode of Black Body Production. A Critical Model of Understanding Racism

Everything described above is more than attitude, it is a strategy. Namely, a strategy of body production through the subtle mechanisms that we may critically reconstruct from this complex history and socio-political reality of racism. In the same time, as production, this may be regarded as a continuous production for some benefits. One of the striking, only apparently tautological benefit of this production is racism itself. Racism needs to be continuously justified and permanently fed through instances of hate, disparagement and aggression. As a result, various racist attitudes will not only confirm this productive paradigm, but will periodically resurface as more or less unconscious manifestations in order to fit the paradigm. The production of the black body acts therefore as a device of institutional, social and cultural reproduction.

Let me elaborate in the second part of this essay on this paradigm, seen as an efficient mode of production, by offering it finally a broader relevance, capable for critically assessing various other social-political structures and practices, beyond racism.

The body is central in legal or social practices of separation, control and targeting for tactical purposes, overtly or tacitly acknowledged. In this reproducible model the black body appears as the product of racism. It suggests that, since the black body is here, therefore racism is justifiable. Nevertheless, the black person is “always already fixed, complete, given” (Yancy 2012, 34). This results from the strategy to set and fix representations, manners, behavior in the physical object which is the body, an object visible to everyone, and therefore impossible to be further questioned about its constructed reality, since it is rendered as an already objectified product. Moreover, as Sherrow Pinder, demonstrates, in a decisive study on blackness, the black body is limited (Pinder 2015, 19). Its possibilities are restricted, and therefore it has to be constantly produced for the benefit of racial structures and power relations of society. The simplest way to produce it is to rely on the already existing technical procedures and social mechanisms of control that racism already created for (against) Blacks:

"When blacks and other people of color occupy a space that seemingly is a “white space,” the materiality of the racialized body – the fact of nonwhiteness – conjures up anxiety for the white social body, which can result in violent outcomes. Partly for this reason, racialized individuals […] are always in danger of crossing over to the white turf, the “white space”. In fact, it is always a hazardous process when nonwhites manage to pilot their way into a “white space”, a space “marked as white turf”, and mostly populated by whites. These nonwhites, the border crossers, are viewed as viciously “out of place”, like a menacing piece of trash, a piece of dirt, a matter that is “out of place” […], which does not belong there and, thus, must be discarded, removed, and returned to its “proper” place. And given that the returning constantly creates deep feelings of apprehension and challenges for the crossers, the racialized space must at all times be under surveillance, watched, policed, controlled, and sealed in to prevent any form of crossing. […] In addition, the “sealed in” of racialized space renders possible the confinement of bodies that are viewed as threats to the white social body." (Pinder 2015, 55-56)

We may understand better from this analysis the machinery of production of Black body, but also how these devices constitute a mode of production for which, as expected, according to the dialectical relationship, the white bodies are also involved, as well as, the whole social body, as biased representation for the privilege of the Whites. This privilege includes not only privilege of “control over” or “using force against”, but also the privilege of “being credited” and “always being right”.

As Pinder puts forward, “[w]hen a police officer, for example, looks at the black man, the black man is conscious of himself as black and as an object of the police’s look” (2015, 124). This look establishes not only a power relation (eventually reflected in actual discriminatory practices or violence), but also the definition of blackness, i.e. the truth. Any reaction, any opinion, any comment following this definitive encounter, then, should be critically evaluated according to this instauration of power and truth. Giving the example of the murdering of Michael Brown, Pinder explains:

"In the Michael Brown case, the remark made by some people that the police officer was threatened by Michael Brown has to be critically examined, since being black itself constitutes a threat to the white police officer. The failure to differentiate how the black body is being seen and what it means to “see” needs to be taken into consideration. And what it means to read blackness as a threat needs to be understood. Given that the black body is constituted through endangerment and fear, blacks have no ontological resistance within the frame of whiteness and have no chance of being seen as human. However, the only real threat here is a black man, trying to fight against the way he is seen by the police as lacking in humanity, that is reduced to his bodiliness or corporeality. Thus his attempt to extricate himself from institutionalized violence is fruitless." (Pinder 2015, 124)

If the black body is already fixed in its contours and acknowledged as limited, in order to be completely maneuvered, it is also needed to be perfectly malleable. Its potentiality has to be strangled, and its shape, posture or breath to be under direct manipulation, in both symbolic and physical senses. This is the ultimate consequence of the long (historical) and complex process (fueled by various instances which are legally, politically, culturally, socially and psychologically constructed through actual or imagined interactions) of the creation of inferior/controlled races, which constitutes the logic of construction of the black body as socially accepted mode of production.

A production – as we have seen – of spectacles in which the African-American expression is mocked; a production of the White’s or society’s disdaining look at the black body; lastly, a condition of possibility (legislation, politics, the fixed, limited and malleable corporeal materiality), which is also a discursive production and a production of truth. This mode of production is embedded in societal and institutional practices and actually practiced in society and through institutions, and as noticed above, continuously reproduced. Because of that – and as a last step of the analysis – we should be able to recognize and identify a critical pattern within which to further explore this White-Black relation; Achilles Mbembe suggests that this may be the model of colonial oppression, as we will see as follows.

Every five minutes a white police officer verbally or physically assaults a black man in the United States of America (Pinder 2015, 123). These repetitive and repressive encounters function as colonial power relations where law is suspended and the citizenship is reduced to bare life. In these instances, the necropolitics instaurates exceptional situations, identical with civil war stases (Agamben 2015) where the “coloniality of power” (Quijano 2000) is brutally exposed. In these stases it is only the simple objectified/gazed black body which stands alone without any support against hostility, punishment and abuse, except its fragile pure existence. In these relations police interventions establish colonial enclaves described by Mbembe as topographies of cruelty and death-worlds, were law is a liminal vagueness that transforms each black body into social spectres, i.e. non-existence. The insightful interpretation here, illustrating the logic of necropolitics, reveal how pure existence (what Agamben calls bare life) is being transformed into non-existence, through instances reminding the exerting of power in colonies.

"[T]he colony represents a site in which sovereignty fundamentally consists in exercising a power outside the law […] and in which “peace” is more likely to assume the face of “endless war”." (Mbembe 2019, 76)

[C]olonies are similar to the frontiers. They are inhabited by “savages”. The colonies are not organized in a state form and have not created a human world. (Mbembe 2019, 77)

Here, the Master will discover that it is possible to enjoy without remorse, to satisfy the whim of atrocities and depredations of all kinds, including on bodies transformed into personal possessions, without feeling any guilt (Mbembe 2020, 106). If sometimes, these subjects are however recognized as human beings, they, nevertheless, will be regarded as “lacking the specifically human character, the specifically human reality” allowing the colonists or the authority – as Hannah Arendt had observed – to kill without being aware that they had committed murder (Mbembe 2019, 78).

"The colony is thus the site par excellence where controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended – the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization”. (Mbembe 2019, 77)

For all the above reasons, the sovereign right to kill is not subject to any rule in the colonies. In the colonies, the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner." (Mbembe 2019, 77)

This analytical model of “colonial warfare” allows us to return to a key characterization of the White-Black relation, made by Pindar above: anxiety. Mbembe talks in another essay in his Necropolitics about the existence of a colonial anxiety, due to constant dealing with “dangerous”, “savage”, “non-human”, “animal-like” bodies, which need to be constantly “civilized”, i.e. controlled and punished in a paradoxical “permanent work of separation” from the civilized (Mbembe 2019, 46). These suggest striking similarities with police anxiety, generated by a series of intense processes of constant pressure: to control and punish the black body, to exert the gaze at the black body and expect from it manifestations of fear, and to manage/respond to the demands of equality and non-segregation coming from law and society, while actually sorting, separating and discriminating against the Blacks. Mbembe demonstrates that this anxiety (which is to be found in anyone dealing with Black people and “carrying a gun” with themselves for that matter) frequently finds an escape only in fantasies of violence that occasionally end up in killing the Black. Either committing the murder or not, the necropolitics is there, it keeps producing black bodies: dead or alive, and because of its complex mechanism described above, even liminal “living dead” persons:

"I have put forward the notion of necropolitics and necropower to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead." (Mbembe 2019, 92)

The Black ghetto, the Black neighborhoods, the “Black belts” of each city, the urban corners where African Americans shop, linger, pass or spend their time become “topographies of cruelty” and “death-worlds” populated by “living deads” not only under the racists actions of police and actual murdering of Black people, but also with every fantasy of killing the black body – fantasies which survived, in more or less subtle forms within the American mind, from the slavery and lynching eras. Frequently, this surviving racism is a barely recognizable form of “nanoracism”:

"a brand of prejudice based on skin color that gets expressed in seemingly anodyne everyday gestures, often apropos of nothing, apparently unconscious remarks, a little banter, some allusion or insinuation, a slip of the tongue, a joke, an innuendo, but also, it must be added, consciously spiteful remarks, like a malicious intention, a deliberate stamping underfoot or tackle, a dark desire to stigmatize and, in particular, to inflict violence, to injure and humiliate." (Mbembe 2019, 58)

Racism is practiced without one’s being conscious of it. Then one expresses one’s amazement when someone else draws attention to it or takes one to task. It feeds our hunger for entertainment and allows us to escape the ambient boredom and monotony. We pretend to profess that the acts are harmless and do not have the meaning attributed to them. […] A kind of merry and frenzied nanoracism that is utterly moronic, that takes pleasure in wallowing in ignorance and that claims a right to stupidity and to the violence that it institutes. (Mbembe 2019, 62)

Only these final avatars, subtle, “invisible” manifestations and dangerous consequences of racism allow us to lastly acknowledge the critical products of the insidious mode of black body production. Its necropolitics does not use anymore the leash and chain or the guns, but allusions and disdain, and, only when anxiety attain paroxysm, a knee pressed on the neck of the body, a gesture which is also part of a spectacle.

A Theoretical Elaboration for Similar Modes of Production

Reviewing the existentialist critique of racism, Slavoj Žižek noticed that the “being” of Blacks is not only socio-symbolically constructed but also produced through performative acts of intersubjectivity: “When they are treated as inferior by Whites, this does indeed make them inferior at the level of their socio-symbolic identity. In other words, white racist ideology exerts a performative efficiency: it doesn’t merely interpret what Blacks are, it determines their very being and social existence” (Žižek 2018, 88).

Theoretically speaking, “production” connects the two major verbs to do and to be. Production means, first of all, making something (to do). By analyzing the mode of this production (which is a complex apparatus, fueled by and filled with mechanisms, relations and reactions – as we have seen), something like a living entity (to be) is being revealed and made true. The link between these significant sides (verbs), as the original Marxist analytical scheme have shown, is not necessarily a human condition, as Hannah Arendt and existentialist philosophers eventually elaborated, but primarily a “condition of possibility”. A methodological consequence of this observation is the fact that by studying production (“to do”) we can arrive at the essence (“to be”). This is what Michel Foucault had in mind when he spoke of the regime of truth, but the perspective is older, even earlier than Marx, and belongs to the speculative method developed by Hegel, who stated that the conditions for the possibility of thinking are conditions for the possibility of being.

Marxist criticism connected production to the human condition (principally class and, by extension, race or any other social identity, historically or culturally constructed) through its decisive analysis on “material conditions” seen as conditions of possibility. In this scheme, a mode of production allows certain potentialities and a regime of control (in the subsequent critical analyses, also formulated as regime of control of truth: those in power can control discursive and truth production, as shown by Foucault, which is the reformulation of the Marxist tenet: those in power have the means of production). The mode of production, thus, as eventually elaborated by post-Marxists, is more complex than the minimal original Marxian schematism: a mode of production provides conditions of possibility that are decisive for the human condition.

What is to be retained from this theory? Firstly, the critical observation that we do not produce only economic goods, we produce ideas, messages, events, relationships, a variety of socially and culturally constructed materialities and meanings; we produce the truth. Then, no matter how active it is in any given society, production is commonly “invisible”: the mechanisms, relations, forms, outcomes of production are frequently obscured by discourses of society and controlled by those in power. Production is hidden in ideologies about civilization, ethics, emancipation, progress; in discourses about what is good and what is needed for society, nation and the whole humanity. It is embedded in unequal class relationships and expressed in racism and all their forms of manifestations, including slavery. It is performed through entertainment shows, security interventions and states of exceptions. It is virtualized, masked, transferred and relocated. Nevertheless it remains embodied somewhere, precisely because it comes to life sometime within the process of production. As in the case of racism and the production of the black body, illustrated through instances of violence against Black people, similar contexts may reveal equally critical and condemnable mechanisms of oppression. These may be hidden in history or society, or continue to remain obscure to our perceptions and opinions about society. Hence, the critical effort which is needed in such a social analysis as the one sketched here.

A second theoretical indication derived from this analytical model is then the possibility to link the historical conditions to contemporary developments. Practices seen in transhistorical perspective – as we did in our analysis – become relevant for interpreting further evolutions of relationships, institutions, policies, behaviors in a more critical way when we recognize patterns or replications of deplorable acts of the past continued and continuously repeated today. Things have changed a lot since slavery times, but the mode of production of the black body remained the same in many aspects.

Through adopting (and adapting) from Marxism the central notion of “mode of production” we appreciated its totalizing meaning (which is somehow obliterated in Foucault’s power-and-truth analysis) and capacity to render suitably the centrality of production in (not only social-economic, but also) political, cultural and psychological relations, otherwise much presented only as relations (i.e. without the context, materiality, apparatus, devices and mechanisms entailed within) or deficiently discussed as “symbolic” representations (i.e. not as effective outcomes, with real consequences in people, human relations and social life). The critical dimension of this analysis, in the way we exposed it, is ultimately marked and shaped by this post-Marxist (even if not strictly Marxist, because lacking its economic determinism) focus on production, and the preoccupation to unveil the hidden mechanisms of production (which are not always embedded in class relations, as in Marx, but also in race relations as we have shown), and disclosure of its problematic effects in social and political reality.

The production of the black body in a given context is just a possible such analysis that suggests that other contexts might be fruitfully investigated for similar critical purposes. Our context – American racist relations dominated by a specific biopolitical strategy, identified as necropolitical, because of the numerous cases of killing black people by authority, but also because its “colonial” capability to decide over who deserves to live and who must die – is an illustrative one, primarily because it is filled with the several and complicated instances and patterns of mistreatment and brutality against Black people occurring in American history and society. Only this history (and its discursivity) – and in this aspect our analysis remained closer to the Foucauldian approach – provided us the full understanding of what is “the production of the Black body” and its critical contextualization in the “American necropolitics”.

Conclusion

Since discursivity is part of this process of production, racism is hidden not only in socio-political practices but also in the theoretical language. A series of concepts such as “colorblindness” or “post-racialty” were elaborated for that matter, in order to mask and obnubilate racial violence. Relevantly however (and this may be regarded as a final confirmation of the validity of our analysis), even when the body is deliberately put out of sight and its racial characteristics denied, in the name of a presumed egalitarian democratic tolerant meritocratic society (which is a utopian view, for sure), it resurfaces, re-materializing itself in each instance of actual racist encounter. Moreover, these encounters create traumas that further visibilize the materiality which is occulted by the socio-political apparatus.

"In the theorizing of race as lived through the body, race continues to configure and reconfigures power relations, which legitimize and extend the interests of the dominant group. Within the framework of colorblindness and post-raciality, the nonappearance of race and racial meanings project unto blacks and other nonwhites a racialized presence. It is partly for this reason that unarmed black men, especially, continue to be harassed, assaulted, and killed by white police officers, which is usually interpreted as police susceptibility and the endangerment that this group poses. […] In psychiatric lexicon, the black body is traumatized for life. Nonetheless, given that the racial trauma is played out in the open, blacks have no chance to “make it unconscious”." (Pinder 2015, 121-122)

Extending the discursivity beyond the conceptual level, we may acknowledge how the racialized body is saturated with racist presentations, having its genealogy in the racist history, which, in the case of America, meant indentured servitude, slavery, the Jim Crow laws, legal segregation and the post-Civil Rights necropolitics. A history that produced and continuously reproduced through such instances as “shooting and killing the black man” – meaning in context that “we are just doing our jobs” and this “is a simple fact” – the assumption that black men pose a threat (Pinder 2015, 126).

As analyzed, this is inherent in a system of institutionalized violence functioning as a mode of production that sustains discriminatory practices and its “locus of terror” (Pinder) through overt strategies, liminal tactics and everyday, apparently unharmful, “minor” forms of “nanoracism” (Mbembe). Its materiality and logic of production calls for audience, however, and brings visibility as in any spectacle.

"Institutionalized violence is in itself a spectacle. […] [which] do not has inherent meaning, but can be interpreted in varying ways and used for contradictory political purposes. The critical point of these kinds of spectacles is that they undergo little or no critical examination because they fail to utilize a critique of power and violence. Power and violence, in this sense, are not two different axes of a major junction in which they meet, but a definite alliance is formed between them, which regrettably informs each other." (Pinder 2015, 126-127)

As we see from this last comment and considering the whole theorization drafted above, only its recognition as part of a mode of production represents a way of examining it truly critically. This “mode of production” is evidently not the capitalist mode of production conceived by Marx, but, by extension, any mode of production which produces the objects, practices and the conditions described in our analysis. The materialist critical perspective suggests however that we should always focus on a concrete form resulting from the process, and this is, obviously, in this case, the body.

The critical genealogy of “black body production” developed within our analysis allowed us to recognize a structure of governance, which is not necessarily built on a given economic mode of production. It may be well a transhistorical and transideological model, bearing neutral but powerful resonances, and expressed through a terminology of varied “authoritative” concepts including, for example, “Power”, “Domination” or “Empire”. This is actually and explicitly what Hardt and Negri, adapting Foucault’s concept of biopolitics labeled “biopolitical production” when acknowledging that Empire is not only a structure of governance, but also a mode of production (Hardt and Negri 2000, 22). And that’s why Mbembe’s suggestion on understanding racism today as a colonial-like encounter is crucial, including in its brutal forms of bodily violence.

We may, accordingly, conclude and advance further into understanding how the analysis of mode of production is not necessarily relied on a specific economic scheme or determinism (as in Marx and Marxism), but on a structure of power (the “power and violence junction” in Pinder) which may be found everywhere, regardless of the political or ideological regime. This is, analytically speaking, the “imperial” model (Hardt and Negri), the “coloniality of power” (Quijano) which instaurates and continuously creates racism. But not (only) in traditional forms known from history when the imperial and colonial regimes dominated the political relations, but – as Achille Mbembe meticulously demonstrated – in subtle, socially instilled patterns and “cultural” apprehensions, that are not only passive molds however, but also (or, more exactly) “productive forces” as explained throughout our analysis.

 

Works Cited


Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.