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ABSTRACT
This essay explores theories of racial capitalism for insights about how to reimagine rhetorical advocacy beyond both Marxist formations and new materialist interventions. With an anticapitalist commitment informed by Marxism and the politics of affectivity that resonates with new materialism, Black Studies scholarship forwards key aspects of these two traditions without following into political rigidity or flattening political asymmetries. It does so by reconfiguring contingency as the grounds of rhetorical praxis. From its frameworks, timeliness is ever present as the past and future bleed into the present, and consequently rhetorical emplacement has an equally ambiguous relationship to traditional heuristics. This uncertain acontingency opens new possibilities for rhetorical studies.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the English department audience at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, for their insightful comments to an earlier version of this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers and Kathleen McConnell for pushing me to be more precise. I am also indebted to John Ackerman and Michael Lechuga, for opening and guiding this conversation.
Notes
1 Maurizio Lazzarato, Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2021) 184.
2 Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy (New York: Verso, 1997); Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism (New York: Semiotext(e), 2018); Nina Maria Lozano, Not One More! Feminicidio on the Border (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019); Ruhan Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (New York: Polity, 2019); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Alexandrea J. Ravenelle, Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
3 See: Jodi Dean, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (London: Verso, 2019).
4 Dean cites Wilderson's memoir, Incognegro, about the South African ANC party but not his critical work that articulates anti-Blackness as a psychological, cultural, and affective structure in excess of capitalist logics and, therefore, immune to party politics. Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). For a discussion of Claudia Jones's relationship to the Communist Party, see Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
5 See, for instance, Dana L. Cloud, “The Spiral of Survival,” Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 374.
6 Diane Davis, “Rhetoricity, Temporality, Democratic Nonequivalence,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 51, no.3 (2021): 195.
7 Thomas J. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 204.
8 An important exception is the recent formum on Rhetorical New Materialism in which the editors emphasize that rhetoric needs seriously to “consider the ideas of Black Studies scholars.” See Rhetoric Society Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2022) ed. Laurie Gries and Jennifer Clary-Lemon.
9 Barbara A. Biesecker, “From General History to Philosophy: Black Lives Matter, Late Neoliberal Molecular Biopolitics, and Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 50, no. 4 (2017): 418.
10 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
11 George A. Kennedy “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992): 1–21. For an overview of such vitalist rhetoric, see Chris Ingraham, “Energy: Rhetoric's Vitality,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2018): 260–268.
12 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 29.
13 Tyrone S. Palmer, “‘What Feels More Than Feeling?’ Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 2 (2017): 35.
14 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) 2.
15 Gilmore. Golden Gulag, 28.
16 Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 78.
17 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015): 66. Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 7.
18 For a discussion of this case, see Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: Avon Books, 1995), 76–78.
19 Mbembe argues that under neoliberalism, the condition of blackness has extended beyond those with black skin to include a diverse category of humans for which capitalism has no use. Achille Mbembe, Necro-Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 177–9.
20 Palmer, “What Feels More Than Feeling?,” 40. For a theoretical discussion of what it feels like to be black, see Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black,’” National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, Ed. Antonio Gómez-Moriana and Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30–66.
21 This is similar to how Debra Hawhee theorizes alogos through its positive capacities that function as alternatives to logos. See: Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
22 For a vision of anticolonial rhetorical practice in communication studies, see Michael Lechuga, “An anticolonial future: reassembling the way we do rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 378–385; for an articulation of decoloniality in rhetoric and writing studies, see Ellen Cushman, Damián Baca, and Romeo Garcia, “Delinking: Toward Pluriversal Rhetorics,” College English 84, no. 1 (2021): 7–32.
23 Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Norton Books, 2020): 162. For her theory of the black body as ungendered, presubjective flesh, see Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81.
24 Wilderson III, Afropessimism, 86.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid, 85.
27 Ibid, 95.
28 Ibid.
29 Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago, IL: Zed Books, 1987).
30 Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (2003): 24.
31 Wilderson III, Afropessimism, 205.
32 Wilderson calls this a program of “negative dialectics.” Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal,” 31. Although this has a clear relationship to Theodor Adorno's work of the same name, a further correspondence exists with Foucault who defines critique as a desire “not to be governed like that” as well as Kara Keeling's reading of Bartleby the Scrivener whose refusal takes the temporally ambiguous modal form of “I would prefer not to.” Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” The Politics of Truth (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007): 44; Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019), 41–51.
33 Hartman's claim to do the history of the present vis-à-vis a genealogy of the black woman resonates with Foucault's genealogy as a self-defined history of the present. See, for instance, Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” Whereas Foucault's genealogy tracks how an idea (madness) or practice (sexuality) becomes a problem for a society, Hartman explores how society has accepted something (a silent archive) as though it were not a problem. Both interventions require new disciplinary methods. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 4.
34 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” 12.
35 Ibid, 14.
36 Ibid,11.
37 Ibid,12.
38 See Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
39 Katherine McKrittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 9.
40 Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought” Que Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 184.
41 This is not unlike the notion that the akairotic—being out of time—helps account for moments when “ambient rhetoric is as much harmful as it is productive.” Alexandra S. Moore and Belinda Walzer, “Precaritization in the Security State: Ambient Akairos in Mohamedonu Ould Slahi's Guantánamo Diary” Precarious Rhetorics, Ed. Wendy S. Hesford, Adela C. Licona, and Christa Teston (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2018), 29.
42 Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 44, no. 2 (2015): 18.
43 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016): 40.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid, 19.
47 See, for instance, Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View” Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, Ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1995): 5–57.
48 Sharpe, In the Wake, 33. Karma R. Chávez “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric's Historical Narrative.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72.
49 Sharpe, In the Wake, 15.
50 Notably, two special issues have recently addressed the temporal turn through the lens of race, gender, and the work of social justice. They articulate themselves within a temporal turn, indicating more work to be done with the decolonization of rhetoric's spatial theory. See Women's Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020) ed. Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Phillips as well as Rhetoric Society Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2021) ed. Collin Bjork and Frida Buhre.
51 I have made similar arguments for rhetoric to explore the embodiment of material affects in connection with particularly political economic structures. Unfortunately, they do so through an undifferentiated sense of rhetorical affect. See, for instance, “The Body as a Site of Material-Symbolic Struggle: Toward a Marxist New Materialism” Philosophy and Rhetoric 53, no. 1 (2020): 89–103 and “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism” and my book Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates (Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2019).
52 Noting the shift from a public-oriented cultivation of black bodies at the height of the Civil Rights movement to a this privately oriented artistic approach, Lisa Corrigan calls for a reengagement with the public work of blackness. Lisa M. Corrigan, Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2020): 164.
53 Michael Lechuga, “An Anticolonial future”; Logan Rae Gomez, “Temporal Containment and the Singularity of Anti-Blackness: Saying Her Name in and across Time” 51, no. 3 (2021): 182–92.
54 Laurie E. Gries offers one such alternative rhetorical methodology—one intended to shift bodily attunements with the earth. See her “New Materialist Ontobiography: A Critical-Creative Approach for Coping and Caring in the Chthulucene” College English 82, no. 3 (2020): 301–25.
55 McKittrick, Dear Science, 1.
56 Ibid, 122–124.
57 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2013): 26.
58 Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric's rac(e/ist) problems,” 466.
59 For a discussion of this relationship, see Catherine Chaput, Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Public Research University (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008).
60 Lechuga, “An Anticolonial future,” 383. See also Matthew Houdek, “The imperative of race for rhetorical studies: toward diversting from disciplinary and institutionalized whiteness” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 292–9, and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric's rac(e/ist) problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465–76.
61 For this reason, Donald Lazere's response to PMLA's “Cultures of Argumentation Forum,” which confines the scope of argumentation to a political subjectivity and form implicated in the ongoing time of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, runs contrary to its purported aims of animating a larger anticapitalist milieu. See his critique and the response from forum editor Pardis Dabashi, “What Ever Happened to the Study of Political Argument?” PMLA 136, no. 2 (2021): 320–3.
62 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” The Foucault Effect, Ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991): 87–104; Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Sharpe, In the Wake.