The many lives of fungibility: anti-blackness in neoliberal times

ABSTRACT

This article maps the many lives of the concept of fungibility in contemporary theories of both blackness and neoliberalism. Framed by the 2018 political chants across the US against ‘white supremacy’, the article unravels how neoliberalism obfuscates the singular vector of anti-blackness that grounds the colonial ontology of liberalism, modernity, and global capitalism. By tracing the concept of fungibility through the work of Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and C. Riley Snorton, the article shows how fungibility works both ontologically and semiotically. The article then tracks fungibility through the neoliberal episteme, as derived from Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, to expose how the neoliberal episteme bastardizes the concepts of social difference into clever accoutrement, thereby eroding the capacity of neoliberal subjects to grasp the persistent ontology of anti-blackness. While the article does not track these dynamics strictly along the trajectories of bio/necropolitics, the foundational role of black death in the colonial ontology of liberalism, modernity, and global capitalism is precisely what the neoliberal episteme obfuscates; by approaching neoliberalism, through Foucault, as the birthing of biopolitics, we see how the division and tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics are racialized. Put more stridently, neoliberalism enables the biopolitical celebration of both life and diversity as values in and of themselves, without any concern for the histories of specific forms of life and specific forms of difference. In this vein, necropolitics calls out the foundational and persistent role of anti-blackness in the colonial ontology of liberalism that neoliberalism intensifies. This leads to the article’s concluding demand that white subjects must countenance fungibility in its ontological and semiotic iterations, speculating that we may be entering a historical moment when this might occur.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-blackness
• neoliberalism
• fungibility
• racialization
• gender
• colonial ontology
• radical black studies
• feminist
• diversity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Much of this article extends arguments, such as the one invoked here regarding the erasure of historical residues from categories of social difference in the neoliberal episteme, that are made with greater precision in Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics (Winnubst, 2015).

2. While both phrases tarry with politics, as I have briefly described, the language of diversity cannot be tethered to ethics and, therefore, can traffic easily on both sides of ideology. By ferreting out the ethical components implied in the ‘No White Supremacy!’ chant, I emphasize that it is the demand for a particular referent that places it in the register of ethics, not only the invocation of an ‘ought’. The ‘ought’ that anchors classical ethics is still necessary, but insufficient for ethics in neoliberalism. For further elaborations of the transformations in ethics in neoliberalism, see also Winnubst (2015).

3. The question of who is and is not strictly an ‘Afropessimist’ is a thorny question that will never be mine to discern. The field I am calling radical black studies, however, takes the social death of blackness in a remarkable array of directions. For a limited sampling of work that diverges from the totalizing logic of Wilderson, Sexton and Warren, see Alexander Weheliye (2014) on the revolutionary potential of an object becoming a radically different subject; Katherine McKittrick (2015) on the mathematics of black life; Christina Sharpe (2016) on the many afterlives of slavery; the broad work of Rizvana Bradley (e.g. Bradley, 2016) on the experimental aesthetics of a wide range of black artists; and the recent work of Tavia Nyong’o (2018) on the queer drama of black life. There are clearly many forms of blackness in the world, both historically and contemporaneously; to call out anti-blackness in an ontological register renders the pervasive power of the colonial ontology inescapable for one’s approach to questions of race and racism. I return explicitly to my understanding of the feminist break from Afropessimism below.

4. Spillers’ work thereby dovetails with the critiques by Maria Lugones (Spillers, 2003) regarding the coloniality of gender, while remaining clearly distinct in the genealogies, material violences, and futures attached.

5. The elaboration of the ways that these various differences, especially gender, modulate the flattening of social differences that is at work in the neoliberal episteme falls beyond the purview of this article. For a detailed elaboration, see Winnubst (2015).

6. In Lacanian terms, this intensification of social comparison as the primary horizon for meaning-making renders ego-formation ensconced at the level of the imaginary; see Winnubst (2015) for the full elaboration of this Lacanian hermeneutic lens. For a brilliant rendering of this social scene, see the episode ‘Nosedive’ of the Netflix series Black Mirror; I thank Marie Draz for this reference.

7. See Capitalism and Freedom for Friedman’s classic arguments for ‘trickle-down justice’ through the endless expansion of free markets.

8. These characteristics have dominated traditional analyses of whiteness; for an exemplary analysis, see Dyer (1997).

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Shannon Winnubst

Shannon Winnubst is Chair and Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University. She has written two books, Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics (Columbia: 2015) and Queering Freedom (Indiana: 2006), as well as many articles and essays spanning feminist theory, queer studies, and philosophy. She has served as an editor of several projects, most importantly of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism (2013–2018). She is currently working on the figure of white death as a reconfiguration of ‘the human’ vis-à-vis anti-black coloniality and as a response to the contemporary global rise of anti-blackness and xenophobia.