The Blues and the Damned: (Black) life-that-survives capital and biopolitics

Abstract

This paper juxtaposes and connects the critique of capitalism and biopolitics with arguments concerning ontology in anthropology and allied fields, in relation to insights from research on life in the shadows of oil refineries in Durban, South Africa. I argue that both capitalism and biopolitics attempt to ontologize or make present that which neither historical-geographic process can fulfil. With respect to capitalism, the spectre of full employment and productivity haunts a reality of widespread underemployment, indebtedness and insecurity. With respect to biopolitics, the spectre of governmental intervention to secure the means of vitality haunts a landscape of uneven access to the means of life and unjust exposure to the means of death. The articulation of capitalist biopolitics is, I argue, a fatal one, which reproduces widespread insecurity in the guise of vitality and improvement. The global intellectual tradition that has long understood this, I argue, is the Black radical tradition. The improvisational critical aesthetics of the blues have also provided a powerful means to consider what survives the ruinous articulation of capitalism and biopolitics. Indeed, precisely because capitalist biopolitics destroy both vitality and value under the spectre of constant renewal, these Black arts of survival are vital for our times, everywhere. I draw insights from fieldwork in Wentworth in South Durban that speak to the power of the blues as critique of the harm-producing ontologization of capitalist biopolitics, as well as of the life-that-survives.

Résumé: Cet article juxtapose et relie la critique du capitalisme et de la biopolitique et les arguments relatifs à l’ontologie en anthropologie et autres domaines y afférant, concernant les résultats de la recherche sur la vie à proximité des raffineries de pétrole de Durban, en Afrique du Sud. J’avance que le capitalisme tout comme la biopolitique tentent de créer une ontologie ou de concrétiser ce qu’aucun des processus historico-géographiques ne peut réaliser. Pour ce qui est du capitalisme, le spectre du plein emploi et de la productivité hante une réalité fort répandue de chômage, de dette et d’insécurité. Pour ce qui est de la biopolitique, le spectre de l’intervention gouvernementale pour sécuriser les moyens de vitalité hante un paysage inégal d’accès aux moyens de vie, et une exposition injuste aux moyens de mort. Selon moi, l’articulation d’une biopolitique capitaliste est fatale, et reproduit une insécurité fort répandue sous l’apparence trompeuse de la vitalité et de l’amélioration. La tradition intellectuelle mondiale qui est témoin de cela depuis longtemps, est selon moi la tradition radicale noire. L’esthétique critique d’improvisation du blues a aussi constitué un moyen puissant d’étudier ce qui survit à l’articulation désastreuse du capitalisme et de la biopolitique. En effet, précisément parce que la biopolitique éthique détruit la vitalité aussi bien que la valeur sous le spectre du renouveau constant, ces arts noirs de survie sont indispensables pour notre époque, et partout. Je tire des conclusions du travail sur le terrain dans le Wentworth dans le Sud de Durban et parle du pouvoir du blues pour critiquer le caractère néfaste de la création d’une ontologie de biopolitique capitaliste, ainsi que de la vie-qui-survit.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• Capitalism
• Biopolitics
• Ontological turn
• Black Marxism
• the blues

Mots-clefs:

• Afrique du Sud
• Capitalisme
• Biopolitique
• Tournant ontologique
• Marxisme noir
• le blues

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, Peter Kankonde Bukasa and Lorena Núñez, the editors of this special issue, ‘Vital Instability: Ontological Insecurity and African Urbanisms’, and specifically to Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon for comments on multiple versions of this paper. I have also benefited from the extremely astute thoughts of two anonymous referees and the equally generous reading of Joel Wainwright. I will not have done justice to all their comments, but have only gained from them. Many thanks to Cedric Nunn for the use of his beautiful photograph.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Many thanks to Joel Wainwright for his generosity, for this point, and for pushing me to explain why photography might be seen as part of an aural blues tradition. Learning from Fred Moten (2003), my response is that artifacts that highlight one sense dampen but do not destroy others.

2. The reference here is to Walter Benjamin’s ([1935] 1985, 228) comment that Eugène Atget photographed deserted Parisian streets ‘like scenes of a crime’ (Chari 2013, 149).

3. Thanks again to Joel Wainwright for the phrase ‘life-that-survives’, in this form that will prove prescient in relation to the critique of biopolitics that I propose in this paper.

4. In my preliminary study of US Afro-pessimism, distinct from pessimistic discourse about ungovernable Africa, key figures Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton draw from the large corpus of Black thought, including, importantly, a reading of Fanon’s ([1967] 2008) provocation ‘a Black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential form from which a genuine new departure can emerge’. Wilderson (2010, 58–59) stages this new departure using a term from Saidiya Hartman thus:

Afro-pessimism explores the meaning of Blackness not – in the first instance – as a variously and unconsciously interpellated identity or as a conscious social actor, but as a structural position of noncommunicability …  predicted on modalities of accumulation and fungibility, not exploitation and alienation;

this, axiomatically, separates what Wilderson calls ‘antagonism’ from anything like a Black Marxist engagement with contradiction, conflict and struggle, building on Orlando Patterson’s (1982, 13) argument that ‘slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonoured persons’, a situation he terms ‘social death’. Afro-pessimists take this ‘permanence’, what Saidiya Hartman (2007) explores as the afterlife of slavery, to be ontological; but as Jared Sexton (2011, 23) argues in conversation with Fred Moten (2008), this critical position was not intended ‘as a negation of the agency of black performance, or even a denial of black social life’; the debate with Moten rests on Sexton’s (2011, 28–29) argument that ‘black life is not social, or rather than black life is lived in social death’. Much hinges why ‘social death’ is conceptualized as ontological, exempt from contradiction and struggle; to put it differently, might we rather see the critique of ontologization as central to what Paul Gilroy (1993, 37) calls Black Atlantic counterculture, in which ‘words, even words stretched by melisma and supplemented or mutated by the screams which still index the conspicuous power of the slave sublime, will never be enough to communicate its unsayable claims’. In a generous and bountiful response to what he calls Afro-pessimism’s ‘paraontological imagination’, Moten (2013, 778) asks ‘What if blackness is the name that has been given to the social field and social life of an illicit alternative capacity to desire.’ Including multiple works by Hartmann, Wilderson and Sexton, also important are texts by Lewis Gordon, Nahum Chandler and Hortense Spillers, and on South Africa (Barcheisi 2015; Wilderson [2008] 2015).

5. Achille Mbembe’s (2003) concept is a critique of sovereignty, rather than of capital and biopolitics, but my implication is that biopolitical struggle becomes necessary when the death-drive of sovereignty rears its head. I call these tendencies, meaning they are not necessary.

6. Many thanks to Joel Wainwright for help with this formulation.

7. Joel Wainwright, personal communication, 10 May 2016.

8. We might call this a corrective to Wainwright’s precise words, ‘insofar as it is inherent to being’, with a lower case ‘b’.

9. Katherine Verdery and I have argued that this is not an accidental relation, in Chari and Verdery (2009).

10. One of the problems of translating Les damnés de la terre as The Wretched of the Earth rather than ‘the damned’ in Fanon (1991) is that ‘wretched’ implies a pathetic state while ‘damned’ implies a process of condemnation, and in its cosmology, its converse, redemption; I retain this dialectic in using the category ‘the damned’ as a reminder of the religious underside of this radicalism.

11. The turn to ontology in anthropology has taken many forms, with key contributions on Amerindian and indigenous ontologies, for instance, Descola (2013), Vivieros de Castro (2013), Pedersen (2011); from socio-cultural studies of science and from Science and Technology Studies, for instance, Latour (1988), Haraway (1991) and Helmreich (2009); from various approaches to materiality and vitalism, for instance, Bennett (2010), Coole and Frost (2010), Stewart (2007), or, more critically, Miller (2005); and in ways that intersect with the above, from post-human and multispecies ethnography, for instance, in Kohn (2013) or Tsing (2015). Each of these thinkers has produced substantial research through what they in various ways conceptualise as an ontological perspective.

12. Less convincing is Ugo Rossi’s (2013) recasting of regulation theory in ontological terms as a way of arguing for ‘ontological multiplicity’ within histories and geographies of capital. While regulation theorists sought to distinguish capitalist regimes or ‘varieties of capitalism’ through differences in institutional, political and structural form, Rossi claims ontological difference as functional to each distinct regime of capital accumulation. However, the key problem with regulation theory was that its rigid notion of ‘regimes’ held little in the way of a Gramscian attention to the cultural politics of contradiction, struggle and change, and Rossi’s ontologism turns regimes into stone.

13. James Laidlaw, in a review of Pedersen (2011), asks of the notion of multiple ontologies, ‘what on earth happens at the boundaries between different ontologies, and when things or people cross from one to another’ (Laidlaw 2012).

14. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Commonwealth, the third part of their Empire trilogy, make an argument that on the face of it is similar, by positing ‘biopower’ as ‘the power over life’ to a counter-power they rather arbitrarily distinguish as ‘biopolitics’, ‘the power of life to resist and determine an alternative production of subjectivity’ (Hardt and Negri 2003, 238); but this argument suffers from the same lack of actual attention to the differential processes of social change in theory or practice, and so we are left with a series of assertions with no explanatory or political value. Thanks to Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon for the provocation.

15. Thanks to Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon for this as well.

16. I cannot do more than claim this, although the extended account is in my draft book manuscript, Apartheid Remains.

17. I have gained considerably from the way in which Fassin (2010) diagnoses concern for physiological, moral, political and affective life in his critique of the notion that biopolitics encompasses all of it, and ‘life itself’, an argument with Nicholas Rose and Paul Rabinow.

18. For some key works in blues critical writing in addition to those cited in the text, Brown (1932), Oliver ([1960] 1990), LeRoi (1963), Baldwin (1964), Jones (1966), Keil (1966), Murray (1976), Palmer (1981), Carby (1986), Flynn (1986), Baker (1984), Ellison (1989), Barlow (1989), Powell (1989), Lomaz (1993) and more recently, with respect to post-apartheid South Africa, Gordon (2014).

19. Jacques Derrida, in Fassin (2010, 82).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, South Africa.