From Morrison’s introduction it seems clear that she is exploring a concrete experience of what Cheng would call melancholia in order to reveal its workings and move readers to overcome it. I think the novel itself is an example of the utility in an exploration of the psycho-social dimensions of raciality that Cheng calls for. I’m usually someone who insists on any social theory leading to action for me to consider it useful; Morrison’s novel reminded me of the ways that everyday individual actions perpetuate a broader racist structure: each of the individual rejections, down to the white man behind the counter not seeing her, contribute to Pecola’s self-loathing, which itself pours back out into her community. Likewise Frieda’s simple and heroic act of fighting the boys who are harassing her is much bigger than a momentary act. Individual actions become part of a complex nexus that constitute greater social structures. These actions as literary events resonate too. I am socialized white and male; my experience of reading Toni Morrison if nothing else reminded me of the infinite un-knowability of everyone around me. The Bluest Eye combats invisibility in the nuanced but entirely concrete stories of its various characters, and hopefully can prevent the “dynamic locking in mutual projection” that leads to “the racial moment” (Cheng, 16). There is also of course the danger of it becoming its own new projection.
Can we come to the understanding that Cheng alludes to where we break down the opposition between material and immaterial manifestations of racism? [This distinction seems to come from a legal battle in the first place, at least in Cheng]. How does this move affect our understanding of particularity as opposed to massification? (There are plenty of massifying materialist understandings of structural racism, and Cheng’s use of psychoanalysis is in a way a massification of racism as it plays out in individual situations. We could synthesize a giant massifying theory of racism, that moves fluidly between sociopolitical and psychic cause and effect... Toni Morrisson intentionally uses a “unique” rather than “representational” character (xii) - why is this important in our theorization, and how do we keep a focus on individual experience from being crippling when we are trying to confront racism as a system? To be clear I think we can and we have to, and I think Toni Morrison succeeds in doing this. One way to phrase the question is ‘what is the utility of a massifying systematic theoretical understanding of psycho-social/material racism?’)
I've been thinking about some of these issues from slightly different angles, and I think you've brought up several key points for formulating social actions against race. "Can we come to the understanding that Cheng alludes to where we break down the opposition between material and immaterial manifestations of racism?": I think that somehow we must. It does not seem to be enough--and repeatedly we've been confounded trying to surmount this--to address social or political manifestations of race individually. The overall morphology of the "race system" is so convoluted and self-supporting that resistance along single axes, such as visual representation, is insufficient.
ReplyDeleteYour point about the necessity of insisting on the focus on the individual leads me to suggest that we need to dig deeper into knowledge and representation, toward the "primal" that Heidegger claims is only revealed "at last." Theories of large social structures are largely unable to process the contributions and struggles of the individual. It seems to me that "psycho-social/material racism" is closer to the essential objects in play, is more sensitive to the individual's role.
I think that has promise, and is worth discussing further. But I worry that it may be less sensitive to the technological and the epistemological--the ways that dialectical thought have historically formed digital technologies, which now, having retained that inertia, confirm such thought almost of their own accord (e.g. statistics). Is there a deeper level to reach, whose components are more fundamental, and from which both technological and psycho-social arise? Or do we just need a theoretical extension capable of considering technologies as active agents themselves?