Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics

241 Pages·2019·1.044 MB·English

by  David Lloyd

Under Representation

Under Representation
The Racial Regime of Aesthetics
David Lloyd
fordham university press
New York 2019
Fordham University Press gratefully acknowledges fi nancial
assistance and support provided for the publication of this
book by the University of California, Riverside.
Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical,
photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief
quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission
of the publisher.
Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the
persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party
Internet websites referred to in this publication and does
not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will
remain, accurate or appropriate.
Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a
variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in
print may not be available in electronic books.
Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available online at https://catalog.loc.gov.
Printed in the United States of America
21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Under Representation 1
1. The Aesthetic Regime of Representation 19
2. The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain
in the Racial Regime 44
3. Race under Representation 69
4. Representation’s Coup 95
5. The Aesthetic Taboo: Aura, Magic, and the Primitive 124
Notes 161
Bibliography 205
Index 221

preface
There are books whose unfolding, from a handful of ill-formed questions
to the work that fi nally appears, takes so many years that their chapters
begin to resemble fragments of a memoir. They map out the shifting per-
spectives and learning processes that the passage of time hopefully entails.
Under Representation is one of those books. The initial framing of its argu-
ments stemmed from the “culture wars” of the late 1980s, out of a need
to account for the seemingly unyielding racism of the so-called liberal in-
stitutions. How could institutions whose missions promised democratic
inclusivity and enlightened inquiry remain in practice so resistant to the
project of racial desegregation? To approach that question was, in the con-
text of the intellectual left’s then-pressing concern with ideology and insti-
tutions, to inquire into the political formation of subjects that educational
institutions were charged with producing. Coming to such questions from
research into Irish nationalism and anticolonialism, where the role of cul-
ture in the shaping of political subjects was so prominent, I found myself
pursuing them into the terrain of aesthetic philosophy, the foundation of
the humanities disciplines that were most troubled by the culture wars.
Those circumstantial conjunctions would become the enduring matrix of
a set of questions about aesthetics, race, and politics that continued to en-
gage me on a track that ran parallel to my ongoing work on Ireland and
postcolonialism.
They were not questions that lost their urgency. In the insurgent opti-
mism of the late 1980s, it would have been hard to envisage the retrench-
ment that was about to take place in the wake of the Cold War: the defund-
ing of the university and its consequent privatization and corporatization;
the rise of neoliberal economics globally, harnessed to a political foreclo-
sure of alternatives to brutal regimes of austerity and expropriation of pub-
lic goods, from welfare to education; and the rollback of the small gains
of affi rmative action in the name of postracial rubrics like “excellence and
diversity.” All those factors stalled the transformative aims that had been
at stake in the culture wars, above all the democratization of the university
vii
viii Preface
through its radical diversifi cation. Though the institutions still spoke the
language of inclusion and representation, their actual capacity to continue
to segregate and to restrict access to the educational commons was borne
out in the ever-more stratifi ed demography of both the university and so-
ciety. Merely to maintain and defend some of the gains of the post–civil
rights decades seemed struggle enough. And the language of rights and
representation that was still the idiom necessary to any defensive agenda
came to seem as inadequate to the actual political situation as the invoca-
tion of universality and the human in the face of the increasing relegation
of so many to disposability under the neoliberal dispensation.
The chapters gathered in Under Representation embody successive at-
tempts to come to terms with the evolving conditions in which any strug-
gle for democratic transformation and justice took place. Throughout, I
assume that the critical theorization of the aesthetic, as the realm in which
the notion of the subject of freedom was thought alongside the subordina-
tion of unfree subjects, is indispensable to understanding the formations
of politics and race that shaped the modern epoch among whose ruins we
continue to work. I seek to supplement the analysis of race that has been
advanced so powerfully of late but that, surprisingly, has almost entirely
left the terrain of aesthetic theory aside. This is especially surprising given
the importance of artworks of every kind to both the imaginative survival
of the racialized and the critical resistance to racism. Under Representation
as a whole argues that to ignore the aesthetic as a crucial domain within
which the modern idea of the human was forged is to overlook its con-
tinuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures of the
present. It is that formation that I name throughout the racial regime of
representation, tracking its genealogy from Enlightenment thinkers like
Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin.
This book emerges out of my longstanding engagement with post-
colonial theory and seeks to challenge the no less peculiar occlusion of
race from the major works of that fi eld. That postcolonial engagement
has been infl ected by an ongoing dialogue with critical race theory and in
particular with black studies, which over the last few decades have entirely
transformed the thinking of race as a historical and philosophical category.
My own entry point into the analysis of race and colonialism as an Irish
undergraduate in England studying Irish nationalism was through Frantz
Fanon. His analysis of language and colonialism in Black Skin, White Masks
was to me a startling revelation of the colonial nature of British rule in
Ireland, opening the way to an analytical framework that was then, in the
late 1970s, virtually never considered. Fanon’s work has remained an indis-
Preface ix
pensable touchstone for me. Throughout Under Representation he opens a
passageway between predominantly US analyses of race and the neglected
question of raciality in postcolonial studies and between these fi elds and
that of aesthetic theory. Hence what might otherwise seem a peculiarity
of this book: its frequent juxtaposition of Fanon’s insights with readings
of European critical thinkers. Fanon’s fundamental interrogation of the
cultural imposition of racial colonialism that goes by the name of assimila-
tion already implied the outlines of a critique of the racial structures of the
aesthetic.
Though this is a theoretical work that intervenes primarily in the tradi-
tions of aesthetic thought, the conditions out of which I have written were
always collective and dialogical. Given the many years over which it has
been in the making, it would be impossible for me to acknowledge every
individual from whose conversation or writing I have learned or whose
criticisms I have absorbed in revising my thinking. But over those years,
the common work of a number of groups and collectives has proven in-
dispensable to my own and this book could not have been written with-
out their sustaining commitment to dialogue as the essential medium of
thought. I still think of the Group for the Critical Study of Colonialism,
which met in Berkeley from about 1984 to 1991, as an inspirational exam-
ple of the creative work that can be done with minimal material resources
and an abundance of determination. Later, the University of California
Multicampus Research Group on the Subaltern and the Popular, orga-
nized by Swati Chattopadhyay and Bhaskar Sarkar at UC Santa Barbara
from 2005 to 2014, was indispensable to thinking through the question
of subalternity and furnished an intellectual community that never failed
to prove that laughter and enjoyment are the companions of dialectic.
These were truly symposia in the original sense of the term. Most recently,
the informal gatherings of the Anti-Colonial Machine have offered since
2010 the kind of insurgent spaces that generously and generatively allow
one to risk venturing unfi nished thought in the confi dence that it will be
returned augmented and enhanced. To the members of all these collec-
tives, I am grateful for the opportunities to think together and to learn
the gift of an intellectual collaboration that can never be recuperated or
institutionalized.
No less formative of my thinking have been the numerous organiza-
tions of students who have maintained and pressed the demand for justice
on every campus at which I have worked over the last three decades, from
the student organizers of the antiapartheid divestment campaign at Berke-
ley in the 1980s to the Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation at