In "Black Skin, White Masks," Fanon counterposes the "dual narcissisms" of white superiority and black desire to prove "equal value." These "anomalies of affect" (as he calls them) circle each other. Fanon's chief concern is the black man's liberation from racialization as "epidermalized" socio-economic inferiorization. While he affirms that no unilateral liberation will have coherent value, he adds that it would be a mistake to "believe in their automatic interdependence." In this context, I would like to address what counterposes itself to that liberation in the form of "white affect," echoing Fanon's sentiment that by analyzing it, one may hope to dissipate it. (BSWM,10-12)
While the notion of "white affect" would seem to be relevant to the noise we hear these days about white pride, or other defenses of whiteness, where does its implication of an essentialized white personality with an emotional attachment to being white take us? Is it simply something standing in opposition to the call to abandon white skin privilege, or to abolish the white race as a social construct? Is such a programmatics intelligible? Or do both beg the question of where whiteness as a social construct acquires its tenacity?
Let us begin with derogatory terms, those moments at the kernal of all modes of domination that are so prevalent and accepted in this culture -- recently called "hate speech" or "slur." Derogatory terms are words that generalize individuals without referring to them, a categorizing name that substitutes itself for reference, and generate a totality of information about another without being informative. That is, they are form without content, self-referential and self-generative acts that cannot be assigned a meaning other than their use, as acts. The purpose of the act is to harm, to give negative valuation, to generalize, and to inferiorize, all at once. They are not simply performative speech acts, which require social recognition of contextual validity to be authentic (like a marriage ceremony or a declaration of war). They require only prior harm within an established mode of domination, which they re-reify in the moment, to be self-authenticating in their use. That is, they are speech acts that constitute their authenticating context, rather than depend on context to satisfy their conditions of enactment.
In effect, derogatory terms are not semiotic signifiers, but forms of assault -- verbal assault, yet not linguistic because outside the sign in social evocation of oppressive hierarchy. As forms of assault, they should be prohibited under assault statutes rather than as protected (or prohibited) language. It is indeed their pseudo-semiotic character that renders them unanswerable in kind, because their hierarchical authorization, which they reconfirm, is unidirectional, top down. Furthermore, in generalizing a person assaulted as a member of a group, the act both disparages the group through the individual generalized, and the individual through the derogation of the group. In other words, response or counter-violence in self-defense cannot be in kind; it is doubly proscribed by the fact of hierarchy which both conditions the deployment of derogation in form, and is, in content, by definition, the outlawing of self-defense by the subordinated. Counter-violence gets labelled aggression and criminalized; that is, construed as aggression and countering under the guise of self-defense.
If a derogatory term is a means of assault, an act of violence, then its continual use, even in the absence of the people it assaults, positions the speaker in an attitude, an affective state of continual, though discontinuous aggression, as a sense of self. What is gained by this? What does one become through it?
Clearly, the animus that drives one to such an attitude of assault has nothing to do with the person assaulted. The target is imaginary, constructed through the act of derogation and the generalization it participates in. The act is thus self-referential, relating to the generalization it enacts rather than its target's individual being. It is rather the existence of the person assaulted, whether present or not, that gives pretext for this animus and its real assault. In effect, as self-legitimizing, its use is always gratuitous. Indeed, its gratuitousness is what renders it unanswerable in language. Its use is thus obsessive, an endless internally generated filling of virtual space, the recalling of a required future. Derogation only serves to inflate the terms of hegemony it relies on. In both deployment and affect, derogation is redundant.
If derogation must repeat itself in social form (as hegemony) in order to exist in the first place, and creates the social milieu in which to repeat itself as a micro-hierarchy, the immediacy of its enactment becomes an expression of an excess of hegemony, a hyper-hegemonic replicant, or replication for its own sake. In this obsessive gratuitousness, however, it betrays its dependence on the other, and thus its compulsion to relegitimize the hegemony it expresses in excess. The violence it constitutes obsessively and redundantly becomes the bery being of the other against whom it is thrown, an existence it assaults in order to render it assailable. In this violent complex of redundancy, obsessiveness, and gratuitousness, the derogatory term allegorizes the entire social structure of domination -- whether with respect to race, sexuality, gender, etc. For a white person, its continual use not only sets the user in the mode of assailant, but reinstitutes the micro-structure of whiteness as identity and identification.
We have been speaking of the overtly racist version of white identity. There is a liberal version, also obsessive, also redundant, and violent in a different way. It seeks to adopt the effects of white racism as a project, to alleviate the distress of its "victims," feeling it has to "help these people." In assuming this project, its operations cancel people's autonomy, objectifying them as humans caught in a situation. In feeling threatened by the self-determination that the autonomy or resubjectivization of the subordinated would enact, liberalism's anti-racism reifies racialization, and thus its derogations. Both the overt white racist and the white liberal are conscious positionalities, since each can be curtailed when in a situation dominated by the other one. For each, their conduct is focused (rather than redundant), called for (rather than obsessive), and properly contextualized (rather than gratuitous), and hence not violence (whether as assault or objectification) at all.
What is in question, here, is the language of white racialized identity, the language of whiteness that masks this complex of obsessive redundancy and the violence of dependency. Two basic postulates present themselves for this language of whiteness. Others are defined through a signifier for color so that whites can define themselves as white. And the whiteness so defined depends on a crypto-biological purity condition that distinguishes it from the panoply of crypto-biological chromatic differences it sees in others. It constructs itself as a difference in chromatic difference, a conceptual incommensurability between itself as white and others as of color, through which it signifies and constructs what is to be noticed about people. The resulting structure of social categorizations constitutes white racialization of its society, or of the world.
It is with the fact and power of definition that we must begin to understand the language developed. To define someone is to generalize them. The discourse that racializes by pointing out what is to be noticed about a person as racial defines in generality what is to be encountered in that person. Though physical differences exist between all people, only signified differences can be given importance and valuation. The act of noticing, as a function of that importance, already subordinates the person's individuality to what is to be noticed; it is already a generalization.
Of course, generalization is not empirical. People present themselves only as individuals. To experience them as instances of a generalization, one must bring that generalization as pre-existent to one's encounter with them. It cannot represent prior experience for the same reason. In generalizing, a prior concept discursively constructed elsewhere, is superimposed upon a person, who is then encountered through it. It thereby substitutes itself for experience of that person. Thus, the act of generalization effaces a person's self-presentation, and obviates experience of the individual. In effect, as prior knowledge of a person, generalization renders the person unknowable. As an alibi for that unknowability, racism resorts to the ostensible "objectivity" (i.e. determinism) of biology.
But if one is going to interact socially with a generalized, and hence unknowable other, then an alternate knowability must be constructed. The other must be endowed with a subjectivity, an intentionality, a temperament and capability by which to be encountered. To this end, racism produces a vast system of narratives that reinvent personhood and subjectivity for the one generalized, imposed without the participation of the individual they are about. These narratives, the second discursive level of white language, link the apriori attributes of culture and character reserved for the other through generalization with their being encountered, either in reality or in imagination. As substitutes for the unknowable, these narratives naturalize themselves as empirical -- another link to biologization. But their content or "aboutness" belongs to the white sources of the narrative discourse.
Finally, while these narratives constitute the sign system that refers to the racialized Other, they in fact constitute the discourse through which whites speak to each other as white, the medium in which whiteness constructs itself as white. Though the system of narratives ostensibly refers to those generalized, its real referentiality is to itself. All discourse between whites as whites assumes this language and its meanings. It often limits itself to cliche, tone of voice, innuendo, and derogatory terms, but its antecedents are the system of narratives that its innuendos abbreviate. When speaking this language, as the medium of identity, a white speaker is always speaking to other whites, even when actually addressing a "non-white" person. Ironically, it is precisely because whiteness is a language that racism, though its existence silences whole groups of people, has been able to coexist with the Bill of Rights, and with the right of free speech -- and even seek protection for itself within that right. For the racist, free speech extends only to the users of language; it does not extend to those who are a language.
The psychic violence experienced by those subjected to such conscription as a language, to being rendered the means whereby whites institutionalize their relations to each other, remains indescribable. One could cite DuBois's notion of the double consciousness. The (white) affect I am attempting to address here takes its moment of inception from the permissibility of this violence, to the point of being socially ritualistic.
There is an ontological paradox in the definition of another as "non-white" being the core of white self-definition, since to be white then means to find the core of one's identity elsewhere, in the other. The other becomes the substance of one's identity. This is the source of white obsession with the racialized other (or the obsession with women by masculinism). The other is defined to be noticed, yet thrust elsewhere, expelled yet interiorized. For whites, what is "non-white" becomes at once nemesis, fascination, and self, against which white identity must universalize itself as unmarked.
Physical violence is inherent in such a system. The other is both placed at the center of white identity and continually evicted from it. And because it is a self-generated attribute of white identity, this violence is always gratuitous. It marks the need to continually reconstitute white identity as autonomous, precisely because it is dependent. That reconstitution is the core of white affect. As Ronald Judy says, "Will beyond power has no passion, only affect." For white affect, it is precisely the imminence of power that renders the violence (of objectification as much as of terror) gratuitous -- unintelligible for its victim, while intelligible in its obsessive necessity for its white perpetrator.
This violence, as part of the language that whites speak to each other, and identify as white, becomes the matrix for the white social bond, what whites coalesce around as a symbol system. Contingent on mutual affirmation between them as a language, group identification becomes the real meaning of the "white" sign system. Whiteness is given by others, through the deployment of language and violence which constitutes one's membership card in the group. As membership, for which dues are paid in the form of speech and act perpetrated on the generalized other, but directed toward other whites, this violence and language is the interface, the realm of mutual conditioning between the institution of racism as individual animus or prejudice and the social institutionality of racism (profiling, redlining, police brutality, differential judiciary treatment or employment, etc.) without which individual prejudice would not be possible. Whiteness as a social structure is constituted by performance, and its performances (as language and gratuitous violence) are the moments of that structure as institution.
White-identified people cannot escape the effect of this structure. Identification of oneself as "white" brings with it the entire weight of white supremacist definitions, objectifications, and derogations, and situates one in the hierarchy. This is the place where white liberalism and overt racism coalesce. While the overt racist accentuates exclusion, as a form of appropriation and absorption, liberalism accentuates inclusion or absorption as a form of reified alterity. In identifying themselves as white, they both reduce those they designat as non-white to a meaning for themselves. Liberalism's objectifying focus on the effects of racial oppression leaves the structure of whiteness intact; that is, its attempt to separate whiteness from white supremacy is empty.
One cannot contest these structures without transmuting one's identity, in order to void one's dependence on them. One cannot identify as white and be anti-racist at the same time. What preserves white identification is one's very sense of self, the white affect for which redundancy, obsession, and gratuitousness are the ex-stasis.
But let us go a step further. If white language, the language of noticing and assault on the racialized, is the language by which whites recognize each other as white, this would also structure the act of noticing itself. It is not just that black people are noticed by whites, but whites have to be noticed by other whites as noticing. No state of coexistence between oneself as white and those one racializes can be accepted; all stasis must be disturbed to re-establish disequality and reaffirm whiteness. The act of noticing and assaulting someone, whether real or imaginary, fulfill this need. No racialized other is to be permitted social coexistence, or a human niche, to be themselves as such with a cultural structure of their own choosing. This is the content of continuous aggressivity to which white affect refers. Where the overt racist does it through derogation, the liberal does it through absorptive dependence and idealizing objectification. Both speak for the other, as their prerogative, and resist the other's autonomy. And both apprehend resistance or self-defense by the other as ingratitude, the rejection of their gift of white affect itself.
There is thus a drive toward double transformation involved in the assaultiveness from which whites acquire gratification as white. It is first a transposition of the noticed coexistent individual to an agonic generalized non-compliant character in a narrative, and oneself from mere human into a reconstitutor of social institutionality and self. This is the double bind into which racialization places those it racializes. This is the promise of white identification, as well as the structure with respect to which the idea of white skin privilege falls far short. One reconstructs whiteness by inducing non-compliance to something (contesting the other's self-respect, autonomy, desire, whatever), to which one can react as white. Stasis is transformed to an instance of rebellion and repression, which rehearses the structure of hegemony. The capacity for this is the truly evil benefit to be derived from the structure of racialization in general.
The anomaly of white affect is that it is a self-referential affect
that is wholly dependent on others it coopts for its own purposes.
Caught between an ectopic social ideology and a dystopic social
reality, the producer of whiteness seeks to recognize himself as an
agent of hegemony. To become such an agent, an act of violence is
required, for which another must be provoked into resistance. That
resistance is defined through the complex structure of hegemony to
which the would-be agent aspires, and reified as such by the
performance of whiteness that then constitutes hegemonic agency, that
fulfills the narratives of racializing generalization through which
whiteness constructs itself. The moment at which a black or brown
person will be conscripted by the needs of performance into the
opposite role, gratuitously, is never foreseeable, and always in
immediate potentiality. No compliance will obviate it; indeed, it will
only participate in insuring its recurrence, as providing the agent of
whiteness with the pretext to engage in the form of (surplus)
production of whiteness as a social structure, through which to realize
his/her identity as white. And what I am calling white affect is what
drives this process -- the interface between the social structure of
whiteness and the individual quotidien enactment of whiteness, between
the spectrum of violence and the social integument authorizing it,
called racism.