Abstract
In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect that informs ‘white innocence’ and its attempts at witnessing the pain of the Other. Engaging with the work of critical race theorists we put the artistic interventions of Hannah Black and Parker Bright critique of Dana Shutz’s Open Casket in conversation with Teresa Margolles’ Vaporization. In doing so, we explore the epistemological, affective, and aesthetic dimensions involved in the desire of whiteness to transcend its own matrix of race-power and aestheticization of black suffering. That is, instead of anti-racist and transformative, Schutz’s piece, in our view, remains caught within a Manichean subject/object relationship constituted by a curative relation of mastery and servitude that is inextricably contained with and by the ontology of whiteness. We argue that this dynamic of ‘pornotroping’ mobilizes an aesthetics of hailing and identification that reaffirms white innocence. Margolles’ Vaporization, on the other hand, compels us to engage the space, corporality, and epistemology of flesh outside of the subject/object divide, while confronting us with multiplicities of embodiment as experienced through art and social productions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For example, Wendy Brown as set the tone for critiquing what become ideologically misrecognized “identity politics” as opposed to the politics of positionality. While she attempts to move away from a binary models of subject positioning (especially concerning white women), Brown’s concept of “wound attachments” represents a sophisticated, “color blind” theoretical “move to innocence” (Brown 1995). While she correctly locates how “identity politics” often does not take capitalism and the state into account of its positionality within “liberal democracies” (thereby naturalizing both capitalism and the legitimacy of state authority), she specifically sidesteps race and elides, unlike Stuart Hall who she engages, how coloniality and race structure identities in a way that reaches beyond class and exclusively gender experiences (ibid. 52–53).
Like Wekker, Sheehi has shown the violent psychological dynamics at the service of settler colonialism within processes of “mutual recognition” projects and “dialogue initiatives” in Occupied Palestine (2018). In examining dialogue projects instituted by Israeli and Western psychologists that intend to establish “humanizing” exchange between Israelis and Palestinians, Sheehi observes the “witnessing” pain and “mutual” suffering within the unremediated and disavowed asymmetries of settler colonial hegemony fundamentally perpetuate on-going dehumanizing structures of settler colonialism and its suffocating occupation regime. These dialogue initiatives are enframed by the same form of white, colonial innocence as discussed by Wekker’s Dutch colonially informed racial structures of white innocence. Moreover, the fantasy of dialogues replicates the mechanics of white innocence, wherein it reconstitutes and naturalizes the disavowal that Zionism is a violent, colonial settler ideology and practice and that Israel is an Apartheid state. The call for “mutual recognition,” and “acknowledgement” within a “shared humanity,” therefore, normalizes Israeli settler colonialism and its regime of military occupation as normal, and it configures the desire of the Palestinians for liberation as a pathology. Like Bright’s and Black’s intervention, refusal of dialogue functions as a refusal of innocence and self-objectification; refusal acts, in fact, as a performance of self-affirmation. Fundamentally, Sheehi argues that these are the psychological dynamics, the “colonial extractive introjections,” that underpin Patrick Wolfe’s observations of, what we can say is, the psychotic impulse of the innocence of the settler, who erases the indigène only to take their place as the “true” natives of the emptied land.
In the context of the study of political violence in Chile, Palacios (2019) argued that memorialization seem to be always displaced and challenged, not only by the politics of forgetting but also by a space of silence—absence—which is left when the naming of violence happens. It is this spacing, this interruption of knowledge and certainty, she argued, what conveys “an experience characterized by a paradoxical undecidability between the truth of the real, and the lack of certainty and even knowledge to represent it.” While discussing the affective force of Monumento Rieles, and more particularly of the nacre button attached to the train rail—an object that only insinuates its presence but that resists to be grasped by the gaze that attempts to possess it, Palacios argued that the button “in its humble literality, manages to destabilize symbolic closure (digestion) through its evasiveness, and in doing so prevents the reaffirmation of a type of ‘subjective omnipotence’ while resisting the colonizing operation of the gaze that wants to capture, frame and own it.” Instead, she continues, “this semi-invisible but material, tiny nacre-ruin offers back a truth without knowledge, a gap, a question, a silence. Its opacity consists in its resistance to becoming an epistemological object while at the same time it powerfully destabilizes the subject who encounters it” (Palacios 2019, p. 614).
References
Bakelmun, I. 2015. Experimental Encounters: Teresa Margolles’ Vaporization. World Press https://feltacts.wordpress.com/waterfromthemorgue/.
Basciano, O. 2017. Whitney Biennial: Emmett Till Casket Painting by White Artist Sparks Anger, The Guardian, March 21. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/21/whitney-biennial-emmett-till-painting-dana-schutz.
Black. H. 2017. Open Letter to Whitney Biennale, reproduced in Alex Greenberger, “The Painting Must Go”: Hanan Black Pens Open Letter to the Whitney About Controversial Biennale Work. ART news, March 21. https://www.artnews.com/artnews/news/the-painting-must-go-hannah-black-pens-open-letter-to-the.
Brown, W. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University.
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matters: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Benso, S. 2000. The Face of Things. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Butler, J. 2006. Sexual difference as a question of ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty. In Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ed. D. Olkowski and G. Weiss. The Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park.
Carroll, A.S. 2017. REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Critchley, S. 1998. Das Ding: Lacan and Levinas. Research in Phenomenology Journal 28: 72–90.
Coletta, M. 2018. Confronting the Pervasiveness of Violence and Marginality in the Work of Mexican Artist Teresa Margolles, Institute of Latin American Studies (Blog), School of Advanced Study, University of London, June 4. https://latinamericandiaries.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2018/06/04/confronting-the-pervasiveness-of-violence-and-marginality-in-the-work-of-mexican-artist-teresa-margolles/.
Fellows, M.L., and S. Razack. 1998. The Race to Innocence: Confront Hierarchal Relations among Women. Journal of Gender, Race & Justice 1: 335–352.
Gikandi, S. 2001. Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic. Michigan Quarterly Review XL (2): 318–350.
Glynos, J., and Y. Stravakakis. 2008. Lacan and Political Subjectivity. Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory Subjectivity 24: 256–274.
Hartman, S. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self Making in Nineteenth Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horto-Stallings, L. 2015. Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Keenan, T., and E. Weizmann. 2012. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Lubiano, W. 1998. The House that Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today. New York: Vintage.
Mbembe, A. 2019. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press.
Moten, F. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Moten, F. 2018. Stolen Life. Consent Not to Be a Single Being. Durham: Duke University Press.
Musser, A.J. 2018. Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance. New York: New York University Press.
Palacios, M. 2020. Becoming the People: A Critique of Populist Aesthetics of Homogeneity. Theory & Event 23 (3): 787–809.
Palacios, M., and M. Plot. 2020. The Flesh Which is Not One: Meditations on Multiplicity and Its Populist Arrest. Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. 25: 36–54.
Palacios, M. 2019. The Aesthetics of Memory: Ruins, Visibility and Witnessing. The Sociological Review 67 (3): 602–620.
Palacios, M. 2013. Radical Sociality: On Disobedience, Violence and Belonging. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Palacios, M. 2009. Fantasy and Political Violence: The Meaning of Chilean Anti-Communism. Wiesbaden VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Palacios, M. 2004. On Sacredness and Transgression: Understanding Social Antagonism. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 9 (3): 284–297.
Rancière, J. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. New York: Verso.
Ross, T. 1990. The Rhetorical Tapestry of Race: White Innocence and Black Abstraction. William & Mary Law Review 32: 1–40.
Stallings, L.H. 2015. Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures. Champaign: Illinois University Press.
Sheehi, S. 2018. Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Nonviolence and Dialogue Initiatives as a Psychic Extension of the Closure. Psychoanalysis and History 20 (3): 353–369.
Spillers, H. 1987. Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe. An American Grammar Book. Diacritics 17 (2): 64–81.
Spillers, H. 2003. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Weheliye, A. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wekker, G. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wilderson, F. 2010. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. London: Duke University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Palacios, M., Sheehi, S. Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the affective-aesthetic matrix of desiring witnessing. Subjectivity 13, 281–297 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-020-00106-9
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-020-00106-9