By Nicole D. Stevens (Department of Comparative Studies)
The Worlds in Contention conference prompted several questions in my own research about the utility of neoliberalism to discuss racial capitalism and, more specifically, the ways that questions of fungibility and authenticity can be used to understand global anti-Blackness. In particular, Dr. Inés Valdez and Dr. Megan Ming Francis’s papers, although schematically distinct and separate from one another, created one central question for me in conjunction with my research: how does racially motivated neoliberalism allow opportunities for anti-Blackness to flourish and how does this success of anti-Blackness concern different ontological and political questions? Although my work is largely focused on Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization of Western humanism, as I explain later, this question is urgent to understanding precisely how the mechanisms that govern our current state, both political and economic, operate to continuously redefine the capacities and capabilities of white supremacy.
Dr. Valdez’s paper, “The Brown Family and Social Reproduction in U.S. Capitalism,” highlighted several key components of neoliberal structures in relation to racial violence both in theoretical and actual social positioning, and the ways that this positioning is consistently (re)constituted to serve a white America. Dr. Megan Ming Francis’s engaging paper, “Crimes of Freedom,” brought to the surface additional questions of how, precisely, justice and movements towards justice creates what I would consider “in-between moments.” To be a bit more precise, these two papers together encouraged me to consider what and how justice (or liberty, or equality) operates in our neoliberal world. Here, I employ the use of “justice (or liberty, or equality)” to indicate the idyllic democratic ideals that “built” the Western world and to additionally demonstrate the ways that neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism are directly in opposition to these ideals. We may also consider that the Western world, although being created on these ideals, was built upon rampant brutal colonialism and violent anti-Black and anti-Indigenous death. Reckoning with these two seemingly separate entities requires unpacking white supremacist desire for the violence to continue at the expense of Wynter’s “global poor” as outlined in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” (2003).
My own work focuses broadly on the categorization of humanism(s) within Western contexts and, more precisely, on how race, gendered bodies, and social theory combine to constantly reinvent the social construction of Man. Tracing Sylvia Wynter’s work throughout my research provides me the opportunity to turn to, now through this conference, how this humanism is disrupted and simultaneously encouraged by neoliberalism. In particular, Wynter traces the evolution of Western humanism and details what she describes to be three stages of humanism: the Christian, the Colonizer, and the Biocapitalist. As a result of these three ongoing stages, each taking pieces of the last to carry into their present, there is a replication of the idea of “Man” (Western humanism) that is presumed to be universal but fails at accomplishing a set standard of human. The three pieces by Drs. Valdez, Francis, and Wynter, together, show that any full analysis of neoliberalism that does not first account for the massive anti-Black and Brown violence upon which it was built fails to identify not only the origins of capitalism writ-large, but also of an insistent humanism that demands a perpetuation of said violence to define itself. In clearer terms, the creation of neoliberalism is dependent upon Western humanism which in turn relies on anti-Black and Brown violence to exist.
Additionally, I want to further consider the implications of this conference for the constructedness of identity in relation to another area of research in which I am interested: artificial intelligence. A recent boom in conversations of artificial intelligence considers how we can utilize artificial intelligence to develop cryptocurrencies. The inclusion of artificial intelligence in discussing the future of Western humanism is, I find, an important distinction to understand and unpack precisely because of its promised ubiquity and importance in further developing late-stage capitalism. Here we might consider the logic of Prof. Valdez’s paper once more to think through the ways identities and the capacity of white supremacy to serve itself shifts and changes with the increased accessibility of technology. To bridge the gap here, I first want to consider the ways that artificial intelligence is, in some ways, accessible to the “average Joe” and then move on to understand how the increased accessibility of this technology, while potentially life-saving and noteworthy in its own right, blurs the lines of privacy and “justice” to further promote white supremacist neoliberal structures in the West. Artificial intelligence is currently widespread and accessible to everyone that has access to a technological device. From social media to online banking and—with the COVID-19 pandemic—virtual work and education, artificial intelligence works in a variety of ways to understand and design code for every day human life. What happens, then, in the United States when this artificial intelligence is being used to advance technological capacity and innovation? I would argue that it is being used as a tool of the state to promote white supremacist neoliberalism, even if several artificial intelligence mechanisms, especially for private corporations and large governments, seem to provide glimpses of humans and robots coexisting peacefully. Moving forward, I additionally want to consider the implications of these questions on artificial intelligence as both a collective body and a processing system that individuals may take part in; everything from its design to its execution is created to support a state, certainly, but a state that is precisely white supremacist in nature because it is designed to protect a shoddy humanism.
The question that remains, for me and my own research, is how and when this humanism ends. Here I want to briefly consider Dr. Isabel Altamirano Jimenez’s theorization of the relationship between the land and the body as one that cannot be separated. In a similar vein, we might consider the ways that humanism, as we have come to understand it, is dependent on both economic structures, as Dr. Jimenez writes about extensively, and racialized violence to sustain itself. It would be naively optimistic to say, perhaps, that in our lifetimes this (re)invention of Man can be stopped, but the other choice is to come to terms with the fact that our own self-identification processes, most of which have largely to do with a theory of object permanence I would argue, depends on this structure. Are we truly willing to risk losing ourselves to the matrix of im-possibility to stop neoliberal and anti-Black/Brown forces? If so, when?