Race Racing: Four Theses on Race and Intensity

In what follows I attempt to wrest the concept of race away from reactive dialectics and give it its full positivity. I desire, in other words, to make an affirmation of becoming in the processes of race racing. By “race racing” I don’t mean a faster conception of race, but it does involve diagramming speeds as intensive rates and gradients internal to assemblages of technology and perception. For example, the shrinking average shot duration of an average Hollywood blockbusters creates a feedback with forms of attention and anticipation constituting the perceptual mode of power in dominant cinema (Massumi 2005, 2010). In what sense, through what vectors of force could such a perceptual mode of power become a question of race in its mode of becoming, that is, race racing? Thus, what I mean by “race racing” is moving toward a “common notion” of race (a notion of race that is common to at least two multiplicities), one that unfolds the feedbacked processes of racialization as intensive variation, continuous, qualitative duration, and vectors of embodied habituation immanent to historically specific media assemblages. On the “face” of it, race would most obviously be seen as a mode (and modification) of the attribute of extensity (space): the epidermal schema is a variable organization of the space, distribution, arrangement, and color of the body (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 144–48). But in what sense can we say that race racing, its being in becoming, is an intensive process?

What I think is clear is that the politics of antiracism must move beyond reactive dialectics and representational strategies that have by and large determined the forms of antiracist interventions. Antiracism must become something else, experimenting with duration, sensation, resonance, and affect. This experimentation would summon Deleuze’s famous gloss on Henri Bergson’s two multiplicities as an inspiration. Deleuze insisted that for Bergson duration was “susceptible to measurement only by varying its metrical principle at each stage of the division,” taking the problem into the “sphere of two kinds of multiplicity”: quantitative and qualitative (Deleuze 1991, 40; Ansell-Pearson 2001, 16–17).

In his fine, Deleuzian-inspired study of the philosopher of intuition, Keith Ansell-Pearson shows that the significance of Bergson’s attempt to think about duration in a new way is that it puts into question the ontological confines of esprit by not returning to the “assimilating act of consciousness” the alterity of novelty. Thinking about the radical alterity of duration allows thought to pragmatically conceptualize the material conditions of becoming, to pose the question, in other words, of why and how it is that we dwell among badly analyzed composites and are “badly analyzed composites ourselves” (Deleuze 1991, 10; Ansell-Pearson 2001, 28).

Which brings me to my first thesis: practices of race racing affirm the capacity of embodied, qualitative duration to give race its immanent intensive variability across and within populations. What are the virtual and actual relations between sensation and race? This question must come to terms with the “time of life” itself, which is not a universally given quanta, obviously.

In light of this question, we would want to move beyond resistant acts of naming (queer, freak, nigger, etc.) as “indispensable” to politics. For instance, Arun Saldanha argues for the importance of naming as a strategy in radical politics. Writing of the Goa “freaks” involved in trance cultures, he writes, “In naming themselves freaks, white youths immediately called attention to their desire for the escape from normality and from the past” (Saldanha 2007, 54). In his work Saldanha rigorously poses the question of the relation between (raced) naming and intensity, but in what sense is naming anything other than a capture of bodily sensation? Let me be more precise: molecular revolutions have no language or signification because they are not of the order of consciousness, and they have, therefore, no “true” name. They are of an ecological order of embodied composites whose processes of sensation pass a critical threshold of difference-in-repetition and thus effect a counteractualization toward the virtual. Thus race racing is a method of counteractualizing sensation toward a plane...