The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an Aesthetics of Crisis

At the moment it is generally accepted that race is a social construction. It is also generally accepted that race has been constructed along an oppressive axis. The consensus is disturbed when one attempts to account for why oppression exists in the first place. The contestations are even sharper when one offers an account of race outside of the prevailing logic of supplementarity. With the postmodern disbelief in metanarrative (Lyotard) and the subsequent skepticism toward concepts, race is seen as a trope, and it is now very difficult to offer conceptual accounts of race. Hence "narratives of specificity" circulate and the experience of race establishes the limit of intelligibility. Within this context I shall attempt to reclaim a concept-based materialist understanding of race. I will argue that race signifies alterity because of the division of labor. In other words race difference operates in the interest of maintaining and justifying surplus extraction. ¹

My argument proceeds in three parts. First I engage the linguistic turn in social theory and foreground the implications for theorizing race. I critique some exemplary instances of poststructuralist accounts of race, and I especially engage the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an influential exponent of continental theory within African-American literary and cultural discourses. I argue that the linguistic turn enables "narratives of specificity" and these narratives displace relational inquiries. Consequently, the specificity of race is disconnected from underlying causal mechanisms.

Next, I critically examine Cornel West. West is thought to offer an advance over the idealism in linguistic theory. However, I will show that his "genealogical materialism" does not move us away from the idealism of Gates but ultimately ends up pointing us back to "narratives of specificity." Once again the "experiential" is privileged and the historical determinate conditions of possibility for such an experience is obscured. By blocking an understanding of the historicity of experience, Gates and West limit intelligibility to the local, and I will show how this leads to very conservative understandings of race.

Finally I draw upon Richard Wright's Black Boy, which offers an effective counter to "narratives of specificity." Wright also operates at the local level, but he situates it within the global. Wright articulates what I call an "aesthetics of crisis" because he demonstrates that daily life is the site of contradictions for a racially structured and exploitative social order. If race is deployed to maintain and justify an asymmetrical division of labor then its very deployment in daily life exposes the fault line of dominant ideologies. The claims of the Liberal democratic state are contradicted by the daily life of African-Americans. Wright's "aesthetic of crisis" not only brings into sharp focus the contradictions under capitalism but also locates within daily life a utopian impulse.

My reading operates from the modality of critique because critique moves from the immanent logic and situates race and its logic in history, in the global frames of intelligibility that help to reproduce the economic, political and ideological reproduction of a particular social formation. Critique is that knowledge practice that historically situates the conditions of possibility of what empirically exists under capitalist labor relations and points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing--what could be instead of what actually is. For example, a recent United Nations report concludes that the wealth of the seven richest men could completely eliminate world poverty. The satisfaction of human need on a global scale is historically and objectively possible, but this is what is suppressed under the regime of capitalism. It is because of such possibilities that critique is so urgent because critique indicates that what "is" is not necessarily the real/true but rather the existing actuality which is open to alteration. The role of critique in materialist postmodern discourse on race is the production of historical knowledges that mark the historicity of existing social arrangements and the possibility of a different social organization--one that is free...