Epilogue

Life after Empire

A gateway to exploring the drama of form and flesh, the figure of the hybrid invites us to begin a sustained dialogue on hybridity—the darling word of globalization—as a physiological, bioformal, somatic, and inter- and intramental process in the making of the human in imperial modernity. In the strange light of literature and art, the last “refuge of mimetic comportment,” we are called to see ourselves as plastic creatures, open to the world, and susceptible to mimicking forms and ways of living associated with privilege (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 53). Inhabiting particular moments in a history that precedes and succeeds it, colonial hybridity is suggestive for an understanding of current processes within a story that neither began nor ended with it. What I have dubbed “postcolonial biology” is a phenomenon cast within multiple historical coordinates. Together, these histories bring us to a shared global moment in which several elements are interconnected: the politics of neoracism, in which culture functions much as race did;1 the global rule of capital and corporation, with its fixation on “thingified” aesthetic form and meliorism; and a state of crisis in the ability to imagine frameworks for a good life alternative to it. These intertwined contexts set the stage for exploring the ongoing formation of the postcolonial subject in the currents of history. Fanon and Adorno, seemingly so differently employed and motivated, direct us to explore the future of the modern subject, distorted by instrumental reason and imperial modernity, now revealed in full harness to the exploitative regime of capital since their prescient warnings first came to light.

At a moment of imaginative foreclosure in the pursuit of utopia, colonial and capitalist-style, this book can only hint at alternatives to dominant models of global subjectivity. Without imbuing it glibly with a capacity for agency, we can speculate that if the leibhafte incarnate moment is involved both in the production and recognition of suffering, attention to it in our own lives and that of others could also be a catalyst for reinvestment in the consequential question of the content of a good life. The will to freedom, Adorno reminds us, is born of an “impulse intramental and somatic in one” (Negative Dialectics, 228–29). A crucial preliminary to the formation and expression of this impulse, however, is an honest encounter with the self as a heteronomously determined historical and biological being. How are we living out the sentence of history in psyche and flesh? In Minima Moralia, Adorno bemoans philosophical neglect of the field’s true purpose, “the teaching of the good life.” Anyone who wishes to understand “the truth about life,” he suggests, “must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses” (15). Even if right life has become impossible (Minima Moralia, 39), the desire for it exists in a recognition of manifest “bodily feeling, in identification with unbearable pain,” which constitutes for Adorno the “true basis for morality”: “the demand for right living [richtiges leben], lives on in openly materialist motifs . . . not . . . the pure idea” for Adorno; this transition of “metaphysics itself to the stratum of the material is what is repressed by the conniving consciousness” (Metaphysics, 116–17). A corporeal turn does not reinstate the body–mind divide; it merely asks for recognition of the exaltation of thought as an obfuscation of the problem of the suffering, repressed body struggling with the power of capital and corporation. The heteronomously determined body-minded organism under pressure of ad simulare in global capitalism is a living, breathing combat zone. Almost infinitely plastic, the body-mind is capable of beginning again and again, rendering its psychic and material inputs a matter of urgent inquiry and meditation.

In the globalized world, the market’s aggressive turn to the body yokes the experience of the biological body-mind securely to historical forces. Its investment in the emotive and affective dimensions of consumer behavior, manipulation of affects through advertising, exaggeration of perceived lacks, and affective inducements to expenditure on products for grooming, depilation, deodorization, and myriad forms of self-modification recall some of the technologies of the better body from the colonial civilizing mission.2 Jameson’s discussion of “Utopian corporeality” identifies an ideological project that “invests even the most subordinate and shamefaced products of everyday life, such as aspirins, laxatives and deodorants, organ transplants and plastic surgery [with] muted promises of a transfigured body” (Archaeologies, 6).3 Forfeited to capitalist personhood and its suasive advertorial governance, the plastic body is an open invitation to ideological and material product placement. Adorno reminds us that “what the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption” (Minima Moralia, 15). Living the so-called good life exposes the body to reformation all the way down to its “hidden recesses,” at the level of muscle memory, neuronal circuits of reward and pleasure, cellular composition, and digestive flora seriatim (15). In a globalized world, moreover, the hybrid body-text now includes chemical, environmental, technological, and corporate inputs on an unprecedented scale, inviting us to develop a program for an object-oriented postcolonial studies that explores the role of race, class, and geography in relation to the ontology of “things things things” (Midnight’s Children, 526).

How should we imagine a techne tou biou—Plato’s code for the aesthetics of existence—lived in accordance with principles that have not been prefabricated by the market or political ideologies in hock to the new empire of capital and corporation? At this juncture, when racial and cultural prejudice masquerade in the guise of developmental aesthetics in a cozy alliance with capital and corporation, it would be well to recall Fanon’s admonition regarding one of the fundamental tasks for the once colonized: the need for “a continual struggle against colonialism in its new forms” (The Wretched of the Earth, 235). Fanon’s turn to flesh and psyche in thinking through the impact of colonialism warned us that “cultural mummification” under colonialism leads to “a mummification of individual thinking” (Toward the African Revolution, 34). A turn to native forms of existence as an alternative offers a compromised vista. Colonial devaluation of native forms of existence produces a distorted relationship to the culture that has “vegetated,” been “abandoned, sloughed off, rejected, despised . . . put into capsules . . . since the foreign domination,” only to be selectively, guiltily overvalued later without being “grasped anew” (41, 44). No longer organic but dissimulated, native culture surfaces disjunctively. Trendy forms of global citizenship allow for a selective return to native ways once they have been sanitized, usually through repackaging for purposes of commodification.4 In a telling instance, Kraidy explains the nexus between market mentality and hybridity understood as the “cultural logic” of globalization. In this dispensation, hybridity “entails that traces of other cultures exist in every culture, thus offering foreign media and marketers transcultural wedges for forging affective links between their commodities and local communities” (Hybridity, 148). Yoga studios, patented breathing techniques, “art of living” courses, slow food movements, and the hypercapitalization of farm-to-table culture are but a few examples of the retail reclamation of ways of living that are otherwise disappearing from mainstream experience. Assimilation to the new world order, therefore, goes well beyond mimicry of “Western” forms. As during colonialism, but perhaps now even more so, recombinant hybridity reconciles both native and global forms of elite existence; cultural, national, religious, and/or class fundamentalisms coexist and meld with cultural and technological memes associated with capitalist modernity.

In the high noon of globalization, the privileged postcolonial subject binds his or her native prejudices, hierarchies, and ways of living with norms evolving in the new world order. The pressure to assimilate to these norms grows in the nation and without, not least for immigrants in developed nations. Characteristics of assimilated global citizenship include the suppression or privatization of modes of enjoyment likely to be derided by those in power, self-conscious mockery in the indulgence of de-privileged forms of bodily expression, and tacit or overt prejudice against those seen as aesthetically disabled by the norms of the new world order. Preoccupation with the atomic individual self and its artful construction and melioration dominates global culture, supplanting the need to conceive of a postcolonial aesthetic of the bios responsive to the challenges of conceptualizing the problem of living a good life in the aftermath of empire on a collective rather than individual basis.

Love of the Same

What has gone under the name of modernity, Jameson argues in A Singular Modernity, is a “concept of otherness,” an “optical illusion nourished by envy and hope, by inferiority feelings and the need for emulation” (211). Founded in hierarchy and class division, the imperial civilizing mission now travels under new forms that offer the illusion of parity in an amorphous model of global citizenship that promotes individualism and scarcely pays even lip service to growing divides. In the name of the new world order and the seductive rhetoric of global citizenship, racial thinking goes undercover.

Fanon’s dream, “once the colonial status is irreversibly excluded,” offered a utopian vision of reciprocity conceived in terms that are tantamount to release of muscular tension: “The occupant’s spasmed and rigid culture, now liberated, opens at last to the culture of people who have really become brothers. The two cultures can affront each other, enrich each other” (Toward the African Revolution, 44). In this view of humanism, “universality resides in this decision to recognize and accept the reciprocal relativism of different cultures” (44). Rather than insist on the sameness of all humans, a vision that failed to redeem the black man as indistinguishable from any other in histology, morphology, and philosophical humanism, Fanon pleads for recognition of differences without hierarchy, a sentiment echoed by Adorno. Adorno warns us that “to assure the black that he is exactly like the white man, while he obviously is not, is secretly to wrong him still further. He is benevolently humiliated by the application of a standard by which, under the pressure of the system, he must necessarily be found wanting, and to satisfy which would in any case be a doubtful achievement” (Minima Moralia, 103). Adorno derides formulaic versions of mélange and tolerance on the grounds of equality in response to human differences:

The familiar argument of tolerance, that all people and all races are equal, is a boomerang. It lays itself open to the simple refutation of the senses. . . . Abstract utopia is all too compatible with the most insidious tendencies of society. That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done, that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality . . . nothing that is different survives. An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences. (Minima Moralia, 102–3)

Indeed, it is in the tyranny of sameness that Horkheimer and Adorno locate the common core of dominative rationality. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, they establish continuity between elements of anti-Semitism, the treatment of blacks, the subjugation of workers, and the violent expression of responses rooted in biological prehistory in a class society: “Race . . . is a regression to nature as mere violence, to the hidebound particularism which, in the existing order [class society], constitutes precisely the universal. Race today is the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual, integrated into the barbaric collective” (138). They rage against an order that responds to difference with a hysterical project: “to make everyone the same” (139). The attempt to bind the diversity of the particular into the conceptual can never offer a successful model for utopia. Nor indeed should it be a goal to strive for a concept adequate to identity with the idea of equality. The ineluctable challenge and elusive goal of a desirable society demands diversity without hierarchy. And yet, the more or less unisonant narrative of progress in global discourse—with pockets of resistance that are arguably constituted by it—suggests that leveled sameness is the answer to the prayers of an almost seamlessly global corporate culture industry.

The sociobiological body rendered as similarly as possible to others in as many ways as it can be in its plasticity is the fantasy of the global marketplace. Its composite developmental goal includes the duplication of a Baconian subject of reason that pays lip service to difference while becoming increasingly intolerant of it. In this vision, contempt reigns for the body requiring and consuming less, costing the planet as little as possible, living close to the ground, and resisting “development.” The body that is “raw” in Gandhi’s description and “rude” in James Mill’s is a routinely dispensable casualty in the name of progress throughout much of the postcolonial world, as it had been in the colonial one.5 In crudely postural terms that are cryptic but suggestive, differences between “sitting mankind and squatting mankind” with “profound biological echoes” surface as an unacknowledged dividing line nationally and internationally (Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” 81).

“Pure races do not exist, but humans differ,” observes Albert Memmi (Racism, 7). Yet to insist on our differences—chromosomal, genetic, phenotypic, cultural, behavioral, postural, visceral, ingestive, evacuative, or comportmental— constitutes a barely adequate response to the current global moment defined by the rule of identity. Resistance at the site of the body to counter the pressure for participation in ad simulare through a reversion to frozen precolonial cultural moments, or newly assembled ones that smack of cultural, national, or religious fundamentalisms or holistic forms of living ratified by a market that continuously seeks to repackage and renew traditional products, all carry their own dangers. Cutting across the longitudinally and latitudinally conceived divides that have long dominated our thinking about race and relations of domination, there is another line that skirts the fourth world or the alter globe with subaltern populations that resist incorporation into globalization either by failing to adopt, or simply by lacking the social and other capital required to adopt, the norms and forms that make the impact of global capitalism recognizable in daily life. Nonconformity with global memes of consumption and comportment can signal resistance or meaningful difference, but it can also be another name for a naked lack of resources and opportunities.

Although the term “Global South” is used to refer to economically disadvantaged nation-states, locations within the developed world deprived of its economic and other privileges, or to transnational resistance to structures of disenfranchisement and marginality, I argue that an additional conceptual border be recognized in thinking about the Global South: a civilizational border between human and the human as animal being that constitutes a distinctive global fault line. In the contact zone between peoples across and within nations, the triumph of certain ways of living directed by the intimacies of capital and global culture over indigenous ones constitutes a potent borderland. Those who live closer to a state of nature, in huts or the jungle, eat with their hands, and do not want or cannot afford the aesthetic prosthetics of modernity are the internally colonized, disdained by their own “superiors” who sport signs of primacy associated with the Global North: cars, computers, cosmopolitan cuisine, fashion, vacations, and other forms of spectacular overconsumption. This internal borderland commands but rarely receives attention. Its inclusion in thinking about the Global South will do much to expose the material conditions and phenomenological manifestations of global divides.

“A respect for cultural difference, while a sine qua non of any just society,” Eagleton reminds us, “cannot be the telos of it. . . . Differences cannot fully flourish while men and women languish under forms of exploitation” (Illusions, 120).6 This is a tall order. I have suggested a beginning here through a conscious engagement with the regulation of plastic body-minds and their biological processes to bring the politics of imperial capitalism home to the body in which we live. This is a point of departure, not arrival.

Ecce Animot

Plastic by nature, capable of perceiving and generating forms, responsive to authority, labile and open to the world in psyche and flesh, marked by civilizational repressions, simultaneously cerebral and sensory, what should we do with our body-minded body?7 What should we do with our capacity for sensation and perception, for experiencing, discerning, and inflicting suffering, our pretensions to individuality coupled with our submission to authority, and our need to be the same as our superiors and better than a host of those we tacitly consign to domination? Adorno claims that it is “the physical moment [that] tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different” (Negative Dialectics, 203). But this is the very response that has been vitiated in the course of modernity, generating a “weakened sensorium” and an anaesthetic “bourgeois coldness that is only too willing to underwrite the inevitable” (Minima Moralia, 237, 74). Adorno claims: “Whoever imagines that as a product of this society he is free of the bourgeois coldness harbors illusions about himself as much as about the world; without such coldness one could not live. The ability of anyone, without exception, to identify with another’s suffering is slight” (“Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 274). Horkheimer and Adorno’s is a chilling vision of the novum organum, the subject dreamt of in Bacon’s vision now come to cold life in a world where “personality is a caricature of freedom” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 299). Modern society has produced a mechanized subject whose very biology it sought to modify, dissolving the border between the social and biological, leaving no separable ontic interior or substratum beneath the deformity. Sclerosed, hard of heart, ill-equipped to deal with reminders of a shared animal prehistory, this is a creature often indifferent to the suffering of others, unable to recognize even its own, or apt to justify it in the name of historical inevitability. The rational novum organum is poorly equipped to imagine happiness independent of the definitions circulating in the marketplace. Transformed down to the level of reflexes, instincts, and entrails, this is a creature driven by the logic of rationalization, hollow civility, and retail therapy. Led and fed by the market and corporation, its hybrid inputs include dominant global cultural memes as much as what it breathes and ingests, knowingly or otherwise.8 Adept in the language of instrumental rationality, more in touch with the life cycle of a market brand than the workings of their own psychophysiology, numbed by exposure to suffering instead of being animated by it, these are subjects seduced into believing that life is good when they have put as much distance as possible from what they conceive as the animal state of existence. In an extreme version of anti-biotic warfare, life turns on itself as an intruder on the scene of human existence.

Summarizing Adorno’s position on the impossibility in Kantian ethics of a conception of life in which one might live with the objective of believing oneself to have been “a good animal [gutes tier]” (Negative Dialectics, 299), Derrida explains that “nothing is more abhorrent, more hateful, more odious to Kantian man than a memory of a resemblance or affinity between human and animality. . . . The Kantian feels only hate for human animality” (Paper Machine, 180). Adorno argues that in “socialized society, no individual is capable of the morality that is a social demand but would be a reality only in a free society.” In effect, “the individual is left with no more than the morality for which Kantian ethics—which accords affection, not respect, to animals—can muster only disdain: to try to live so that one may believe himself to have been a good animal” (Negative Dialectics, 299). “Fascism begins,” Derrida goes on to say, echoing Adorno, “when you insult an animal, including the animal in man” (Paper Machine, 181). Underlining the dialogue between conceptual reason and the repression of biological functions in civilizational development, he explains, “authentic idealism (echter Idealismus) consists in insulting the animal in man or in treating a man like an animal” (Paper Machine, 181). Adorno traces the etiology of this pathological process thus:

The constantly encountered assertion that savages, blacks, Japanese are like animals, monkeys for example, is the key to the pogrom. The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this gaze—“after all, it’s only an animal”—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that it is “only an animal.” (Minima Moralia, 105)

In the Western philosophical tradition, something that merely has life, Heidegger’s Nur-lebenden, which Derrida translates as “living but no more, life in its pure and simple state” has not been considered a good enough life (Animal, 22). Mere life has been voided of a meaningful existence as an end in itself. With deliberate exaggeration, Adorno issues an aphoristic proclamation in a dialogue with Horkheimer: “Animals could teach us what happiness is” (“Towards a New Manifesto?,” 35). “Philosophy exists,” he states, “in order to redeem what you see in the look of an animal” (51). In the end, in failing to challenge the propensity to think about animals as mere life, tools, meat, or experimental life forms in distinction from humans, we may have failed to recognize the logic of instrumental rationality that also defines us.9 One of the lessons of thinking through a long history of love–hate with the body as mere life is that the animals we oppress are us. We, too, die in the animal that dies in us.

The oracle for the future reveals but this: know thyself. With our sarx (flesh), soma, and psyche administered from within and without, our bodies are the site of product placement and environmental inputs with and without our knowledge or permission. Our very guts are available today for a largely unregulated variety of pharmaceutical, pesticidal, and alimentary experiments. These elements of our unwitting hybridity and reverberating echoes of biological repression and redirection in our daily comportmental aesthetics rooted in disdain for mere life point to a corporeographic front line in the continuing politics of difference. Given the fraught history of the role of the biological sciences in histories of racism, it was with a mix of trepidation and compulsion that I staked a claim to biology, conceiving of it as life lived in mind and body in the broadest sense with manifestations in specific, special effects produced by the interaction of form and flesh. An interest in the biological now leads urgently to the questions, What is the postcolonial way of life long after formal colonialism has supposedly ended? Is it a good life? For whom is it good? The privatization of the idea of the good life answers poorly to the realities of the global moment and our hybrid, interdependent existence. The world is writ large within us even as we write upon it the plot of a history that hurts. We are victims and agents of our plasticity, poorly equipped to, but nonetheless charged with, the need to imagine a future for the future.