Scenario planning is pornotroping that condemns blacks to repetition of impersonal death – infatuation with the “contingency” of “material change” disavows libidinal investments.

Black lives matter and black lives matter and black lives matter. This homographic reading of the most salient political statement of recent years speaks to the torsions of blackness, matter, and life that have come to define our contemporary era. In “Unbearable Blackness,” Jared Sexton (2015) argues with regard to the triangulation of these concerns that antiblack fantasies “do not render blacks, like so much of the planet, subject to death in an economy of disposability; rather, they subject blacks to ‘the interminable time of meaningless, impersonal dying’” (p.168). In the wake of recent grand jury decisions not to prosecute the murders of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, to name only the most widely publicized cases, Sexton’s claims register most strongly in the state’s refusal to allow these deaths to die. They are caught instead in a biopolitical apparatus that suspends racial blackness between a life unrecognized as such and an illegible form of death that can never pass into reason. Against this timeless, spectral dying, we can read the declaration that “Black Lives Matter” as a call to return racial blackness to a form that matters, to a form, in other words, that is matter. On this score, I ask: how do black life and death become matter, and what is at stake in the demand that they should assume such form? Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) dramatize these questions through protagonist Lauren Olamina and her condition of hyperempathy. In this article, I explore hyperempathy as a speculative embodiment of “pornotroping” (Spillers, 2003) to understand how racial blackness structures current theorizations of matter. Questions about the proper scale, scope, and character of matter have assumed a renewed sense of urgency given the emergence of the Anthropocene, a distinct geological epoch in which human activity has become so influential as to alter fundamental aspects of the Earth System. While ecologist Eugene Stoermer and Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen introduced the current definition of the term in the 1980s, we have since witnessed a growing scientific consensus about the rigor of the concept. A recent article published in the journal Science by the Anthropocene Working Group (2016) provides the latest example of this support, demonstrating that fluctuations in the content and pace of sediment deposits and extinction rates are anthropogenically driven. However, the very nomenclature of the “Anthropocene” has been subject to critique from within the humanities for allowing an abstract notion of the “Anthropos” to anchor an implicit philosophy of history. Daniel Hartley (2015), for instance, comments in a recent issue of the UK-based magazine Salvage, “Inherent to the Anthropocene discourse is a conception of historical causality which is purely mechanical: a one-onone billiard ball model of technological invention and historical effect, which is simply inadequate to explain actual social and relational modes of historical causation” (para. 4). Hartley takes special issue with the presumed origins of the Anthropocene, which many geologists date to the industrial and nuclear revolutions. This determination, he suggests, interprets the environmental impact of technology as the “net effect” of an undifferentiated “human” activity (Waters et. al., 2016, p. 139). In order to assert a causal link between technological development and ecological catastrophe, any consideration of the roles race, class, and gender have played in engineering our historical present must be obscured.1 The benefits and consequences of technological development and environmental disaster, after all, are rarely if ever distributed symmetrically among and within human populations. “It is not all people that are indicted by the onset of the Anthropocene,” writes Nicholas Mirzoeff (forthcoming 2016), “but a specific set: colonial settlers, enslavers, and would-be imperialists” (pp. 19-20). At the same time, this remodeling of human history and ecological philosophy is not unique to geologists. Indeed, the Anthropocene’s scientific definition may have become matters of debate only recently, but its constitutive concerns—global warming, genetic technology, biodiversity loss, environmental racism—have thrown our prevailing concepts of nature and culture into crisis well before the epoch’s formal identification. At stake is not only the fate of homo sapiens as a species, but also the basic composition of a world yet to come. The challenges of analyzing the effects of non-human systems (e.g., weather patterns or ocean currents) and actors (e.g., viruses or pesticides) while attending to the uneven distribution of environmental risks and resources have generated a range of philosophical responses. For example, publications like Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2009), “The Climate of History,” Elizabeth Kolbert’s (2014) The Sixth Extinction, and Roy Scranton’s (2015) Learning to Die in the Anthropocene recommend a universal or existential “species thinking” necessary for grasping the complexities of climate change. Other responses, like Jane Bennett’s (2010) Vibrant Matter and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (2015) Stone, interrogate fantasies of human mastery as a way of reckoning with the power of non-human agents. Over the last decade, one particular variety of response has acquired critical purchase within the academic left: the new materialisms. As part of what Richard Grusin (2015) has named “the nonhuman turn” in contemporary thought, the new materialisms join affect theory, critical animal studies, and object-oriented ontology in calling for enhanced attention to matter and materiality. The popularity of this approach, evidenced by a growing number of monographs, special journal issues, and anthologies, appears grounded in the need to develop strategies of coexistence attuned to the Anthropocene’s political and ecological crises.2 How, for example, should we understand agency and embodiment in light of recent developments in biotechnology and the increasingly unpredictable behavior of non-human objects? The promise of the new materialisms thus inheres in the notion that a focus on materiality can offer us more comprehensive and efficacious ways to respond to these developments. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010) write in their introduction to the New Materialisms anthology, “What is at stake here is nothing less than a challenge to some of the most basic assumptions that have underpinned the modern world, including its normative sense of the human and its beliefs about human agency, but also regarding its material practices such as the ways we labor on, exploit, and interact with nature” (p. 4). There is much to recommend an intensified engagement with matter, not least of which is Coole and Frost’s proposal that such engagements can disrupt our “normative sense of the human” and of “human agency.” Given this professed interest in dismantling human exceptionalism, it is curious then that, as Zakiyyah Jackson (2015) and other critical race scholars point out, the new materialisms have systematically “[ignored] praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people, particularly those praxes which are irreverent to the normative production of ‘the human’ or illegible from within the terms of its logic” (p. 216).3 Black thought has long challenged the enforced description of Africans and their descendants as non-human objects of science, as specimens for study and experimentation, as commodities for market exchange, as things. In fact, from at least the 16th century onward, black bodies provided crucial raw material for the development of natural history, the natural sciences, and the life philosophies in Enlightenment thought.4 Both geology and biology, for example, pursued notions of species and evolution that preserved early racial taxonomies; the techniques of observation and interpretation used to analyze geological activity were the same as those employed by the racial science of phrenology. Mirzoeff (forthcoming 2016) leverages this history to argue that “the very concept of observable breaks between geological eras in general and the definition of the Anthropocene in particular is inextricably intermingled with the belief in distinct races of humanity” (p. 2). His claim that the concept of the Anthropocene reproduces race-making technologies gestures to the historical fact that the human as such has emerged through the exclusion and extermination of black bodies. Proscribed from the realm of the human, black intellectuals have had to think within and through the categories of the non-human and the inhuman to pursue new ways of being in the world. Philosophical questions about the vitality and agency of the human, the animal, and the object are therefore longstanding in the fields of Black studies. Alexander Weheliye (2015) observes in Habeas Viscus that across Sylvia Wynter’s oeuvre, “it is the human—or different genres of the human—that materializes as the object of knowledge in the conceptual mirror of black studies” (p. 21). The scholarly work of Hortense Spillers (2003) and Fred Moten (2003), and the Afrofuturist contributions of Nalo Hopkinson (1998; 2000) and Nnedi Okorafor (2010), similarly confront the “most basic assumptions that have underpinned the modern world,” including our notions of history, temporality, and modern science.5 And yet, as it is with the Anthropocene’s implied philosophy of history, much of the scholarship produced under the banner of the new materialisms tends to reduce race to a crude “identity politics” or to endorse a model of difference-withoutrace.6 This reduction and disavowal of race, I contend, is something of a structural necessity for the new materialisms. In what follows, I trace the general theoretical principles of the new materialisms to a dissatisfaction with the linguistic and cultural paradigms of post-structuralism. I then demonstrate how this dissatisfaction enables an ethics of relation or affect that further legitimizes the reduction and dismissal of race. However, as a close reading of Butler’s Parable duology reveals, one of the primary figures of the new materialisms—the material body—is defined by and through disavowed social fantasies about black female flesh that are linked to the global legacies of modern slavery. My examination of the critical responses to Butler’s novels further suggests that such fantasies are necessary to secure a libidinal investment in the ethical potential of materiality. I argue, thus, against a misrecognition of black female flesh as a resource against the violence of hierarchical differences, rather than the site of their active production. Finally, I turn to a reading of Butler’s Parable duology as an allegory about the dangers of proceeding in the Anthropocene without a robust analysis of the formation of racial blackness. Because a proper survey of new materialist literature is beyond the scope of this article, the comments below should be taken as entry points for probing the (absent) place of racial blackness in theories about matter.7 The promise of the new materialisms The new materialisms are drawn from a long genealogy of philosophical materialism, in which Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Marx, and Deleuze are cited as major touchstones. In recognition of this legacy, Coole and Frost (2010) assert that the interventions loosely gathered by the term “new materialisms” are better “categorized as renewed materialisms,” with the qualifier “new” acknowledging the “unprecedented” ecological, biological, and technological conditions under which we currently live and labor (p. 4, italics in original). Although their specific objects of analysis are appropriately diverse, the new materialisms collectively insist on a post-humanist matter that is lively, self-directed, agential, creative, and always in the process of becoming. In this regard, matter is better thought of as materialization, or the process by which complex phenomena are temporarily and contingently stabilized to varying degrees. The ontological shift entailed here is towards a philosophical monism, inspired most notably by the work of Deleuze. Following Spinoza and Bergson, Deleuze (1994) develops a notion of the virtual as a generative field of difference, or a “plane of immanence,” where “all the varieties of differential relations and all the distributions of singular points [coexist] in diverse orders ‘perplicated’ in one another” (p. 206). These differences are then formatted into distinct phenomena or entities by processes of actualization that “[bring] the object back into relation with the field of differential relations in which it can always be dissolved and become actualized otherwise, as something else, by being linked through other differential relations to other particles” (Cheah, 2010, pp. 85-86). While not all new materialist theories cleave to a strictly Deleuzian philosophy, there is general agreement that the dynamic interactions among objects, bodies, and phenomena turn us away from the Anthropocene’s “billiard ball model” of causality, and more significantly, away from some of poststructuralism’s critical trends. According to the new materialisms, the linguistic and cultural turns of the last half century have resulted in both an intellectual and a political poverty. Specifically, social constructivism (Coole & Frost, 2010) and cultural representationalism (Barad, 2007) have overdetermined matter to the extent that it appears as a passive product made meaningful only through cultural and discursive practice. Coole and Frost (2010) even write of a theoretical “exhaustion,” claiming that they “share the feeling current among many researchers that the dominant constructivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to the contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy” (p. 6). Somewhere and sometime during the rise of the Anthropocene, cultural theory, broadly conceived, lost its explanatory power. This assessment of inadequacy repeats across much of the recent new materialist scholarship, condensing the cultural turn into a discursive reductionism that rebuffs the empirical for the ideal, or the material for the symbolic. Elizabeth Grosz’s (2004) The Nick of Time opens with a telling “reminder to social, political, and cultural theorists, particularly those interested in feminism, antiracism, and questions of the politics of globalization, that they have forgotten a crucial dimension of research…not just the body, but that which makes it possible and which limits its actions: the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality” (p. 2). Social, political, and cultural theory, in other words, have overlooked the material conditions of life that render the body available for inscription and enculturation in the first instance. So too in the recently published Gut Feminism does Elizabeth Wilson (2015) rebuke “social constructionism” for “[tending] not to be very curious about the details of empirical claims in genetics, neurophysiology, evolutionary biology, pharmacology or biochemistry” (p. 3). Her ensuing conclusion is that focusing on how social structures produce and discipline bodies comes at the expense of recognizing the ways bodies radically alter and organize social structures themselves. It appears that cultural theory harbors an “allergy to ‘the real’” that dissuades “critical inquirers from the more empirical kinds of investigation that material processes and structures require” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 6). However, the very aspects that would make matter more “real” than language or culture are the same aspects that restrict its ethical potential and facilitate a conceptual rejection of race. In line with their post-humanist agenda, the new materialisms evoke matter and materiality as existing in excess of human subjectivity and its attendant domains. Mechanistic theories of causality hold that objects are composed of inert matter acted upon by external forces, which presumes that an object’s potential or possible capabilities are already present and fixed in some initial moment of creation. But, as the new materialisms emphasize, the virtual field of differential relations is immanent to matter in such a way that it is impossible to anticipate all of the effects a material configuration may have, or the organizational forms it may take. This ability to act independently of the subject’s will and desire is variously construed as “impersonal and preindividual forces,” an alterity that “comes from outside the capability or power of the subject” (Cheah, 2010, p. 80, 89), “degrees of indetermination” that represent the “‘true principle of life’” (Grosz, 2010, p. 149), and a “powerful reminder…that life will always exceed our knowledge and control” (Bennett, 2010, p.14). Differences in terminology aside, the new materialisms are united by an understanding of materiality as a spectral, impersonal force with material effects, one that escapes reason and disrupts systems of meaning, including modernist binaries like mind/body, culture/nature, and inside/outside (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). The latter aspect is key because, while matter can frustrate representation, its “excessive” properties do not mean that it exists “outside” of the subject. Rather, matter and materiality are “real” because they actively produce reality in unpredictable ways (Cheah, 2010). It is here that the ethical impetus of the new materialist project is located. If we accept our embeddedness in mutually transformative, nonhuman networks, the ground of ethics shifts accordingly. First, a responsibility to an externalized other gives way to an accountability for the many relations that constitute becoming. And second, ethics are no longer reducible to the decisions or actions of individuals that are initiated by a properly historical judgment. In Rosi Braidotti’s (2010) terms, “Accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual codependence is what is at stake in postsecular affirmative ethics” (p. 214). I find nothing immediately problematic with an ethics that aspires to keep pace with advancements in science, philosophy, and technology. What I find troublesome is how our acquiescence to these ethics is solicited. New materialist ethics necessarily manifest as affective encounters that operate best on micropolitical scales. Because materiality is figured as an impersonal force of the real, it runs the risk of becoming a transcendental signified that merely replaces language or culture as an organizing principle. Doing so would severely diminish its import as an inducement to a posthumanist ethics. To circumvent the “tension between universalistic theory and specific mode of inquiry,” chance, contingency, and creativity in micro-level encounters are prioritized over more obstinate assemblages that congeal at the global or macro-levels (Zhan, 2016, p. 26). Further, as the nucleus of the new materialisms, the embodied subject or material body compels an ethics that unfolds on a parallel plane, meaning between and within bodies. “This implies,” Rosi Braidotti (2010) proposes, “approaching the world through affectivity and not cognition: as singularity, force, movement, through assemblages or webs of interconnections with all that lives,” and “accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual codependence” (p. 214). In the quotation above, Braidotti invokes an ethics of relation, in which sensation and perception comprise the “zone of [ethical] effectivity,” and attunement and affirmation take precedence over social transformation (Tumino, 2011, p. 555). Because material inter- and intraactions are preconscious and multisensorial, ethical practice is based not on the ability to evaluate right from wrong, but on a commitment to feeling right. We can observe this adjustment in appeals to “an ongoing responsiveness to…entanglement” (Barad, 2007, p. 394), “a heightened sensitivity to the agency of assemblages” (Bennett, 2010b), a “wakefulness” to the “feel [of] what makes us laugh, lament, and curse” (Orlie, 2007, p. 127) and an “experience of the vitality of being” (Connolly, 2010, pp. 196-197). As a consequence, the experiences of living under conditions of crisis are fetishized at the expense of addressing the causes of these conditions themselves. The imperative to “[live] with the open wound...through a sort of depersonalization of the event” (Braidotti, 2010, p. 213), for example, not only depoliticizes the claims of historically oppressed communities, but also flattens distinctions between traumas inflicted through happenstance and persistent intergenerational harm. How else could one, as Braidotti does, list as equivalent examples: those who survived the Holocaust, Frida Kahlo’s deadly tram ride, and missing the train to the World Trade Center on September 11th (p. 214)? The limits of a new materialist ethics appear most forcefully, then, as we attempt to move from an embodied “responsiveness” to the dislocation of structures. When patterns of materialization are addressed, it is generally as the amalgamation of “perpetual circuits of exchange, feedback, and reentry” that thereby “[inflect] the shape of political experience” (Connolly, 2010, pp. 190-191). On the one hand, there is nothing innately objectionable about attributing the creation and transformation of political structures to any number of quotidian, embodied experiences. This is in fact common in political theory and historiography.8 On the other hand, it becomes more difficult to reconcile the effects of chance, unpredictability, and indeterminacy with the endurance and repetition of something like antiblack violence.9 The new materialisms are therefore at pains to clarify why the structures of global antiblackness continue to function as if “neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise” (Spillers, 2003, p. 208). Interpreting and describing our entanglements with non-human, materialist forces are not enough to account for, much less dislodge attachments to, social categories and representational arrangements. By this I mean that becoming more aware of material forces will not inevitably reduce the weight of discursive or psychic formations. It could even obstruct change by making forms of affect and sensation newly available for inscription. As Timothy Morton (2007) states, when “contact becomes content,” perceptions of difference collapse into identity (p. 37). Granted, these complications are not unique to the new materialisms as changes in scale almost always require a re-calibration of ethics. The point is, however, that the framing of the new materialisms as inherently more ethical generates, and is generated by, a disavowal or misreading of race as a stagnant analytical framework. As I submit above, since at least the Enlightenment period intellectual genealogies have maintained an almost overwhelming racial homogeneity. Critical theories produced by non-white scholars may have increased in terms of production or representation, but these are consistently marked as minority perspectives that have little to do with universal or ontological questions.10 Hence, black bodies especially are rendered objects for theoretical development, rather than subjects of universal philosophy. Coole and Frost (2010) continue this trend, revealing that even as “feminists and class theorists have often insisted upon” the importance of material bodies and environments, the authors remain “[concerned] that such material dimensions have recently been marginalized by fashionable constructivist approaches and identity politics” (p. 19). The latter, they continue, “had a good deal to say about the body and its imbrication in relationships of power, but we are not convinced that they pay sufficient attention to the material efficacy of bodies or have the theoretical resources to do so” (ibid.). Such a statement is heavy with longstanding racial charges of intellectual primitivism and parochialism. The unfortunate request to be “convinced” of identity politics’ intellectual merit effectively seals an historically white critical theory as the standard for authoritative knowledge production.11 One must also wonder about the referents for these insufficiently materialist identity politics, given that the New Materialisms anthology fails to cite even one example that might be taken as representative of a larger trend. Even if Coole and Frost employ “identity politics” as a shorthand for idealist approaches to subjectivity, their statement betrays both a misunderstanding of studies of “identity,” and a symptomatic desire to abandon race. To be clear, Coole and Frost never openly reduce “identity politics” to racial identity. But in many if not most of new materialisms’ founding texts, race receives only casual mention alongside the “other socalled axes of social difference” like sex, gender, and class, and often to specify a concept that has been “paralyzed by [a] ‘binary’ take on dualism” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 88, 143), or to name potential beneficiaries of one’s theorization (Barad, 2007; Grosz, 2004). We could perhaps attribute this treatment of race to an obdurate politics of attention (Ahmed, 2008) that determines which issues receive consideration.12 Nonetheless, to ascertain if and how the new materialisms might furnish us with a timelier ethics, we must first ask what purpose the omission of race serves. The Movement for Black Lives has forcefully reminded us that black bodies have historically provided the standards against which the human subject and non-human objects are measured. This is to say that the “rupture in the quality of being” inaugurated by modern racial slavery is not limited to black lives (Brand, 2001, p. 29). Black critical theorists repeatedly insist on the world-historical scale of this rupture, tracking how it conditions our thinking about humans and matter, and the movements of this thought itself. What this means for our current discussion is that “the question of race’s reality has and continues to bear directly on hierarchies of knowledge pertaining to the nature of reality itself” (Jackson, 2015, p. 216), or on what Dionne Brand (2001) calls our “cognitive schema” (p. 29). As a conceptual orientation or method of “way-finding,” the prevailing cognitive schema articulates a libidinal economy of antiblackness to the history of ideas, ensuring, as Spillers (2003) maintains, that “dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation;” “sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us” (pp. 208-209). By inverting a childhood rejoinder about the supposedly limited reach of the symbolic, Spillers lays out a provocative proposal: the metaphors of slavery are immanent to the force of the material. Although “‘race’ alone bears no inherent meaning, even though it reifies in personality,” it “gains its power from what it signifies by point, in what it allows to come to meaning” (Spillers, 2003, p. 380). Black lives matter, and blackness enlivens matter. It is possible, then, that the elaboration of thought, the conditions of its enunciation and reception, are always part of a racial praxis, even when those “personalities” that absorb the reification of race are most absent. This is a paradigmatic example of the prevailing cognitive schema at work. Antiblackness conditions the force of materiality by determining the logic of both its actualization and its theoretical manifestations. These functions become clearer when we turn our attention to Octavia Butler’s Parable duology.