Anti-blackness is locked into place through the alienation of black labor and abstraction through the form of capital---only a starting point that critiques the processes of finance capital can mobilize effective resistance.

Okay, hi. My name is Ramon Amaro. Thank you to the organizers for having me here today. I’m actually going to diverge a second and take the conversation to an ontological and theoretical point that can hopefully emerge to different conversations as we go on later. Namely, what I want to begin with is the idea of bare life of the black female body, an idea that Alessandra Raengo argues must be understood if we are even to critique modern forms of capital, as what we know as the black form is already subsumed in the monetary form of capital and the fictive substance of race. What I mean, and what I would like to propose here in following Raengo, is what she calls “the ontological scandal” perpetuated by slavery. This scandal, according to Raengo, is repeated “with each instance of alienated black labor, each time blackness functions as the commodity form, and with each repetition they continue to be reified.” But what’s important is Raengo’s gesture presupposes that the production and subsequent domination of colonial nations today are predicated on the abstract reification of the black female body as a mode of currency. To even begin to address this ontological scandal, we must first think through how the black body is individuated as a currency of exchange within modern financial systems. For instance, extensive work has been done by Spillers, Hartman, and others to illuminate the important role of the cargo ship on the Middle Passage as a scene of capital exchange and racial subjection. However, I want to build on this work to think through the genesis of the black self as already informed by the logics of innumeration and speculative risk, where the pre-individuated state of black being is always already contaminated by the conditions of labor-based capital accumulation. But this accumulation also informs a dissonance between the real black sense of self and any social agreement that may abstract the black self into, as Denise DeSilva argues, a formative system of monetary value. In other words, as Ian BacComb describes, the growth of Anglo-European financial domination was not merely a cycle of labor and exchange, but a scaled transaction of quantifiable insurance risk associated with the contingency of death and illness aboard slave cargo ships. BacComb points to the British economy in particular to discuss the granting of a real existence of enslaved bodies inasmuch as the survival and the successful delivery of these bodies can be bought virtually as the hidden substance of insurance contracts and bills of credit. Or in the case of the British slave ship Zong, the enslaved body is underwritten as the speculative risk of capital, and public outrage. In this way, the importance of the enslaved body to modes of capital is not predicated to actual material flesh, or even the potential for that body to labor, but was instead articulated as an abstract flow of enumeration and probability. If, under this premise, we are to take W.B. DuBois at face value and consider the double consciousness of the racialized individual, then we are immediately confronted with the fragmentation of black genesis as a tension between what is made visible as blackness or black non-being, which Sylvia Wynters argues is already owned by ontology as a problem of bio-epistemic compliance and the regime of prototypical capital existence, which I argue is symptomatic of a larger logic of social quantification. So I just wanna diverge for a second and return to the issue of the Zong for those who aren’t familiar, the issue of the slave body on the British slaver was the start and emergence of the British insurance industry. If anyone knows, there was an illness that broke out on the slave ship, in the middle of the Atlantic, seven crew members died, and I think it was in term of like twenty slaves, and the captain of that ship decided that, actually, it was cheaper to throw all the slaves overboard and claim the insurance than it was to continue the passage. And when he returned back to England, he sued the insurance company, and that was the start of litigation -- of the body itself as being a virtual point of risk. And what I’m arguing is that, since that development, obviously we know how pervasive the insurance industry is, how pervasive capital mechanisms are at identifying risk and probability, and what I’m arguing here is, following Raengo, is that what we know today as modern capitalism in the UK is already predicated on the violence of the black female body. So, to continue, as the terms of contemporary capital depart from the derivation of value as the direct engagement with the body to the technics of labor practice, so in other words, it no longer became about the actual slave being delivered to do manual labor – the financial gain was greater from actually deriving insurance risk on the body itself. So the body only became a black body once it was subsumed into capital types of risk. These engagements emerged as adaptive forms of information exchange that, unlike popular believe, are indifferent to the specificity of the body. However, it is specific only as much as the racialized body can be extracted into quantifiable forms of data and pre-emption, which continues today to be defined as social value in contemporary techno-capital institutions. What I’m attempting to highlight is that while the technology of shipping and insurance risk, predicated on violence and the abstraction of the black body, were once the lens through which blackness was made visible, the emergence of new generative types of technology, like machine learning, enact an accelerated form of targeting and visibility that no longer require physicality, but depend on the meta-abstraction of all social phenomenon to locate the body as a measure of correlation and probability. So, in other words, after the Zong, following Raengo here, after the Zong, the idea of abstracting the body into actual risk, of course, further objectified the black body, but it also set a precedent of actual citizenship being viewed as potential financial gain or potential investment.