Eugene made a comment about language(s) and culture(s) that form part of the undercommons (borrowing from Fred Moten’s work). He specifically used the word “hieroglyphics,” which made me think about Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, published in 2014. Weheliye indicts both the liberal and posthumanist “man” as a subject and object of study. Alternative formations for person, or personhood, are fully erased in these views.
As book reviewer Aditi Surie von Czechowski writes, “Since black subjects have NOT been fully assimilated into the human qua man,” “the functioning of blackness as both inside and outside modernity sets the stage for a general theory of the human, and not its particular exception.’ Flesh is not only integral to understanding these exclusionary operations, but also – and this is the novelty of Weheliye’s argument – a source for rethinking the figure of the human through its very corporality.” The rest of the book review, which is brilliant and can be found here, describes Weheliye’s critique of Agamben and Foucault’s postmodern theories that rely upon writing blackness out of history.
To bring this back to hieroglyphics, Weheliye explains that certain people (certain bodies, in fact) are marked with a “hieroglyphics of the flesh” in a permanent state of emergency. This sound like an interesting theoretical statement and catchphrase, but these hieroglyphics actually describe very intense and real suffering allowed within the judicial and political systems. Perhaps an example of this is the beating of Rodney King: Prof. Allen Feldman at NYU writes in the book In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care, “policemen invoked the film Gorillas in the Mist while patrolling in an African American neighborhood . . . that characterized King as ‘bear-like’ and as getting up on his ‘haunches,’ presumably to attack the police, and the animal subtext of his fantasized immunity to pain which enabled this ‘attack’ and justified police ‘retaliation’ as ‘reasonable use of force.'” The police use this intense imagery to mark King as inhuman. The description of hieroglyphics brings Agamben’s work much further, and Weheliye relies on the work of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter to ground theory with and within radical black feminism. In thinking about the future, how should we think about doing away with the “hieroglyphics of the flesh?”
Admittedly, I do not have an answer to this. But remarkably, Agamben’s work is (also) weak on the alternative to bare life or sovereign power. Weheliye does improve on the answer to the question of alternative political futures. Returning to the book review, Czechowski explains, ‘The flesh conceals within its present self the potentiality of alternate futures, its dual nature offering us an alternate way of dismantling Man: ‘flesh stands as both the cornerstone and potential ruin of the world of Man.’ It is that source material through which we can approach new genres of the human, not least because it ‘resists the legal idiom of personhood as property.'” This fleshly and bodily focus is somewhat distinct from much of our class discussions that are rooted in futurity and removing the body focus. But, creating different hieroglyphics (whether or not of the flesh), could considerably alter political futures.