Negrophilia and The Black Square
Frantz Fanon said that negrophilia and negrophobia are two sides of the same coin; both are an inverted reflection of the wretched and contradictory self-hatred the narcissistic white subject feels towards himself. Unable to work through these feelings, he projects them onto blacks. He is negrophobic; he hates them, because he sees himself in them, a very ugly sight indeed. But he loves himself, too. He loves himself excessively, in fact, and so the white man is likewise negrophilic, obsessively in love with all things black, fetishizing it. But this love is really just an attempt to cover up his unexpressed hatred. So we go back to his negrophobia, his hatred of blacks. And this hatred, it turns out, is just his plugged-up attempt to conceal from himself his desire for blackness. It’s a vicious cycle of compensation and deferral. At both ends of the spectrum is a white subject writhing, obsessing, projecting, made uneasy by the other that he sees himself to be, the other he defines solely by what he cannot bear to accept in himself. The continuity of his life, the ordering of his ego, depends on this, and so his imagination is put to work.
The degree of one’s narcissism can be measured by the ferocity with which one’s fantasy affixes itself to an object, rendering it either pathetic, weak, and empty or super-charged, strong, and threatening. There are many ways that bourgeois self-hatred expresses itself and just as many ways that capitalism will either exploit or pacify this form of self-hatred to reconstitute itself. This dynamic was most recently manifest in the social media event #blackouttuesday, where everyone shared a black square to show solidarity with the protests responding to the murder of George Floyd. These uploaders were quickly told to not hashtag Black Lives Matter, because the black squares were clogging the instagram algorithm and covering up more important information like organizations people could donate to. Some people were saying to delete the original post and reupload if you had to have that black square up, because the original photo had the metadata with the hashtag still in it and so would still keep messing up the algorithm even if you deleted the caption.
I’d been ignoring these black squares all day, just scrolling past them, but when I was waiting for the RRX from Cologne to Düsseldorf, the train I take to go back home after work, the sun was shining on my back and bouncing off my phone’s screen, and I came across another black square from a very apolitical friend whose posting it was already confusing, suspect even, and I saw my face in the square, reflected in my phone. Was this the point of these posts? Walter Benjamin said that when an audience in a cinema thinks they are identifying with an actor in a film they are really, unknowingly, identifying with the camera, with its technological fidelity and its method of mechanically reproducing gestures and inflections. Cinema teaches us to learn to love our unfreedom, it gives us the illusion that we are in control of our alienation by being a voluntary activity we participate in during our free time. I think that in response to our current situation, Benjamin would say that we feel reassured and comforted by how meaningless our actions are; that we secretly love that there’s nothing we can do aside from some pointless, symbolic gesture (one that backfired, nonetheless). And this is great because we don’t have to feel bad or guilty when nothing changes. Benjamin said that fascism allows society to express its discontents without changing the foundation of its social relations. Fascism does this by rendering everything aesthetic — especially politics. Adorno went on to describe how after the war and the end of fascism, the culture industry had synthesized this method of aestheticizing politics with the commodity form. Bourgeois self-hatred was expressed in an identification with transgressive culture, and so cultural resistance to capitalist conformity took religion’s place as the opiate of the masses. There was once the idea that political experience accumulated, that we learned lessons from our failures, that we perfected our political practices by thinking about them, and that our thinking was in turn being influenced by the political reality it was trying to change. This is an old and stale memory, though, and nothing seems to cull it. Nobody is going to remember blackout Tuesday. That wasn’t the point. It wasn’t even really an experience, and we won’t learn anything from it.
Everything is “dialectics at a standstill,” to quote Benjamin again. All experience is so propositional, suggestive of a promise it can’t fulfill. I’ve always felt this way about some of the more experimental art made at the turn of the century — monochrome paintings in particular — that they weren’t about an experience you get something out of so much as they were a linguistic, conceptual proposition as to how an artwork could, theoretically, function. Endgaming, “the logical conclusion” of this or that art form, and so on and so forth are the catchwords around this discourse. Am I meant to see something other than cracking black paint in that square? Myself? My imaginative faculties? The possibility of what could have come after but never did? A projective identification with the other? People looting in a Target? All of contemporary art seems locked in the echo chamber of this black square, tethered to its ‘post-conceptual’ condition. Its purpose is now to be critical, to simultaneously recognize the conditions of its production and to solve them. In other words, it has the contradictory task to reassert, in ever-more ingenious ways, the rule that aesthetic experience isn’t possible by being an exception, by finding in research or creating in gesture some kind of key that will unlock its raison d’être. Reduction and reconstitution over and over again ad infinitum. And like the black square, I don’t know if this stuff needs to be looked at to be experienced. I don’t know if there is anything to learn.
There’s going to be police and police violence so long as we have capitalism; no amount of reform, opposition, or defunding will get rid of them. Poor neighborhoods where the lumpenproletariat and reserve army of labor and permanently unemployed live will always receive the brunt of it. The police state is prepared to outlive humanity. The kernel of truth the looting expresses is its hopelessness, the tacit acknowledgment that nothing is going to change. Of course the negrophobe hates this, because he has to see his naked opportunism. The same way that, conversely, the negrophilic 24-hour news programs love it, patronizingly spinning a narrative that “this is how these communities express centuries of oppression.” Both of these responses, Fanon reminds us, have more to do with the neurosis of the subject projecting than the thing being projected onto. Capitalists racialize politics. They need a fetish object to abuse so they can absolve themselves and keep from introspecting. This leads inevitably to protests, riots, looting, violence, and death. Marxists respond by politicizing race, the way Eugene Debs did over a hundred years ago, when these issues seemed less indomitable than they do today:
Let the capitalist press and capitalist “public opinion” indulge themselves in alternate flattery and abuse of the Negro; we as Socialists will receive him in our party, treat him in our counsels and stand by him all around the same as if his skin were white instead of black; and this we do, not from any considerations of sentiment, but because it accords with the philosophy of Socialism, the genius of the class struggle, and is eternally right and bound to triumph in the end. [1] //
[1] Eugene Debs, The Negro In The Class Struggle, International Socialist Review, Vol. IV, No. 5. November 1903
