Emancipation and Debt
by
Isabell Lorey
Presented in the session "Power and Domination,"
Emancipation Conference,
Technical University Berlin, May 27, 2018
1. In the modern age, emancipation means the liberation from relations of power and domination and hence from dependencies. The task is to become a free subject independent from others that is capable of governing itself. This bourgeois idea of emancipation is—not only Foucault made this clear with his theory of governmentality—the basis of a masculinist form of liberal-capitalistic and democratic governing since the 18th century. The free subject governs itself in a way that simultaneously makes it governable in the frame of biopolitical governmentality. This free subject is male, owns property and is white. Emancipation means in this instance to become a subject within the scope of this norm.
Proceeding from movements and struggles of the 1960s and 70s, Foucault explicates in his text “The subject and power” that what we have to liberate ourselves from is exactly this form of emancipation. A current practice of liberation needs “a critical analysis of our world,”[i] a critical analysis of the present, according to Foucault. As is known, he is not concerned with emancipation from all power relations–—as if this were possible. A critical analysis of the present means to understand, in which relations of power and domination, who can become a subject, who may not, and how we are bound, in both cases, to an allegedly own original “identity,” which either ties us together in groups and discriminates us and/or individualizes and separates us, and makes us (self-)governable. An emancipation from such identity politics does not lie “at a future date,” not in the promise of “liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle”[ii]. Instead, we need “to refuse what we are” and what we are now forced to be, in the present. According to Foucault, we have “to liberate us both from the state and the type of individualization which is linked to the state,”[iii] and search for new forms of subjectivation.
2. In the etymology of the Latin word emancipatio, emancipation cannot be separated from patriarchal domination of ownership. Mancipatio means—by the laying on of the hand (manus)—to take a thing in one’s possession. In Roman antiquity, those who did not have any, or no entire, law of a person were also treated as thing—first and foremost slaves. E-mancipatio then meant the liberation from the domination of ownership. In the strict sense of the law, emancipatio means various things: to release the son from patriarchal power into independence, to release the daughter into the hands of another man or to liberate a slave from the ownership of his master. The pater familias hands over his former property. The dominating subject is the one who releases and liberates.
3. In 1968, the mythical year of the student movement, and at the end of the decade of independence of most African states from colonial domination, in this year of 1968, Stokely Carmichael made clear at the likewise legendary London “Dialectic of Liberation Congress” that, even in the second half of the 20th century, a white practice of domination is often hidden within emancipation. Carmichael, who later became a central figure of the Black Panthers, was chairman of one of the most important Civil Rights Movements in 1968, the SNCC, and author of the book “Black Power.”[iv] In London he said: „I’m amazed when I pick up the paper and read that ‘England today decided to give independence to the West Indies.’ Who the hell is England to give me my independence? All they can do is stop oppressing me, get off my back. [...] So that you cannot grant anybody independence, they just take it. And that is what white America is going to learn. They cannot give us anything. No white liberal can give me anything. The only thing a white liberal can do for me is to help civilize other whites, because they need to be civilized.“[v]
Independence is not a gift, not a mercy of the (white) West. Those who enslave cannot bestow independence. But they can stop to oppress, to dominate and to enslave, and can contribute to “civilizing” other white people. The ruling must emancipate themselves. They have to reject to become a superior subject and therewith becoming an autonomous and sovereign subject.
4. Emancipation is a promise for a future liberation. Instead of being a practice in the here and now, a matter of breaches in the linear construction of time, it belongs to the time of the victors, the time of the ruling, the time of domination over ecology, over the “surround”[vi]. Progress and growth are grounded in increasing inequalities and economies of superiority and in the wealth of a few. “Progress for whom?”[vii], asks Carmichael in 1968. „We will have to tell you when progress is being made. You cannot tell us when progress is being made, because progress for us means getting you off our backs [...].“[viii]
5. Saidiya Hartman has reminded us that the freedom given from whites counted as a kind of present to the enslaved, as a gift for which they had to prove themselves thankful and worthy, and which put them in debt and made them guilty. This gift of debt binds the “freed persons” to the past with an inverse responsibility and lends duration to the debt up to the present day: for in the logic of debt only the indebted individual is responsible for the doings of the past.[ix] This displacement of responsibility onto the individualized debt of the freed erases history, the history of slavery. Enduring black debt serves the linear historiography of the white victors.[x] Even long after the end of slavery the debt relation inscribes itself onto an enduring, indebted servitude-at-work in the context of freedom, individualization, and self responsibility, through which, in the logic of debt, black emancipation remains bound in an asymmetric relation to the white “benefactors,” Hartman argues in the chapter “The Debt of Emancipation” in Scenes of Subjection.
6. Can we save the term emancipation? Maybe not. We could instead think about abolition, precariousness, debt. Abolition not only in the sense of the abolition of slavery, which was never capable of abolishing racism and maintained the relationship between capital and race, and also not in the simple sense of abolishing sexism, homo- and transphobia, or of debts. In their book The Undercommons, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney speak of “another abolitionism” [xi]. This understanding of abolitionism is concerned with the abolition of a society that enslaves.[xii] It is about abolishing a society that despises dependency and care and is shaped by violence and hate against everything that is perceived as “different.” This other form of abolition is not a future paradise free of domination, but rather is the struggles and undercommons in the here and now.
7. The group “Precarias a la deriva” from Madrid emphasized with a queer-feminist perspective that, for achieving another society, another world, it is necessary to break with the modern nexus of emancipation and independence; to break with the doctrine that whoever is dependent of others cannot be emancipated, that those who are bound to relationships of care, cannot really be free.[xiii] Neoliberal governing fits the idea of emancipation based on individualization and autonomy just fine. Whoever is not capable of this, has to blame him- or herself, and is self-responsible for privatized risk management.
But, what if we think ways of living together that start from care and dependency, from infinite social debts, from which emancipation cannot be achieved? The Precarias, the undercommons and many other feminist, queer, black contexts have already begun to deliver manyfold suggestions to these matters. The concern is not about demonizing autonomy and freedom, but about rethinking them, proceeding from mutual connectedness, affection and solidarity—where the lines between those who care, and those who receive solidarity and support cannot be clearly drawn, because these relations are perceived as mutual and endlessly indebted to relationships of care.
8. If we regard racism, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, as the „extralegal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerabilities“ that lead to „premature (socialcivil and/or corporeal) death,“[xiv] even if sexism, homo- and transphobia are understood as the production and contempt of hierarchized vulnerabilities that lead to a premature death, a society that abolishes this lethal precarity must emanate from, and assume, a commonly shared precariousness.
This shared precariousness is not an anthropological constant. It is not an original vulnerability that is the same for everyone and not an immutable ontological category. Precariousness is relational and social, even more: it is ecological, because it is never without a relation to environments, to the surround, never without care in the here and now. We have come to know precariousness only in terms of hierarchized vulnerabilities, only in connection to precarity, to inequalities, discrimination and exploitation. And nonetheless precariousness can be preserved within abolitionist struggles.
9. Near to this understanding of shared precariousness against precarity, Harney and Moten finally also have suggested another social understanding of bad debt, black debt, unpayable debt. A precondition for this is the separation of debt and capital, of debt and credit. “Credit”, they write, “is a means of privatization and debts a means of socialisation. […] [D]ebt is social”, it is mutual, it “scatters, escapes, seeks refuge.”[xv] This bad debt cannot be repaid, for social reasons, for reasons of being_with_. It is “debt without creditor, the black debt, the queer debt,” write Harney and Moten.[xvi] It is queer debt, because it flees identity and self-referentiality, because it does not allow us to become a subject in a hegemonic and modern way. To practice bad, black, queer debt corresponds to the capacity to be affected by others, by people and things: to be connected, vulnerable, precarious.[xvii]
Notes
[i] Michel Foucault: The Subject and Power, Critical Inquiry 8(4) 1982, p. 777-795, here, p. 785.
[ii] Foucault, The Subject and Power, 780.
[iii] Foucault, The Subject and Power, 785.
[iv] Student Non-Violent Coordinating Commitee (SNCC).
[v] Stokely Carmichael: Black Power, in David Cooper (ed.): The Dialectics of Liberation, Verso: London/New York 2015, p. 312f.
[vi] For the concept of “the surround,” see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning & Black Study, London: Moínor Compositions 2013.
[vii] Carmichael, Black Power, p. 305.
[viii] Ibid, p. 306. “… and that’s the only progress that we can see.“
[ix] See Saidiya Hartman: Scenes of Subjection. Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in the Nineteenth-Century America, New York, Oxford: Oxford UP 1997, pp. 130-131.
[x] See Ibid., 132, and also Benjamin, On the Concept of History.
[xi] Harney/Moten, The Undercommons, 41.
[xii] See, 42.
[xiii] See, Precarias a la deriva: „Was ist dein Streik?“ Militante Streifzüge durch die Kreisläufe der Prekarität, Wien u.a. 2014, p. 98-108.
[xiv] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, cit. according to Harney/Moton, The Undercommons, 42.
[xv] Harney/Moten, The Undercommons, 61.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] See Isabell Lorey: Demokratie im Präsens, forthcoming book in 2019.
posted by Shelley
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