“The strangeness that seems to reside somewhere between the body and
its objects is also what brings these objects to life and makes them dance” (Ahmed QP 162; emphasis mine).
I’m working on a chapter for
a collection on critical whiteness studies. I’m in the process of thinking
through my argument, so I’m using the blog as an attempt to work through my
ideas, and, ideally, get some constructive criticism. SO, consider this stuff
as very much in progress. In the chapter, I use No Wave music as a way
to think about the politics and aesthetics of white disorientation. I’ll post
on the music later. For now, I want to focus on the philosophical background,
particularly this concept of “disorientation.” What do I mean by “white
disorientation”? Well, first I need to explain what I mean by “orientation.”
Orientation as theory of
socio-political inequality
Sara Ahmed talks about
power, hegemony, and privilege as “orientations”—they direct our bodies to work
in certain ways and not others, they direct and arrange the world in ways that
facilitate certain kinds of interactions, and discourage others, etc. “‘Orientations’
depend on taking points of view as given” (14); they “shape not only how we
inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well
as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward” (3). Orientations
are the background conditions that give form to our perceptions: they’re the
“lenses” that allow some things to come into focus (at the expense of others),
or the program behind the interface, making some things easy to do and others
nearly impossible. In each cultural or subcultural context, there are systems
of practices, conventions, and habits that allow us (especially our bodies) to
“fee[l] at home” and “fin[d] our way” (9). For example, classical music
concerts and pop music concerts feature different orientations among musicians
and audiences: the former is much more formal, the latter more casual, but both
are highly ritualized. These orientations help audiences know how to “find
their way” through the event, and how to “feel at home” and enjoy the
performance: they include rituals governing, for example, knowing when to clap
at a classical music performance (not between the movements, only when the
conductor’s hands go down), knowing it is generally OK to talk, even yell, at a
pop show, knowing that there will be one or two encores after the “official”
end of the performance (the show’s not over till the house lights go up),
knowing where in the venue it’s OK to dance, and the accepted types of dancing
(moshing, slamdancing, crowd surfing, light twirling, breakdancing, etc.).---these
are all “orientations” that help us navigate a concert. We are oriented when we
know who we are and what we can and/or ought to do; or rather, we are
orientated when we take for granted who we are and what we can/or ought
to do. So, when you don’t have to think about riding a bike, but just
hop on and pedal, or when you don’t have to think about comporting
yourself in a gender-appropriate way, that’s being orientated.
Ahmed argues that whiteness
is a form of orientation: it’s one of the “programs” through which we
“interface” with the world and with others. “The world of whiteness,” she
argues, is “the familiar world...a world we know implicitly” (111). Because “colonialism makes
the world ‘white’” (111), this “we” includes more than just white/Western
subjects—everyone has to be familiar with whiteness, because it orientates
global flows of money, resources, labor, etc. Whiteness is ubiquitous. So, in
the context of global white supremacy, whiteness is not what is distributed unequally; rather, whiteness
is what does the distributing of privilege, money, resources, etc. Or
better: whiteness is the gauge used to do the distributing. As Ahmed
explains, “whiteness becomes a social and bodily orientation given that some
bodies will be more at home in a world that is orientated around whiteness”
(138). If whiteness orients the world, those with white bodies—actual white
people—will have an easier time navigating this world that people with
insufficiently white bodies. (Think of Peggy McIntosh’s famous formulation of
white privilege as an “invisible knapsack” of resources that provide for white
people’s ability to seamlessly “be at home” in the world.) The world also
shapes our bodies, positively reinforcing bodily comportments, behaviors, and
aesthetics that follow the “program” of whiteness. “If the world is made
white,” Ahmed argues, “then the body at home is one that can inhabit whiteness”
(111).
But what about bodies that
don’t “inhabit whiteness”? First, their
awkwardness, troublesomeness, and “unruliness” indicate the underlying ubiquity
of whiteness. The awkwardness of non-white bodies “reconfirms the whiteness of
the space” (135-6). So, when non-whites feel like their very existence is a
“problem” (as Du Bois famously put it), these feelings of dis-orientation are
further evidence that the world is oriented by white supremacy. Ahmed argues
that “the body gets directed in some ways more than others” (15); bodies that
can’t or don’t follow whiteness’s directions lead to feelings of disorientation
and disruption, both for non-white subjects, and the people around them, white
and non-white.[i]
So, it’s not that orientation is unevenly distributed; rather, “disorientation is unevenly distributed:
some bodies more than others have their involvement in the world calls into
crisis” (159; emphasis mine). White supremacy means that disorientation disproportionately
affects non-whites—they don’t get the “invisible knapsack” with the map,
compass, etc. It’s harder for non-whites to navigate about the white-oriented
world; they feel “awkward” and like their very existence is “a problem.”
A Politics of
Disorientation
If white hegemony is a type
of orientation, then disorientation would be the corresponding
anti-racist strategy. Ahmed considers the “politics of disorientation,”
especially anti-racist, queer disorientation, at length. “If orientation is
about making the strange familiar” (11), then disorientation is the practice of
“mak[ing] that familiar strange, or even to allow that which has been
overlooked to dance with renewed life. Such deviations involve acts of
following, but use the same ‘points’ for different effects” (177). For example,
the African-American practice of “signifying,” or the drag practice of camp
performance are both ways of taking something familiar—common words,
stereotypical femininity—and making it work differently. “Bad” and “ill” are
turned into terms of praise and approbation, or a drag queen’s failure at
“natural” femininity is read as a successful aesthetic style and political
critique. So, disorientation can be a means of identifying and critiquing
hegemonic orientations.
I want to think about white
disorientation. As Ahmed herself notes, the disorientation can be the
source of feelings and actions that are politically critical or politically
reactionary.[ii] So,
for example, working class whites are feeling increasingly disoriented by
structural changes in the economy, by the increased prominence of
Spanish-language media, etc., and this disorientation leads to retrenchment
(e.g., in the TEA party), not critique. I want to examine white disorientation
that at least nominally intends itself as critical, progressive, and
anti-racist (so, the effect, and even the implicit intent, might be
reactionary, but the stated, conscious intent is anti-racist). I want to
consider white disorientation as a response to the tension between (a) the
explicit awareness of the world’s white orientation, and (b) the desire for “a
world that is not orientated around whiteness” (Ahmed 156). Ahmed frequently
emphasizes that orientations are implict, pre-reflective, and habitual. So,
with respect to point (a), if whiteness is so compelling because it is implicit
(or, to use Richard Dyer’s term, “invisible”) to whites, then explicit
awareneness of it ought to be, at some level, disorienting.[iii]
Second, with respect to (b), I am not arguing that whiteness has ceased to be hegemonic.
There are certain “worlds” where whiteness is not the primary orientation
device (e.g., Indian classical music, some African-American music subcultures,
like quiet storm), but these worlds exist in a universe governed by the
gravitational pull of whiteness. So, the result is that even predominantly
African-American musical genres can still be partially or even primarily
orientated by whiteness. For example, mainstream R&B, hip hop, and rock are
historically marketed primarily to white consumers. That said, popular music is
one domain where whiteness’s ubiquity is at least somewhat qualified. Popular
music is perhaps the closest thing most whites will ever encounter to a world
not oriented by whiteness. So, motivated by their desire to experience a world
that is not oriented primarily by whiteness, whites look to popular music,
especially genres coded as non-white such as R&B, hip-hop, and world music.
Sometimes this regard for pop music is motivated by orientialism, the desire to
experience (or, as bell hooks would say, “eat”) the other; sometimes it is
motivated by the desire for the limitation and amelioration of white hegemony;
and sometimes, it is a paradoxical mix of both orientialism and anti-racism. I
want to examine what happens when explicitly and self-avowedly anti-racist
whites realize that things they previously thought were not oriented by
whiteness are in fact saturated with it. What happens when a self-declared
progressive white person realizes, “Oh shit! This thing I really appreciate and
value, this thing that is an important part of my life, is really racist”? I
use the idea of disorientation to examine some musicians’ responses to their
awareness that their taste in music—what they liked, what they found pleasurable—relied
upon both (a) racist stereotypes about African-Americans, and (b) the
co-optation of African-Americans by whites, for their financial and aesthetic gain. Or, more simply, I’m interested
in how the concept of disorientation helps us think through these musicians’ problematiziation
of their whiteness. Whiteness implicitly organized their aesthetic
experience of music; but what happens when whiteness ceases to be implicit, but
is explicitly reflected upon as a problem? Disorientation is one way
whites experience and express the rejection of whiteness-as-orientation.
But I think it’s also
important to note that critical, anti-racist white disorientation is qualitatively,
phenomenologically, and politically distinct from the disorientation non-whites
experience vis-à-vis white supremacy. According to Ahmed, “racism ‘stops’ black
bodies” (111); blacks’ attempts at orientation are either denied (via outright
prohibition) or rebuffed (via a ‘roadblock’). So here disorientation takes the
form of blocked orientation. This blocking is the effect of a very specific
cause: blacks are never granted subject status—they are never treated as
autonomous moral/political agents, i.e., as full persons, citizens, etc.
“Reduced as they are to things among things,” the white-oriented world situates
blacks only as objects, never as subjects. Or, blacks can participate in
white-oriented worlds, but only as objects. As both Du Bois’s and Fanon’s
discussions of multiple consciousness reveal, “racism ensures that the black
gaze returns to the black body, which is not a loving return but rather follows
the line of the hostile white gaze” (111). So, when blacks take their own
bodies as the objects of critical self-reflection, their self-regard is
mediated by normatively white ideals of subjectivity, gender, beauty, humanity,
citizenship, etc. They see themselves through the eyes of another, in third
person (as a “he” or “she,” not an “I” or “me”).
When anti-racist whites
subject themselves to critical self-reflection, they may be disgusted or
ashamed at their implicit and explicit racism, but this gaze is not
necessarily hostile, as in the case with non-whites. This gaze does not
require whites to sustain a performative contradiction, i.e., to adopt a form
of subjectivity that necessarily denies their status as a (potential) subject.
Whites may be taking their own bodies as the object of their critical
reflection, but they are not reducing themselves to things. White
supremacy shapes the world in a way that allows whites to be both
subjects and objects: even when they objectify themselves, they are
never just objects. If there’s any hostility in this critical
self-reflection, it comes from anger and disappointment in one’s self: it is an
emotional and affective relation of the individual to hirself; it is not, as in
the case of anti-black racism, a structural hostility resulting from systematic
oppression. Moreover, critical self-reflection is different that social and
political change. Whites can problematize their own personal attributes and
beliefs while simultaneously participating in white-oriented institutions,
social structures, etc. So, whites can feel bad (guilt, shame, etc.) without
thereby “diminish[ing] their capacities for action” (111). In fact, as I have
argued extensively in my writing on hipness, whites often use
dis-identification with whiteness as a source of aesthetic and social capital.
Or, in Ahmed’s terms “disorientation” can sometimes function as “a way of
experiencing the pleasure of deviation” (177). In order for deviation to be
experienced as pleasurable, even in part, requires a certain level of
privilege—the deviation isn’t making your life unlivable, isn’t putting your very
health and survival in question.
Individual whites’
subjective experience of racial disorientation can often be compatible, if not
actively complicit, with the general orientation of the world around whiteness.
But can it ever be a cause or a symptom of the general dis-orientation of the
world, the undoing of white-orientation? In order to do so, it has to go beyond
individual affective and emotional experience, and attack the structures that
organize and orient collective phenomena. Can white disorientation ever be the
symptom of a progressive desire for a “world not oriented around whiteness”?
How would that work? What would it look, feel, or sound like?
More thoughts on these
questions in subsequent posts. The next post in this series will be a comparison
between two takes on white awkwardness and racialized disorientation. I’ll
contrast Devo’s “New Wave” attempt to critique—via hyperbole—white people’s perceived
awkwardness, with some “No Wave” musicians attempts to exacerbate white
awkwardness as an attempt to critique white hegemony.
[i]
“An effect of being ‘out of place’ is also to
create disorientation in others” (Ahmed 160).
[ii]
“It is not that disorientaiton is always
radical. Bodies that experience disorientation can be defensive, as they reach
out for support or as they search for a place to reground and reorientate their
relation to the world. So, too, the forms of politics that proceed from
disorientation can be conservative, depending on the ‘aims’ of their gestures,
depending on how they seek to (re)ground themselves. And, for sure, bodies that
experience being out of place might need to be orientated, to find a place
where they feel comfortable and safe in the world” (Ahmed 158).
[iii]
“Whiteness gets reproduced through acts of
alignment, which are forgotten when we receive its line” (Ahmed 121).
