Jesus Is White: Whitely Orders of Race and Civilization Via Aestheticized Cohesion

Jesus Is White:

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Whitely Orders of Race and Civilization Via Aestheticized Cohesion OR: Specious Aesthetics: Kant’s Program of Categorical White Supremacy

I. Introduction: The Implicit Violence of Enlightenment Thought

In his treatise, Critique of the Power of Judgement, Immanuel Kant presents his “conditions for the possibility of” aesthetic experience and judgement, or those a priori axiomatic circumstances which are prerequisite for aesthetic experience as such. Kant sets out to delineate the “subjective universality” of our aesthetic judgements: he begins with the presumptive axiom of a sensus communis

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experience of the aesthetic, founded on what he believes are the universal modes of aesthetic experience. Kant wishes to establish the foundations and limits of taste and aesthetic judgement, and argues for the cultural value of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience. Kant wants to grant art a “specious autonomy,”

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a quality of independence granted specially to art that allows it to remain separate from the socio-political domain. For Kant, aesthesis (or the experience of the aesthetic) is characterized by its “disinterested,” reserved, and rational mode of perception. The sublime, in contrast to an artistic product, induces in us feelings which Kant claims fuel a positive cultural process: in this experience our ego is reduced and this limitation placed on selfishness allows us to be more moral members of society. So for Kant the aesthetic is disinterested and functionless in relation to art, but, in relation to the sublime, the aesthetic is transcendental (a transcendence limited properly by an objective and bored rationality) and contributes to an altruistic cultural project.

Kant’s categorical assumptions about, and exclusionary prerequisites for, aesthetic experience, however, are not objective across contingency but are in fact alarmingly specific and are moreover implicated in a cultural project of racialization and subsequent (or, better, co-sequent) racial exclusion. In her chapter Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

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, Monique Roelofs introduces a racial problem-space to Kantian aesthetics. She claims that Kant’s mode of aestheticization is part of an exclusionary cultural project of white supremacy, positing that our aesthetic preferences (Kant’s sensus communis) are, rather than universal, in fact grounded in and furthermore perpetuate the naturalization of racial difference and its attendant material circumstances, circumstances which result in unequal distributions of wealth and power, genocidal processes, and the exclusion of racialized subjects from the domains of moral, ethical, and intellectual consideration. As such, Roelofs claims that the project of “civilization” is in part an aesthetic project, a position which dissolves any autonomy granted by Kant or other aestheticians to the aesthetic, beauty, or “art” as such.

Kant claims that the appreciation of beauty, as opposed to our appreciation of pleasure and moral goodness, is “disinterested,” that we appreciate it without attempting to find an instrumental purpose for it or recognizing any pragmatic operation of it. In her essay Rethinking “Aesthetics”: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice, Sylvia Wynter posits that art is always produced in a specific and contingent cultural context, and furthermore that the aesthetic is constitutive of a process of cultural cohesion—that is, like Roelofs, Wynter believes that aesthetics reinforce existing cultural relations and stratification. In other words, the aesthetic is a thing which functions—it is never disinterested, it is never doing nothing, it is never sealed specially hermetic from the operations of socio-cultural cohesion and/or stratification.

This essay will focus on the manner in which aesthetics impacts the socio-politico-cultural production of group (in this case, racial) cohesion/differentiation and the co-sequent oppression and exclusion of marginalized populations, first by exposing Kant’s problematic axiomatic assumptions, and then by exploring how those assumptions and therefore Kant’s aesthetic system are complicit in systems of exclusion, negation, and violence.

II. Taste and Whiteness: Factories of Insensibility

Kant refers to judgements of the aesthetic as “judgements of taste,” and posits the basis of these as subjective feelings which nevertheless ascend to universal, transcendental applicability. This is his sensus communis, the axiomatic assumption that all subjects experience the aesthetic in individual and particular, yet ultimately universal ways in regards to the mode through which we perceive the aesthetic: this mode is ruled by his “conditions for the possibility of” aesthesis as such, or what he refers to as our “taste.”

So our judgements of what is beautiful or sublime, our aesthetic valuations as such, are locked in to our capacity for taste. For Kant, this is not a capacity which everyone shares equally—he writes in his Third Critique, “[W]ithout the development of moral ideas, that which we, prepared by culture, call beautiful will appear merely repellent to the unrefined person” (Kant 440), and “…we say of someone who remains unmoved by that which we judge to be sublime that he has no feeling” (Kant 441). Though Kant recognizes the influence of culture on taste, he ultimately discards the idea that it is always culturally relative (Kant 407), writing “Taste can be called sensus communis with great justice” (Kant 443). So he posits that taste is learned, but still “common sense”—yet under what category of “common”? It is along these lines that Monique Roelofs provides her critique of Kant’s aesthetics.

For Roelofs, “the web of relationships we inhabit with one another and the material world immerses us in fine-grained enmeshments of aesthetic experience and race” (Roelofs 29). In other words, the aesthetic is not innocuous, but rather serves to integrate us into existing structures of power distribution along racial grounds which are concretized aesthetically. She tracks two “dual trajectories” of this phenomenon: aesthetic racialization “(aesthetic stratagems support[ing] racial registers),” and racialized aestheticization “(racial templates support[ing] aesthetic modalities)” (Roelofs 29).

Aesthetic racialization is the process of the racialization of subjects through and via the aesthetic; in the case of Kant, this happens with his sensus communis, when a European norm of “taste”/“judgement” is coded as universal rather than culturally contingent. In his Observations, Kant

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discusses at length the inferiority of Black people’s mental capacities and furthermore their taste, describing it as “coarse,” “vulgar,” and “disagreeable,” among other things (Kant 2 110-111). When the aesthetic thusly become racialized, it becomes part of Roelofs’ “cultural promise”: “Mobilizing aesthetic elements toward white culture goals developed in opposition to blackness, Kant’s relational models issue a promise: they yield the prospect of a white culture that is free from blackness” (Roelofs 30). In other words, as the aesthetic becomes racialized, it sets out on a cultural project of compartmentalization and Eurocentric universalization: White, male sensibility becomes coded as “natural,” and every cultural sensibility outside of this is deemed lesser or as lacking in some essential way—when White aesthetic sensibility becomes codified, Black or other non-White, non-male aesthetic sensibilities become delegitimized. This delegitimization is enforced through cultural norms which become epistemic and thereby compulsory, threatening delinquents with exclusion from moral and intellectual consideration, or even death. Says Roelofs, “Aesthetic racialization rushes through the conduits of relationality as [Kant] conscripts aesthetic passions and exchanges in a project of white culture building that distances blackness” (Roelofs 30). The Enlightenment project of democratization and universalization, therefore, actually breeds an acute exclusivity which renders null all its romantic claims of universal applicability. Blackness becomes dangerous: “Blackness represents an aesthetic threat, imperiling culture” (Roelofs 36). Because the cultural project relies on the enforcement mechanics of the universalization of the white aesthetic sensibility, the presence of a contesting Black aesthetic sensibility must necessarily be an explicit threat to the epistemic order: if Blackness is not delegitimized, the universal structure may become destabilized—the aesthetic functions so as to annihilate all subversion from the outset, and to overdetermine all expressions of Blackness as immediately illegitimate, lacking in refinement, and, in Kant’s vocabulary, as “coarse” and “vulgar.”

Roelofs writes, “Kant devises systems of publicity that assign disparate positions to whites and blacks, organizing planes of relationality and address, of promise and threat, around paths of aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization” (Roelofs 30). When race becomes so determinative and renders such stratification as is found in “ghettoized” communities, our relations with each other become organized in particular ways around the “promise” of the White aesthetic and its dependent “threat” of Blackness, and these relations become solidified through the dual practices of racializing a “universal” aesthetic, and then utilizing that aesthetic to racialize subjects. Racialized aestheticization “inundates relational passageways as [Kant] holds up as aesthetic, schemes of creation, perception, and interaction that advance white[ness], while pronouncing…black[ness] to be uncultivated and lacking in taste” (Roelofs 30). Racialized aestheticization is the process by which “aesthetics”—the academic/critical field of “aesthetics” and aesthetic criticism, the aesthetic mimetic production of tropic representations, and the somatico-phenomenological aesthesis of living life in-the-world—becomes racialized. As Roelofs puts it, “Racialized aestheticization (the racial exclusiveness of taste) fosters aesthetic racialization (the racially exclusive civilized standing generated by way of taste)” (Roelofs 32). Or: when the aesthetic becomes racialized, it generates a vacuumed contingency into which must rush the aestheticization of race. Taste becomes a matter of race once race becomes a matter of taste—“Whiteness, for [Kant], presents an aesthetic promise that blackness withholds; blackness constitutes an aesthetic threat…[Kant] aesthetize[s] whiteness…enlist[ing] the aesthetic in the service of white processes of cultivation and constru[ing] whiteness as an aesthetic achievement” (Roelofs 30). So aversion to Blackness becomes enforced, instinctual, and moreover rewarded—by sidelining Black sensibility, subjects are able to cash in on the cultural promise of the aesthetic and take part in the culture-building project of “civilization.” Whiteness becomes universalized and is abstractly aestheticized to such a degree of extremity that its sinister implications are obscured by vague humanistic calls for unity, democracy, and altruism—discursive gestures which, typical of Enlightenment discursive practices, are always already coded racially and carry with them an implicit and, moreover, systemically necessary, exclusion of and threat against Blackness.

Cultural Whiteness encounters Blackness with unease; it knows that Blackness constitutes a threat to itself—“Taste promises white culture; whiteness promises taste” (Roelofs 36)—it retreats: a white student steps off the path and cuts through the grass so as not to pass by a black student; a white mother yells at her child from the living room to turn off their hip-hop music, and cranks up Lennon’s

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“Imagine,” remembering that single blazing day that she marched in Washington; a cop sees a black man walking and flashes his lights, pulls over, rolls down the window…. As Roelofs says, “Emblems of the aesthetic mushroom across the field of human interaction” (Roelofs 34).

III. Altruism and Aesthetics: The Sublime As a Project of Universalizing Exclusion

Kant is not wholly unaware of something approaching that towards which his critics (Roelofs and Wynter) are indicating—in an extremely immature sense, he recognizes that aesthetics is a civilizing project. Indications of this are found in his Third Critique, in the section containing his meditations on the Sublime. As mentioned in the introduction above, the sublime for Kant unifies us and strengthens our altruistic tendencies:

The sublime is that which “surpasses every measure of the senses” (Kant 433), it is the faculty of the mind attempting to comprehend the infinite. It is a confrontation with the infinite (that which escapes our ability to rationally comprehend or psychically apprehend)—the surplus of awesome sensation overwhelms our capacity to orient our valuations in accord with our usual ego-centricity, faced as we are with the fecundity of an infinity which renders our specific subjectivity irrelevant. In the face of this ego-diffusion, our typically self-oriented mode of valuation is destabilized, and in Kant’s telling we therefore become more open to experiencing a unity with others, more able to empathize, and less able to assemble our typical self-centered means of ignoring the call of the Other, the altruistic instinct.

However, this empathic urge is limited, it does not extend to all. As Kant himself notes, quoted above, one who would not experience the sublime when faced with sublimity “has no feeling.” The limits of our empathic drives are revealed in Kant to be the limits of our own sensibility—we cannot feel-for someone whose feelings we don’t and can’t understand, someone whose lifeworld is ruled by a sensibility to which we have no access—we cannot imagine what we cannot imagine. This barrier is solidified in Kant’s universalization of exclusion, when he moves to make objective a mode of experience that is inherently subjective—if a certain sensibility is made to be universal, then of course we will be blocked from accessing those other modes of life because their attendant sensibilities are from the outset negated. These othered subjects “have no feeling” in an epistemic sense, in the same way that we would say a madman “has no sense”—in other words, the truth-value of these statements is verified with reference to a regime of logic and truth which is a mode of codification that is not objective, total, or ultimate: that is, “feeling” and “sense” are words and concepts which gain coherence only under a specific epistemic regime which exerts itself through the material enforcement of a system of domination and a discursive-symbolic order.

Yet, again, Kant is onto something—he understands implicitly that aesthetic regimes cohere cultural groups in his naïve postulate that his aesthetic regime is universal and produces culture as such. His unforgivable misstep is, of course, his universalization of his own cultural mode of aestheticization—yet treating Kant as an artifact of this cultural cohesion displays Wynter’s thesis: that traditional aesthetics, like that of Kant, has as its imperative “to secure the social order of which it is a function” (Wynter 244).

Sylvia Wynter wants to focus on the mechanisms of social cohesion on the level of biology, tracking neurochemically how aesthetic practices trigger opiate reward systems which somatically proliferate systems of meaning which cohere cultural imaginaries by neurochemically reinforcing our interpretive processes, which in turn govern our identification with our placement in a stratified social situation. She traces this system through biological processes triggered by the experience of aesthetic representations which reinforce and reproduce those patterns of thought and systems of symbolic meaning, which in turn produce and are governed by epistemic “rules” that continue to serve to “lock in” marginalized populations to their material circumstances and genocidally violent environs.

Wynter writes, “‘Human life’ is not…that of a natural organism which exists in a relation of pure continuity with organic modes of life. Rather, human ‘forms of life’ are a third level of existence, which institutes itself in a dual relation of continuity and discontinuity with that of organic life. It is, therefore, hybridly organic and meta-organic (i.e., discursive symbolic)” (Wynter 241). That is, human life differs from other fauna because of how the mechanisms of our cohesion functions; whereas organic life groups itself along specieal lines or in smaller groups along lines of intraspecieal genetic-relatedness, human beings form groups based on discursive and symbolic and therefore “imagined” or “constructed” lines of delineation: “If all purely organic species are bonded and co-speciated on the basis of their degrees of altruism-inducing genetic kin-relatedness (AGKR), then all human population groups are bonded and co-aggregated on the basis of their discursively instituted degrees of altruism-inducing symbolic kin-relatedness (ASKR)” (Wynter 241).

Wynter is concerned with transgressing the culture/nature bifurcation—we are “co-aggregated” into groups according to the instituted rules of particular discursive epistemic regimes which consist of signifying practices which produce “semiotic strings” of physiological reactions which literally code our brains into certain patterns and associations as part of a process which coheres the collective cultural imaginary which constitutes our socialization (our very ability to be socialized) into stratified cultural groups. That is, the cohesion of human groups, of “forms of life,” is instituted by delimiting our interpretive mechanisms in accord with a system of signification which rewards identification with epistemic norms—we are coerced into membership of a group, and that membership alters our lifeworld, affects how we experience and see and live in the world.

Aesthetics, for Wynter, constitutes the mechanism by which these symbolic practices which produce ASKR are instituted: “The…phenomenon of aesthetic is…expression, at the [human] level…of the AGKR that operates at the level of…organic life….Aesthetics and its discursive-semantic practice…by means of whose meaning-signals such inter-altruistic behaviors are stably induced, must be governed by rules…that are analogous to the rules which govern…coherence at the level of organic life” (Wynter 242). Aesthetic practices code our experiential aesthesis of the world around us in a manner which re-routes sensory data into an mechanized organization of experience which serves to increase our sense of identification with our own group, while distancing us from that of other groups.

How exactly does this process work, in Wynter’s telling? In her relentless project of dissolving the culture/nature distinction, Wynter turns to neurochemistry to explain how group cohesion is instituted. She writes, “…the function of…discursive practices is to recode the IRS

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…by conditioning each culture-specific reward system in symbolically coded terms that…induce the…psycho-affective feelings by which social cohesion…is insured. Each order of discourse must…function as the literal Marxian ‘opium of the people’…” (Wynter 247). The aesthetic now has a biological function, impacting the fields of neuroscience, anthrop- and socio-logy, political philosophy, developmental and behavioral psychology, among a vast plethora of others—Wynter is interested in an interdisciplinary approach to aesthetics which dissolves the false borders which cordon off academic “fields” and prevent them from interfacing and interacting. Group cohesion, along racial, regional, class, or gendered lines, operates along these routes of systematization, which are ruled by, in each individual subject, the chemical functioning of the IRS which rewards or punishes behavior, in accord with whether or not the subject adheres to epistemic formulations of “good” or “bad,” symbolic representations of “life” and “death.”

This transpires via the discursive institution of definitions of, and symbolic associations with, “good” and “bad,” “life” and “death,” and punishing or rewarding adherence to these valuated conceptions. A “paradigm of value” is created, which “gives expression to…the governing code by means of which forms of life are instituted and their specific ensemble of behaviors regulated” (Wynter 245). Symbolic “life” is projected as culture, and death as raw nature (Wynter 245)—these are, in traditional aesthetics, immediately racialized: acculturation is represented as White, and raw nature as Black. So the White subject’s treatment of “othered” populations is coordinated by the already-instituted valuation of those individuals, a system of valuation which is implemented by means of the IRS—adherence to White culture and isolation in White sensibility, or positive connotations placed by signifying practices on the representation of symbolic “life” are “positively marked ones that are then able to activate the IRS, thereby triggering its opiate-induced euphoria coefficient” (Wynter 247).

In light of this, an approach to aesthetics in accord with Wynter’s program would consist of a practice of “deciphering,” in which signifying practices are analyzed in terms of their engagement with the “tropic matrix”

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of codification, in terms of how they engage with cohering group formations. The object of knowledge becomes, in this strategy of deciphering, understanding how a given aesthetic artifact or system of aesthetic analysis/aestheticization operates to cohere existing social matrices, how it “discursively institutes ASKR” and perpetuates and naturalizes current organizations of social stratification (Wynter 244).

The connection with the sublime now is two-fold, with the first fold being perhaps more obvious to the reader than the other. This first fold has to do with what we mentioned above, that Kant recognizes the cultural binding power of the aesthetic, or more specifically the sublime. The second fold is implicated in the first in the context of Wynter’s theses—being as it is that this binding power is not universal but culturally specific, 1) what function does the sublime have; that is, how does it operate to trigger opiate-induced euphoria that hums in accord with those practices constituting the cohering ASKR of a group? and 2) how is this mode of cohesion which is promoted by the sublime implicated in a study of how racialized populations get “locked in” to tropic matrices and material circumstances in which they become more susceptible to both state-sanctioned and “vigilante” violence?

Judgements of taste for Kant are universal because they are disinterested: our individual desires aren’t involved in our judgement of aesthetic value. Judgement for Kant is distant and rational, and aesthetic pleasure—or what can be understood as the positive functioning of the IRS—comes from the “free play” between the imagination and the understanding when encountering an aesthetic object. The Sublime is that which one cannot understand—it is the infinity which stretches, the enormity which dwarfs, the totality which stuns and overwhelms. A storm or mountain is sublime; something is sublime when our reason is overwhelmed—this experience grounds one in reason as it is overwhelmed, so that sublimity is not in sublime objects but in our faculty of reason itself. While our reason is overwhelmed, we still understand that the world operates in accord with it, and that the sublime still has a rationality to it: because reason is absolutely and totally encapsulating for Kant, we can understand a storm in the sense that we can reason that it is not in fact infinite even as we are overwhelmed by it.

What is White about this concept may be already clear, but we will elaborate. Firstly, the aspect of disinterestedness and distance with which the aesthetic object is approached is characteristic of the refined respectability of White acculturation: body severed from world, we float distant in awe. Secondly, the sublime overwhelms us; we are borne along, passive and inundated. This form of passive aesthesis is culturally specific—European culture is a culture of spectatorship, a culture which reifies the separation of mind and body and the gulf between self and world. It allows white men to find satisfaction in objectification and disembodiment, cohere their identities around that satisfaction, bond with other white men around this shared sensibility, and disavow those who do not feel inundated with sublimity as hopelessly uncultured, as opposed to variably cultured. In other words, the experience of the Sublime serves in part to produce the cultural norm of European male normativity and furthermore cohere its implicated group members into a cohesive and organic entity.

The “psycho-affective phenomenon of abjection” is a state which can be inhabited by those who are excluded from epistemic “personhood,” those excluded from the universalization of Enlightenment European liberalism. Wynter writes, “This state, which is one of anxiety and is literally experienced as nausea, the desire to…expel oneself, is induced by the inscription of a prohibited sign-complex, i.e, the abject…the exclusion and ostracism of…‘captive populations’ [is] legitimized by the ‘learned discourse’ of the scholastic order of knowledge [e.g., academic studies of aesthetics, especially those which follow from Enlightenment universalizing projects]” (Wynter 255). That is, the value-assignment of “abject” which leads othered populations to become negated as “good” or even as human as such, is instituted via aesthetic signification, via their representation in aesthetic productions, representations which code how a white subject experientially encounters a black subject in the world, and furthermore how a white/black subject encounters themself in the mirror: the white subject finds in their own face a subject (defined in juxtaposition to the abject), and the black subject find in their own face the abject, that which is negated and delegitimized by epistemic signifying practices. Yet, furthermore, this value-assignment of “abject” is instituted also by those “scholastic orders of knowledge,” those academic institutions which produce authoritative interpretations and modalities of thought which in part constitute cultural “knowledge,” as these systems serve the epistemic function of codifying our knowledge and animating it with not only institutional authority but institutional power.

Populations get “locked in” to material circumstances which deprive them of wealth, resources, and power, and leave them susceptible to inhumane violence, via the codification of value-assessments through the neurochemical enforcement of discursively induced systems of meaning and valuation which are in turn instituted via our altruism-inducing symbolic practices, or in other words our aesthetic practices.

IV. Conclusion: Towards a Transvaluation

We have seen how Kant’s system of aestheticization, which unfolds via the mobilization of the dual nodes of racialized aestheticization and aestheticized racialization, is a false universalization which is ultimately part of a cultural project of civilization. His category of “taste” and its accordant exclusionary axioms serve to ideologically and materially unify Whiteness as a cohesive construct which is in opposition to Blackness which it must necessarily negate—indeed, which requires the negation of Blackness in order to construct its intelligibility. This negation in the realm of cultural sensibility leaves Blackness and non-Whiteness devoid of positive value, a phenomenon by which the exclusion, exploitation, and extermination of othered populations becomes possible.

Furthermore, we have seen how Kant’s theory that art lacks function is not only intensely problematic and false, but indicative of the participation of his aesthetic theory and project in a system of signification which renders Blackness not only devoid of value, but abject and wholly negated, an aspecious negation filled with connotations of “badness” (which is the same as raw nature, which for the European is also death). This process utilizes the circuitry of our brains to wire our instincts, assessments, reactions, behaviors, inclinations, desires, etc. in accord with a discursive-symbolic system of aesthetic signification which rewards group identification (obeying its axiomatic value-assignments) while punishing delinquency (disobeying its axiomatic value-assignments). This system radically others populations which deviate in their ‘forms of life,’ their modalities through which meaning is assigned to bodies, concepts, objects, experiences, and sensations through symbolic signifying practices, an othering which in turns “locks in” marginalized populations to the material circumstances of their marginalization in a cyclical process which incessantly codifies experiential aesthesis in accord with a given mode of ASKR, thereby making static these domineering stratifications and ensuring their stagnation and perpetuation.

The project implicit in Wynter’s and Roelofs’ critiques and assessments is a development of a means of aestheticization through aesthetic production and critique which subverts the strict stratifications of subjects into monolithic identity-groups; which acknowledges without naivety the processes by which group formulation is instituted and enforced and seeks to address them so as to subvert the logics of oppression and exclusion which are their byproduct; and which aims to develop a means of instituting discursive-symbolic signifying practices which work to erode those static conditions which bring suffering to human beings, to alleviate the suffering of abjection instituted by these systems, and to induce a transvaluation of values which challenges and subverts epistemic organizations of value-assignment in accord with an evolving series of mobile and nomadic standards of human flourishing.

Works Cited

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgement.

Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime.

Roelofs, Monique. Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions.

Wynter, Sylvia. Rethinking “Aesthetics”: Notes Toward a Deciphering Practice.

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(but was black, in the sense that his historical non-Whiteness posed the aesthetic threat to European revisionism that contemporary Blackness poses to Whiteness’ aesthetic means of cohesion)

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common sense

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Sylvia Wynter. “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice.” (241)

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Excerpted from her book The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic.

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A man who (if he ever met any Black people at all [rarely leaving his hometown and never leaving Prussia]) could only know Black people as slaves or as colonized natives (whose colonization he adamantly justified).

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A known and proven wife-and-child-beater. Furthermore, the song cited is nothing if not a prime example of the romantic and idealistic fiction of altruistic, democratic humanism which itself is a product of and coheres the intelligibility of Whiteness as cultural practice and cultural ideology.

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Internal Reward System

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The matrix of signifying practices which reduces humans to “tropes” in accord with the cultural discursive rules of representation and signification.