#last tag about my writing only there for organizing purposes not to lay claim to their scholarship

[fatehbaz]

Who gets to be human? On Black geographies, damned people living in inhospitable places, other ways of knowing and being, and racist legacy of European academic epistemologies.

---

---

The idea of the plantation is migratory. [...] Past colonial encounters created material and imaginative geographies that reified global segregations through “damning” the spaces long occupied by Man's human others. Here, damning can be understood in two interlocking ways: as a fencing in and as a condemnation of racial-sexual difference. The uninhabitable - in particular, the landmasses occupied by those who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were unimaginable, both spatially and corporeally - is the geographic (non)location through which the plantation emerged. From Caliban's “uninhabited” island in Shakespeare's The Tempest, to the regions within Africa identified as too hot to be livable, the landmasses deemed uninhabitable presented a geographic predicament upon “discovery.” [...] [A] "new symbolic construct of race," which coincided with post-1492 colonial arrangements, organized much of the world according to a racial logic. [...] The colonial enactment of geographic knowledge mapped “a normal way of life” through measuring different degrees of humanness and attaching different versions of the human to different places. […] [I]n the sites of toxicity, environmental decay, pollution […] inhabited by impoverished communities […] the [current] geographies of the racial other are emptied out of life precisely because the historical constitution of these geographies has cast them as lands of no one. So in our present moment, some live in the unlivable, and to live in the unlivable condemns the geographies of marginalized to death over and over again. Life, then, is extracted from particular regions […]. If we believe that the city [the prison, the resort, other "postcolonial spaces"] is the commercial expression of the plantation and its marginalized masses, and that the plantation is a persistent but ugly blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles, Wynter's essay asks that we seek out secretive histories […]. [R]acial violence haunts, [...] the struggles we face, intellectually, are a continuation of plantation narratives that dichotimize geographies into us/them and hide secretive histories that undo the teleological [...] underpinnings of [colonial, imperial, modern] spatiality.

Text by: Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe, Volume 17, Number 3, November 2013 (No. 42), pages 1-15. [Emphasis mine.]

---

---

Registering the marine world as central to the making of modernity - from slave ships and sea-borne empires to container logistics and the industrialized extraction of its resources (from fish to fossil fuels) - we encounter the constant of colonialism in the haunting racism that produces the violent grammar of inhospitality, today etched on the body of the contemporary migrant. [...] This is to interrupt and rework Occidental historiography, sociology, and philosophy, and to puncture their faith in rendering the world transparent to their will. […] Promoting the instability of critical language is to take responsibility for what Achille Mbembe calls the becoming-black of the world: where the production of subjection provokes alternative knowledge, practices, and politics […]. Today the increasing use of drones in the Mediterranean as part of the technology of governance marks the latest abandonment of social responsibility to the bio-surveillance of unwanted bodies and discarded lives. Smart borders take migrants far below the category of “bare life,” [...] and extends the racial profiling written into the historical premises that betray their deep incubation in the refusal to register the languages and limits of the white myths [...]. From the Black Atlantic to the Black Mediterranean: seas of dispossession and unbelonging have constantly demonstrated the political, juridical, and onto-epistemological limits of modernity. They promote a constant critique of the epistemic foundations of Western [colonial "liberalism"]. Those on the water, the wretched of the sea, the damned [...], who cannot source their identity in the territory of the nation-state, are without rights. They have no social [...] validity. [...] Yet they simultaneously [...] exist, persist, and resist. [...] The algorithm sputters in the dark while cut-up, bricolage, collage, and montage work the critical gaps [...]. The archives unwind to expose other computations of time and further folds in space: the promise of foreign cartographies [...].

Text by: Iain Chambers. A section by Chambers in the essay co-authored by Tiziana Terranova and Iain Chambers. “Technology, Postcoloniality, and the Mediterranean.” e-flux Journal Issue #123. December 2021. [Emphasis mine.]

---

---

[T]he framing of the inhumanities forces a reckoning with the humanist liberal subject that orders the humanities: an invisible and indivisible white subject position [...]. In Césaire’s (2000 [1972]) Discourse on Colonialism, he suggested that “at the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism [...]”. In another searing critique of [White, European, liberal/colonial] humanism, Fanon (1961) tied the unrealized figure of a true humanism to the earth, as a wretched counterpoint, whereby the inhuman residues of the colonial project abide as discarded matter […]. Those blackened colonial afterlives in “modernity’s project of unfreedom” (Walcott 2014, 94) are still very much present in the political geologies of climate change vulnerabilities, the wasting effects of racial capitalism, and neo-extractivist economies […]. The narrative arc of humanism, Scott (2000) suggested in conversation with Wynter, is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age humanist script [...]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of man [as universal concept] was underscored by the racial division of life and nonlife. […] In its simplest iteration, there are forms of life on one side and nonlife on the other; nonlife that is constituted through death, and more recently in Mbembe and Povinelli’s writing through forms of social death, exhaustion, and extinguishment, wherein nonlife emerges as a zone of governance. The gravitational pull that centers these divisions between life and nonlife is the human subject as it is conceived through a Western normative frame [...]. As new forms of racialized beings were articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century paleontology in the context of colonialism, geology was also articulating new origins of the earth, as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). [...] Historically, this normative sphere of humanism was racist and specifically antiblack, and without challenging that history, it remains so, every time the universal or human is invoked. Some of the greatest challenges, of course, came from anticolonial thinkers struggling to make sense of their painful histories in their fullest terms, such as Fanon (1959, 1961), Césaire, Glissant, C. L. R. James and Wynter. As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of humanism that underlies it” (154). For Wynter (2000), “what is called the West [...] begins with the founding of post-1492 Caribbean” (152). Wynter challenged the geographical imaginary that the Americas and Caribbean are somehow an epistemological outside to Western knowledge […].

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020. [Emphasis mine.]

---

---

But what becomes of the native-occupied “uninhabitable” zones is a geo-racial reorganization. The “new symbolic construct of race,” which coincided with post-1492 colonial arrangements, was spatially organized according to a new […] logic. […] That is, the uninhabitable […] is underscored by racial and sexual differences. To transform the [land] […], and make this transformation profitable, the land must become a site of racial-sexual regulation, a geography that maps “a normal way of life” […] This is expressed through uneven geographies: spatial arrangements [...]. The inhabitability [...] also produces [...] forms of geographic nonexistence, which differ from what was assumed was "not there." [...] [W]hat Edouard Glissant describes as the "real but long unnoticed" places [...]: cultural sharings, new poetics, new ways of being [...]. Those who occupy the spaces of Otherness are always already encountering space and therefore articulate how genres or modes of humanness are intimately connected to where we/they are ontologically as well as geographically. To return to an earlier discussion, spaces of Otherness are “palpitating with life.” [...]

Text by: Katherine McKittrick. “Demonic Grounds: Sylvia Wynter.” Demonic Grounds: Black Women and The Cartographies of Struggle. 2006. [Emphasis mine.]

[prettywordsyouleft]

Heartless

Summary: Hyungwon had been collecting the hearts of those for as long as he remembered. But none of them sounded nearly as beautiful as yours did.

Pairing: Chae Hyungwon x reader

Genre: demon au / dark / angst / bittersweet / romance

Warnings: death

A/N: Welcome to my second Demonology story for the week. I’ve had this idea for months, in fact probably close to a year now. It’s pretty dark and out of character for my usual fluffy self but since this collab is called Frightful October, I always try to include at least one story that’s more suited to the title than my others. Still, it was a challenge to write, so I do hope you will give this a chance and read it.

Word count: 3958

[Frightful October Masterlist]

He watched the human from within the shadows, his gaze unaffected despite the brutal killing happening in the alleyway. It wasn’t Hyungwon’s first time seeing such a sight, and it wouldn’t be his last either. His job was simply to clean up the mess left behind. He sighed as the woman’s cries slowed, the life soon seeping away from her face. It was a difficult moment for Hyungwon, his eyes upon her chest as he watched the movement slow and then stilled entirely. Her heart would no longer beat.

It was now useless to him.

However, the man who stood above her, exhilarated and exhausted from his achievement had plenty of beats left in his heart. It seemed almost a shame that Hyungwon couldn’t reach out to save the one that now lay dormant within her chest. But he didn’t focus on her for too long, his job was tied to time. If he moved too soon, he wouldn’t harvest it at the right moment and if he waited too long, he would sacrifice the chance he had. He waited in the shadows for only a moment more before he leapt out, taking away what the man had stolen from the woman below him.

It was another job well done and Hyungwon could afford a couple of days rest. He glanced around the darkened cellar, staring at the specimens he had collected over the years. Some of the hearts belonged to cruel and disgusting monsters, those he had no problem with culling from existence. They were heartless before he removed the organ anyway. He glanced at the row of smaller hearts and moved closer to them. He fingered the side of a small jar sadly, looking at how broken this heart was. The child had been hooked up to so many machines with no chance of survival. Those hearts were harder to harvest. Taking life from a child still felt wrong no matter how many times he had done so. Even if he knew it would end their suffering.

Hyungwon had no choice though. He was bound to his role for eternity, to serve those who he had crossed when he was young and reckless. A heart paid a hefty price, and much like with anything in life, all had a different price tag hanging above them. This broken heart he cherished so much would sell for much lower than the one he had harvested this week.

But they would all sell. The underworld was a dark and twisted land, with entities that reaped luxuries such as beating hearts. Supply and demand was still such a thing down here and he was no different from the others out there following orders and bringing forth what their masters required. Capitalism at it’s finest.

It wasn’t a role Hyungwon gained any true satisfaction out of. Sure, for monsters like the serial killer he now held the heart of, there was a fleeting moment of purpose. He knew he had saved lives by removing the man from the world above. To rid another shadow from that realm meant he had done more than just harvest a heart. But what good were his efforts overall? One killer gone didn’t rid the world of tragedy. More would cause destruction. Humans were a funny sort of race. They claimed to be the best and yet they were far worse than the animal kingdom. At least, with animals, the cycle of life made sense. Humans did as they pleased, and didn’t care for the consequences.

Their hearts all had some sin on them once their innocent years had passed them by.

Hyungwon’s role didn’t focus on some sort of heroism though. He wasn’t just removing those who did bad things from existence. Hearts came in all forms and it was his job to collect them all. From the morbidly sick to the perfectly healthy, he had done them all. Old or young, they all had a price.

Much like his mistakes had.

Putting the new heart onto his desk, he sighed, taking a seat behind it. Steepling his long fingers together, he stared down at the new order to prepare for after his days of rest.

Next, he would be collecting your heart.

Following along quietly, Hyungwon watched you intently. Each order only had five days to observe the subject and then make the best execution for optimal harvest. In the past, he had been sloppy as he learned the ways of being a Heartless, and lost one too many hearts in the process. It was all a fine art, the removal much like a masterpiece. One bad brushstroke could ruin an entire piece and heart culling was much the same. To gain the highest bid was reliant on how well the heart was still beating. Hyungwon needed to know you first before he could decipher in which way he would remove your heart.

Learning about you didn’t immediately tell him why your heart had been requested. Not that he questioned his orders now. When he was new to all of this, he would ask questions. Why did this perfectly healthy human have to die? What was so special about them over the many others out there with more plausible reasons? The truth was there was no logic involved. He didn’t need to know why he had to take your heart, even if there was no obvious answer to it. From the average viewer, you seemed like a decent human being. A college student with a bright future ahead. You were friendly yet focused, and a small part of him was envious of your ability to get everything done with so much grace. You irked him over the first couple of days of observation, living a life that had been so far from his own when he was once alive. It made him eager to find his best plan forward so he could be done with you.

And so, a day earlier than usual, Hyungwon was lurking in the shadows as you walked home from your late-night studying session, preparing to take what he was expected to from you. He knew the quicker he was in approach to you, the seamless it would be. You were naturally curious and had a lot to say to people you met during each day. If you started talking, it wouldn’t take you long to realise he wasn’t from this world at all. Coming up behind you, he reached out for his bounty, readying himself for your heart. He listened out for its beating sound, soon stunned by it.

This was why you had been chosen.

It sounded like a symphony, beating to its own tune, unlike other hearts. He had heard so many over the years but nothing quite as beautiful as yours. This heart would pay top dollar. It would cause fights among the elite in the market. It was incredibly rare, and Hyungwon was entirely overwhelmed by it.

Shaking off his reverie when he realised the sound had become distant from your continued walking, he dashed after you, grabbing you immediately. There was no scream emitted from how quick he had been. Your body slumped in his arms, now unconscious, your heart thumping faster momentarily before settling back down. Even heightened, it was like music to his ears. It pained him to reach for his tools.

And he wavered far too long above you to take what he was meant to.

Why should he take your heart? One day, it would become a prized trophy stored in a library of some wicked monster. Or worse, lay upon a table fit for a King and devoured until the very last beat. No, Hyungwon couldn’t bear the thought that your heart might stop beating one day. His hand trembled as he struggled with his inner dialogue. Could he take this heart and hide it as his own? Somehow mask the sound so no one would ever discover his deceit? He had never been so desperate to keep a heart for his own.

Then again, he had never heard such beauty before either.

Whilst struggling through his turmoil, he wasn’t nearly as aware as he should be. Eyes opened before him and he blinked rapidly, cursing that you had woken up. The plan was broken now. You had seen him and he waited for your scream, terror from what you saw before him.

Instead, you frowned, lifting your hand to his face and flinching when you connected with it. He was amazed himself, no human had ever reached out for him like this. Especially when he still held his tools towards your chest. His grip faltered though, when you spoke.

“I’ve seen you before.”

“What?”

“In a dream that I’ve dreamed my whole life. It’s you. I can’t believe it!”

Hyungwon wondered if the knock to your head he had given you had caused you to hallucinate. Sure, he looked every part of a human on the outside. But he had long left that part of himself behind. Could there be someone out there that you had mistaken him for? Yet your smile was genuine. So much so that he stopped thinking you were playing at a ploy of escape.

“Are you sure?” he asked and you nodded instantly. “Then you must know-”

“From another lifetime,” you murmured and he frowned, staring at you more intently. Had he once known you when he was alive? Only hours ago he had been done with your existence, jealous and frustrated with how amazing you were. Now, Hyungwon worried just how much he would do for you.

It was in that moment that he knew you both weren’t alone anymore, and without thinking much about it, he hastily returned his tools to his pockets, scooping you up and fled from the shadows you had both spent far too long within.

Not that taking you back to his lair was a smart choice either. You were still alive, heart beating just fine and yet completely out of place. Hyungwon cringed when he realised what he had done, though he was desperate to know more of what you said. If you knew him, then maybe you were worth the risk. Not handing over your heart next week for inspection was definitely not something he had anticipated. Right now though, he was unsure of everything about you.

He wished your order had gone to someone else.

However, with the sounds of your beating heart from across the room, he knew he couldn’t handle knowing this heart could belong in the hands of another. He was protective of it already, and since it was attached to you, his gaze softened.

You smiled. “I guess decorating the place isn’t really up on your list of things to do, huh?”

His room was simply furnished, a bed along one wall, dresser and desk against the other. A wash basin and towel was by the door and that was all Hyungwon ever used this room for. He spent far too much of his hours Earthside or in his cellar to have a pressing need for this room to be more personal. Still, he found himself awkward as you took in his basic belongings, your brows furrowed together. You then turned to him.

“Were you going to kill me?”

In any other setting, Hyungwon would have tried to placate you. But you were so direct with him that he felt no need to be anything but that with you. “Yes.”

“Because?” you wondered and Hyungwon watched as you moved closer. He didn’t answer and you smiled. “Did I do something wrong?”

“I have by bringing you here.”

“Alive, might you add,” you commented, pursing your lips together as he nodded.

“Shouldn’t you be scared right now?”

“I am, to a point. But I’m with you and I know you’ll protect me.”

He chuckled darkly. “I was about to kill you, remember?”

“But you didn’t,” you retorted and he sighed, you had him there. “And you won’t, right?”

“I’m ordered to, so don’t trust me. I could do it at any stage.”

You nodded softly, lips still pursed. “Only you this time.”

“Only me… what?”

“Only you can kill me this time. Don’t let anyone else.”

Hyungwon was confused. Had he killed you before? Surely, he would know a soul he had crossed previously. How did you even know him? He craved your answers but he also knew the more he uncovered, the easier it would be to throw himself in the firing line for you.

And you somehow knew this also. Moving dangerously close to him, you looked up briefly as you gently rearranged the collar of his shirt. “I know you’ll keep me safe.”

Shoving you off, he shook his head. “I told you not to trust me.”

He had left you and your confusing words alone in his room as he came down to the cellar. Among the beating of hearts, he began to relax, though the sound was nothing like yours on its own. It muddled his perception, listening out for it from the room above despite all those around him that he could more easily listen to.

Somehow, the even beating of your heart sent him off to sleep. He dreamed for the first time in decades, seeing a world that was so far attached from him. Dancing around as a child, laughing and giggling with his friends.

With you.

He had known you then. Or at least, the you of the past. Hyungwon had grown up with you, a dear friend and then lover to each other. As the dream continued, he almost could tell the story before it reached the next point. He knew of this past well. The pivotal moment in his life where he had killed for the first time. Shaking from head to toe as he dropped the knife he held, now covered in blood, Hyungwon heard your whimpering behind him.

“Is the monster dead?” you asked, coming out from where he had hid you. You wrapped your arms around him as he slumped, comforting words all that he heard.

Turns out though, if you kill the Heartless, you have to become one.

Jolting up from his dreams before it got to the first heart he was assigned to, he stared up at you, realising you had been calling out his name. He searched your face, wondering if you knew that he had killed you back then too. You smiled, reaching out for his hand and he snapped back, shaking his head.

“You shouldn’t be down here. I specifically told you to wait upstairs.”

“Aren’t you hungry?” you wondered and before he could answer, his stomach did. Giggling, you pointed to the plate before him. “I figured if I used some of the supplies in your kitchen, I should make for two. I hope you don’t mind. Not that you really had anything in there.”

He hadn’t shared a meal since he last had with you. Did you know that as well? You smiled over at him again, gesturing for him to eat up before it got cold.

Hyungwon decided he would take heed of your request.

He would protect you from his kind once more.

Days passed and he grew agitated. He had unnecessarily killed, something that he had only done twice during his job. He had sought out the most beautiful sounding heart that he could find and without much thought, taken it to replace the one he was protecting. It had been accepted as yours without any question and for now, everything was stable. You were still at his side and no one seemed to realise his deceit. He would do it again if he had to just to ensure your safety, though you were far from pleased about it.

“Someone lost a life because of me?”

“She had a medical condition. If anything, I helped her escape a prolonged death.”

You shook your head, tears falling in streams. “She had the choice to do so much more though, Hyungwon. Please don’t kill others. Kill me if you have to.”

“You and I both know I already have once,” he replied darkly, stalking away from you. The nightmares haunted him now, his first order as a newly turned demon was to take the heart his former comrade had been sent to do that he had killed instead. He had no idea what a heart should sound like back then and was too frazzled by the task that he failed to even harvest it correctly and you were balancing between life and death. Instead, his trainer had, and he had been left with no option but to watch on hopelessly as you died. Hyungwon believed he was stronger now, one of the elite Heartless. Still, he had always followed orders. Out of fear in the beginning, and because it was all his existence meant over time. Observe, cull, and sell over and over. He had truly believed he had little heart left himself now.

Until you.

You were making him inconsistent, sending him crazy from fear all over again. He couldn’t just disappear with you, no matter how much he wanted to. His departure would only show that of his deception and put you in further danger. It would only be time before someone found you though, especially since you never listened to him.

“I told you to stay put, why did you follow me here?!” he hissed as you appeared over his shoulder as he watched his next order from afar. You sighed heavily.

“I’m not in a jar yet so you can’t hold me captive.”

“I’m not putting you in one either,” he grumbled, grabbing you by the shoulders and marching you backwards. Within a blink of an eye, you were both back in his bedroom and you threw off his grip, shaking your head rapidly.

“Is my heart that valuable?”

Hyungwon avoided answering. “If I don’t harvest that heart by tomorrow-”

“Take mine instead.”

“No.”

“She’s healthy!”

“So many are!” he exclaimed, rubbing at his face. “Healthy, young, beautiful, a lot going for them, there’s so many of them!”

“What happens if you don’t do your orders, will they kill you then?”

“If that were the case, do you think I’d still be here?”

“Then how did you manage to kill the one who attacked us?” you wondered and Hyungwon slumped on his bed, putting his head in his hands. He felt you sit down beside him, leaning into his side. He had avoided this conversation for so long now but for you, it was overdue. “You protected me.”

“I still am.”

“How did you kill him?”

Hyungwon groaned, looking up at you desperately. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? A fellow demon cannot kill me but a mere human could. You could.”

“And then my fate is to become Heartless as well?”

“You will have no such fate.”

“There is no escape for us? No happy ending?” you asked forlornly, pouting when you stopped talking. Of course, you knew there wasn’t and Hyungwon’s silence confirmed your suspicions. You began to cry and he held you tightly as you did so, rocking you both through the realisation.

The love he held once for you had returned and he would lose it again.

Eventually, darkness encased the room, long after the tears had subsided. You had both laid on his bed and were still curled up in one another, comforted by this rare moment of stillness. Hyungwon was savouring every part there was to you this time. The way you breathed in and out, the softness of your skin, the shape of your eyes. Everything was imprinted in his mind, no longer ashamed to see you within it. He had pushed the memory of you out of his thoughts long ago, unable to comprehend his rise and fall that connected with you.

However, the longer you stared back at him during the soft moonlit hours together, the easier he saw your renewed determination. Hyungwon watched you carefully, running his hand repeatedly through your hair. “What are you thinking of?”

“Our escape together.”

“I told you we can’t do such a thing. One of us will die trying. And that will be me.”

You poked his chest with your index finger. “Then will you rest knowing that they will take my heart without your protection?”

He swallowed roughly, emotions rising to the surface. “I can’t kill you again.”

“I will.”

Sitting up, he looked down at you, confused. You smiled, reaching up for his jawline affectionately. It still amazed him how natural it seemed for you to love him in this lifetime. Moving so you were level with him, your lips found his softly, like a breeze brushing across his mouth momentarily. You then smiled at him, placing your other hand on his face. “I will do it all.”

“I don’t understand your suggestion, Y/N.”

“You no longer want this existence, right?”

He nodded distantly, he never had. But he was bound to this cruel fate forever.

“And it takes a human to kill you, right? I’ll do it.”

“You will not-”

“Before then, I will need some ingredients. Do you ever remember the plays we read when were younger, Hyungwon? Romeo and Juliet?”

“You’ll poison yourself?”

“Will we be free then, together?” you hoped and he stared at you intently. His gaze then slipped to your chest, the heart he was protecting thumping beautifully within. It pained him to even consider hearing the last beat it ever took again.

And yet, it gave him hope to know that it would be a choice you both had as well.

Neither of you discussed the plan for the rest of the night. You explored one another in ways you had never connected in the past, Hyungwon relishing in the sound of your heart experiencing the ultimate high.

When morning came, the mood between you was loving and bright. You got up, ate your final meal together, smiling the entire time. He hadn’t felt this light since he was a child. Eventually, you got organised with what you needed. The heart he was meant to collect was still beating out there somewhere and he knew it wouldn’t be long until someone came for it.

He wouldn’t let them find yours instead.

“How do you know we’ll meet again?” he asked you softly as you prepared your last drink of this lifetime, the purple colour convincing him of its potency.

You stopped stirring it, turning to stretch up and peck his lips. “Because I found you in this lifetime again. Our fate is connected.”

“I can’t argue that,” he admitted with a smile and then wrapped his arms around you from behind, your body rocking back into his chest. “Though I worry that we won’t end up in the same place together. I have so much sin on these hands.”

You took them in your own, linking your fingers together firmly. “I won’t let your hand go, not even in death.”

He knew you meant it, and it was one of the things he focused on as he felt the life slipping from him hours later. That and the beating of your heart. It was erratic now, given once you had pierced his chest you then reached for the bottle and downed all the contents quickly. Slowly, he heard the beating skip, starting and stopping, in its final symphony. He closed his eyes when you slumped against him, hands still connected.

There was no pain, even when he no longer could hear your heartbeat. Because he knew he didn’t need to collect your heart whilst it was beating anymore.

It was already his.

_________________

All rights reserved © prettywordsyouleft

[MONSTA X Masterlist] | [Main Masterlist] | [Request Guidelines]

[whitehotharlots]

It’s impossible to square the circle of #BelieveWomen

Let’s think back a month ago, to what turned out to be a pivotal moment in the 2020 campaign: Elizabeth Warren’s bizarre claim that Bernie told her a woman could not win the presidency.

The dishonesty of the attack on Sanders was so manifest that the takes barely need to be re-enunciated: her campaign was stalling so she lied about Sanders, hoping to re-focus media attention on herself while riding the most cynical aspects of MeToo into a poll bounce. Bernie faced an accusation, and since the only properly woke response to an accusation is immediate and uncritical acceptance, he was going to be dinged no matter what happened afterward. (Only, hilariously, he was not dinged. It was actually Liz whose campaign was ruined by the stunt. And this signals, I hope to god, an end to this bullshit). 

This is all very basic. Good writers have already covered it. You don’t need me to rehash it any further.

I would like to talk, however, about how this highlights larger and more fundamental problems within the #BelieveWomen/#MeToo cinematic universe--problems that must be confronted if the people who seriously believe in the goals of these movements wish to accomplish anything other than securing book deals for a handful of shitty writers. My framing device here will be a concept introduced by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, in their 20-year-old critique of identity politics. This has to do with the split between hard “identity,” a fixed and firm conceptualization of identity that carries immense rhetorical weight but does not hold up to theoretical scrutiny, and soft “identity,” which views identities as protean and constructed--a more theoretically sound concept that has very little purchase in everyday discourse.

To start with an aside: it’s important to note that the malignant strains of identity politics presently infesting liberalism have been around for decades. It’s just that they didn’t have much utility until the Obama years--when it became clear that the promises of Hope and Change really just meant more means testing, more austerity, mass deportation, the wanton destruction of the planet, and an acceleration of our Forever Wars. The Democratic Party had to shift gears. In response to a crushing defeat in the 2010 midterms, their media apparatus decided to aggressively pursue identitarianism. This came with two benefits: 1) It allowed them to differentiate themselves from Republicans and motivate supporters while still sharing 98% of the GOP’s policy positions (this is where we get the logic about it being, like, so important for kids to see Black Panther); and 2) it provided an easy means of discrediting any material politics (“if we broke up the banks tomorrow, would that create more trans CEOs?”). Very little has changed within cultural studies-based understandings of identity over the last 20 years, as will be demonstrated from our review of Brubaker and Cooper’s piece. 

Brubaker and Cooper posit that

 “Identity,” is both a category of practice and a category of analysis. As a category of practice, it is used by ‘lay’ actors in some (not all!) everyday settings to make sense of themselves, of their activities, of what they share with, and how they differ from, others. It is also used by political entrepreneurs to persuade people to understand themselves, their interests, and their predicaments in a certain way, to persuade certain people that they are (for certain purposes) ‘identical’ with one another and at the same time different from others, and to organize and justify collective action along certain lines. (4-5)

As a category of practice, identity is morally neutral--its goodness or badness depends upon what ends its evocation is utilized toward. The trouble is when this category of practice is spun into a foundation of analysis, at which point the conception of identity becomes reified, made to appear as sort of an inatlertable given.  “We should,” the authors note “avoid unintentionally reproducing or reinforcing such reification by uncritically adopting categories of practice as categories of analysis” (5). 

Now, you may be fine with the notion that identity markers are un-transcendable, that they serve as the primary or perhaps even exclusive determining factor of a person’s being, worth, or moral stature. That’s what’s called an essentialist point of view. There’s trouble, though, because essentialism is (at least nominally) rejected within most bodies of academic thought. The more prevailing frame is called constructivism, which posits (correctly, I feel) that there’s nothing magical or inevitable about identity groupings, that they are instead social constructs and can therefore eventually be transcended even if their present-day effects are very real. This, the authors note, points to the fundamental contradiction of how identity is actually understood:

We often find an uneasy amalgam of constructivist language and essentialist argumentation. This is not a matter of intellectual sloppiness. Rather, it reflects the dual orientation of many academic identitarians as both analysts and protagonists of identity politics. It reflects the tension between the constructivist language that is required by academic correctness and the foundationalist or essentialist message that is required if appeals to ‘identity’ are to be effective in practice. (6)

Basically, “identity” has been formulated in such a way that it can be utilized in a essentialist sense even while its purveyors issue rote denials of its essentialism--like how someone can shamelessly use the #VoteLikeBlackWomen tag while claiming to not regard black women as ideologically monolithic. Or, more generally, by asserting that social problems can only be addressed by listening to Oppressed Group X or Y, (which is done most commonly as a response to left-materialist suggestions for change), as if all members of those groups would understand each issue identically and would suggest the same response. This is a dishonest and incoherent approach to politics, but it prevails because of its utility--that is, because it poses no real threat to existing power structures.

Here we find a rhetorical move that is foundational to contemporary identity politics: leaning on popular but theoretically indefensible understandings of terms and slogans while claiming that we actually understand these terms and slogans in obscure ways that are unpopular and rhetorically weak. Simply put: this is a lie. 

Brubaker and Cooper go on to explain that “weak or soft conceptions of identity are routinely packaged with standard qualifiers indicating that identity is multiple, unstable, in flux, contingent, fragmented, constructed, negotiated, and so on. These qualifiers have become so familiar--indeed obligatory--in recent years that one reads (and writes) them virtually automatically. They risk becoming mere place-holders, gestures signaling a stance rather than words conveying a meaning” (11). And the parallels here to Intersectionality are manifest--like how class is perfunctorily nodded toward but never substantially engaged with, or how what is purported as a means of understanding a multitude of identity positions is, in practice, a victimhood hierarchy that’s used to determine the (in)validity of people’s actions and observations. As long as we keep allowing people to hide within this double-conceptualization, we will continue promulgating an understanding of social problems that contradicts itself so fully that it cannot lead to any actionable analysis. 

This is fairly obvious now, in 2020, with identitarians having taken control over our liberal institutions and failing miserably at enacting any but the most superficial of changes. But in 2000, Brubaker and Cooper pointed out the simple fact that “weak conceptions of identity may be too weak to do useful theoretical work. In their concern to cleanse the term of its theoretically disreputable ‘hard’ connotations, in their insistence that identities are multiple, malleable, fluid, and so on, soft identitarians leave us with a term so infinitely elastic as to be incapable of performing serious analytical work” (11). And so they wondered, naturally, ““What is gained, analytically, by labeling any experience and public representation of any tie, role, network, etc. as an identity” (12)?

I find the answer pretty simple: leaning on an intellectually dishonest understanding of identity allows writers to cosplay as radicals without giving up any comfort, status, or power. Liberal leadership (by which I mean, those with power in academic and media spaces, as well as the center-right mainstream of the contemporary Democratic party) embraces this charade, as they realize it poses no threat of disruption or upheaval. Conservatives (Republicans, and more generally those in power in business and finance sectors, as well as the military), however, despise this, and are ideologically unaware enough that they regard it as an actual threat, and react to it with physical and fiscal violence (mass shootings are domestic terrorism are conspicuous examples, but selective austerity is much more commonplace and causes more harm on the whole). But now, most terrifyingly, a whole generation of young humanists have found themselves inculcated into this belief system but utterly unable to interrogate its foundational contradiction. They don’t realize it’s a grift. 

This is why the left-leaning criticisms of Warren’s’ campaign stunt fell so flat, even when they were being issued by writers with whom I usually agree. Warren was accused of cynically misappropriating the #BelieveWomen mantra. Writers explained that, actually, everyone knows that we shouldn’t seriously believe every claim by every woman, that the hashtag is instead meant to encourage people to simply be more empathetic and less dismissive to women who claim to have suffered abuse. This is the same fundamentally dishonest contradiction we find in the split between hard and soft identities. The hashtag isn’t #BeSomewhatLessIncredulous. It’s #BelieveWomen. It a blunt mantra, a demand so intense and absolute that no one could possibly take it literally--that it sometimes comes packaged with some post-facto qualifiers does not change this; it just makes its purveyors seem dishonest.

Warren’s stunt failed because most people could see through it. We recognize self-contradiction as easily as we recognize cynicism and hypocrisy, and unless someone has an awful lot of charm we tend to react negatively to all of those traits. A movement founded on such a flimsy edifice is never going to attract outsiders and is never going to achieve anything of value. It’ll elevate a small number of people and make everyone else even less likely to engage with social justice going forward.