- Introduction
Frank Wilderson III presents afropessimism as an “analytic lens that labors as a corrective to Humanist assumptive logic” (Wilderson III, 2020, pg. 228). Afropessimism provides a theoretical lens for understanding Blackness as slaveness that makes Blackness distinct from the types of oppression that are faced by non-Black women, non-Black queer people, non-Black colonial subjects, and the non-Black proletariat. Central to afropessimism is the thesis that Black individuals are blocked from the label of “Humanity,” and the central antagonism is not between White and non-White but between Black and non-Black (Human). In fact, Humanity has a parasitic relationship with Blackness. By exposing all Black people to “natal alienation, general dishonor, and openness to gratuitous violence,” Humanity can ground its own conceptual coherence (Wilderson III, 2021). How is this possible and what kind of praxis might follow from this theoretical lens? In this paper, I attempt to answer that question by using the conceptual tools provided by Robert Brandom’s reading of G.W.F. Hegel in A Spirit of Trust (2019). Brandom reads Hegel as offering an understanding of the ontology of desire, recognition, and mastery that I apply to understanding the relationship between Humanity and Blackness. This is a larger project than this format permits, so I focus my efforts on reconstructing afropessimism with the conceptual tools of Hegelian norms, and seeing what this reading offers for understanding how anti-Blackness supports the creation of a Human identity in non-Blacks. I conclude by drawing out some implications and sites of praxis that this reading of afropessimism allows.
- Brandom’s Hegel
For Brandom, Hegel introduces a “triadic structure of orectic awareness” that he takes to be the ontological structure of agential actions. Everything that is an active agent in the world and not just a piece of the furniture engages in this orectic awareness. The go-to example of this orectic awareness is the relationships of hunger, eating, and food:
Hunger is a desire, a kind of attitude. It immediately impels hungry animals to respond to some objects by treating them as food—that is, by eating them. Food is accordingly a significance that objects can have to animals capable of hunger. It is something things can be for desiring animals. Eating is the activity of practically taking or treating something as food. (Brandom, 2019, pg. 242)
The triadic structure includes adopting a normative or intentional attitude (being hungry), assigning a significance (taking something to be food), and outwardly expressing these internal agential states with an activity (eating food). This orectic awareness is the base requirement for consciousness and is possible for humans as well as non-human animals.
What is distinct about humans is our ability to recognize each other as taking attitudes, and how this recognition affects our own attitudes. Any animal can be hungry and eat food, but only humans (according to this framework) can understand others as also being hungry. To be able to adopt an attitude and assign significance, one must have the authority to do this. Brandom believes that authority is only possible after being recognized as having that authority: “one has authority…only if others take one to have that authority by attributing it…absent others treating one as authoritative, one’s own claim to authority is incomplete” (Brandom, 2019, pg. 286). I like to think of the example of lobsters in prison. There is a story that lobsters were at one time seen as disgusting rats of the sea, and that feeding them to prisoners was considered cruel. If a starving prisoner assigned the significance of food to lobsters, they would be frowned upon. The prison guards might laugh and the other prisoners, if they were not as starved or had a bit more pride still, would not join this odd orectic creature and start treating lobsters as food. The authority of the prisoner to assign things as food worthy of eating when hungry was incomplete. Only when lobsters started being treated as food by the economically and politically advantaged were the norms of lobster eating (that is, the orectic awareness of lobsters as food capable of being eaten when someone is hungry) propagated.
Robust recognition is the circular chain of recognition that allows for full authority. If I take my friend as having the authority to treat things as food, I must recognize whatever he eats as food. This gives him full authority. But, if he similarly recognizes me as having authority over treating things as food, he has the responsibility only to treat things that are food as food. If I reckon that my friend George knows how to pick out food from not-food and he starts trying to chew on rocks, I might rescind the authority. In order for him to be recognized as having authority, he must be recognized by someone who also has authority. He has authority, but also responsibility to use his authority accurately. In prison, if the lobster-eater thinks I’ve got my head on straight for eating bread: so what! He eats lobsters–what could he know about what is food and what is not food? Having authority also means having responsibility to use your authority in a way normatively in line with the person(s) that gave you that authority.
The neat thing about robust recognition is that it cuts both ways. For me to have the authority to recognize someone else as having authority, I must also be recognized as having authority. I can in fact recognize my own authority by recognizing someone else who recognizes me, since by recognizing their authority, I recognize their ability to recognize others. This circular chain of recognition is what makes humans not merely animals. We live in a social circle of recognition, authority, and responsibility. Animals can pick out whatever they want to fulfill their desires, but humans occupy a world of norms and responsibilities that animals cannot take part in. As Hegel puts it: “Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (Hegel, 1807/1979, paragraph 184).
- Human and Slave/Herr und Knecht
For Wilderon’s afropessimism, there can be no robust recognition between the Human and the Slave. That is out of the question. Instead, a different ontological relationship might be in place: the Master and Servant (Herr und Knecht). This relationship is totalizing in that it asserts itself fully inside the Herr and the Knecht: “this is a practical normative conception that understands the [Herr] as a locus of pure independence, authority without responsibility, and the [Knecht] as a locus of pure dependence, responsibility without authority” (Brandom, 2019, pg. 327). What the Herr takes as food is what the Knecht must take as food, and whatever the Knecht takes as food is only food if the Herr assents. This relationship entails a sort of solipsism: the Herr “confronts a world consisting of what for it are only objects, not other subjects” (Brandom, 2019, pg. 332).
These forms are ontologically opposed in a unique way. Compared to two predators fighting over the same carcass (or two peoples fighting over the same land): the parties engaged in a struggle over mastery fight so that “everything be in itself just whatever it is for the desirer. This desire cannot be satisfied by wresting a carcass from a rival and feasting on it. It requires the subjection of the rival” (Brandom, 2019, pg. 333). We are beginning to see the parallels with the afropessimist thesis. Wilderson argues that while the colonist and the colonial subject struggle over land, the Black and the Human have no material crux to frame their struggle around. Instead, their relationship is total and encompassing the ontological categories of their existence. The Human desires the Black to be the Slave; that is the Human struggles so that they can have authority over the Black without responsibility – it is a battle of self conception. The slavemaster whips so that his desires become authoritative over the slave, the slave revolts so that he can have authority over his own desires. They are incompatible “de jure, necessarily, in principle, and universally…that is why the parties must struggle” (Brandom, 2019, pg. 334).
But there is an ontological irony at the heart of the Herr. In victory, the Herr treats the vanquished as a non-normative object and not a normative subject. The Knecht cannot recognize authority since they are just a vessel of the authority of the Herr. This is supposed to allow the Herr to “realize his self-conception and be in himself what he is for himself…The problem of the other as subject is solved by turning him into an object” (Brandom, 2019, pg. 339). This “victory” becomes a non-victory since the opposing subject that the Herr was engaged in battle with is no longer a subject and no longer ontologically able to even enter a relationship with the Herr. The Herr can only be a Herr if they are recognized as Herr by the Knecht. But if the Knecht is not a subject and can perform no recognition, the Herr cannot truly be recognized as having authority. It is impossible to have authority without responsibility, and violently objectifying another subject to gain authority without responsibility is a self-defeating venture.
This irony can be seen in the slave narrative of Harriet Jacobs and her dealings with her master, Dr. Flint. Dr. Flint, though married, had frequently desired his slaves sexually and was the “father of eleven slaves” (Jacobs, 1861/1988, pg. 38). However, his treatment of Harriet was different. He seems to have desired her not just as an object of sexual gratification, but as a subject of reciprocal affection. He desires her not “like a negro” (Jacobs, 1861/1988, pg. 39), but like a human: he wants her to want him. However, she is still his slave and their relationship still abides by the ontology of Herr and Knecht. Her desires cannot be her own. When she vocally rebukes his advances, he is within his right to ignore the rebukes and gratify himself anyway. But, because he wants reciprocation and not just mastery, he is trapped in a stalled cycle of recognition. He wants the desire/love that comes with robust recognition, but because Harriet is his slave and Knecht, that is impossible. Her being a Knecht means she has no authority and cannot recognize his authority over her desires nor instantiate her own desires. Dr. Flint is left inert, forever desiring her desire, but blind to the fact that it is impossible.
- Blackness in Context
We are getting close to the afropessimist thesis, but there is still more to go. It is not just the case that the Herr/Knecht allegory plays out in Black life, but, for Wilderson: “Blackness is conterminous with Slaveness” (Wilderson III, 2020, 102) The twisted desires of Dr. Flint toward Harriet could’ve played out between an Israeli and a Palestinian, a boss and a worker, or a man and his wife. But there is something distinctive about the relationship between the Black and the Human that is more than just the Knecht and Herr.
To find this missing piece, the first thing to consider is the socio-historical context of Blackness, especially within the United States. From the 17th century to the 19th century, chattel slavery was the primary kind of life available to Black residents of the Americas. In Christina Sharpe’s phrase, Black people even today live in “the wake” of the slave ship. The White Europeans imported Black slaves as industrial potential. They existed to provide economic and political power to their owners, and they were always subject to being killed or “tossed overboard” (Sharpe, 2016, pg. 36). This was epitomized in the southern plantations. The imported African slaves were “bred like horses or sheep ” until the “389,000…became four million enslaved African-Americans” (Ballinger, 2015). For economic and political power, the Black “race” living in the United States today was created in the Antebellum South. In that brutal history, the ontology of Herr/Knecht was woven into every interaction that a Black person had. Wilderson states that this fact has not changed: “every single scene in America is played out on an antebellum stage” (Wilderson, 2020, pg. 88).
Christina Sharpe identifies the “Weather” (Sharpe, 2016, pg.102) as the environment that Black people find themselves in the Wake of the slave ship. It is a Weather of anti-Blackness. The varied patterns of wind, rain, sun, storm, and calm of the 19th century southern United States, the 20th century Jim Crow, and the 21st century Mediterranean all share the texture of anti-Blackness. We can translate the Weather as the ontology of Herr/Knecht that determines the interaction of every Black and non-Black person. The objectification of the Knecht is ready to reduce every Black person to another slave to be whipped, kid to be shot, or migrant to be left to drown. The Knecht cannot have their own desires, and whatever the Herr decides is good enough. Under the gaze of the eternal Herr, the Weather sets the stage for Black death.
This also brings us to the unique narrative of temporality that Wilderson associates with Blackness. Humans can participate in a variety of narratives that follow the structure of equilibrium/disequilibrium/redemption. That is, Humans can participate in a variety of norms that travel from recognition to loss to reclamation of recognition. Blacks are not allowed this. There is only the narrative of the Knecht. There is no past recognition that can be lost and reclaimed, only the eternal position of the Knecht.
- The Creation of Humanity
Here, I depart from Wilderson and continue using this account to investigate what this Hegelian social ontology would mean for the Human or Herr. There is still remaining tension with Wilderson’s account, but I am taking Wilderson’s intention of afropessimism to be a useful theoretical lens to understand the relationship between the Black and the Human. I have brought afropessimism onto a parallel level of abstraction with the social ontology of norms provided by Brandom in his reconstruction of Hegel. I continue with the thread laid by Hegel and follow the conceptual path to understand Humanity through an afropessimist lens. Understanding what use Hegel is for understanding Blackness is a different question and would be worthy of attention elsewhere. For the rest of this paper, I focus on what Hegel offers for understanding Humanness.
The Herr/Knecht allegory binds two subjects. Inside the social ontological heart of the Master is an impossible desire that cannot be met. There is a psychoanalytic effect this social ontology can have on people: trauma for the Servant, but trauma too for the Master. Dr. Flint wasted away his family’s wealth and status funding an obsession with Harriet and trying to express his desire for her desire. What happens to Humanity when their relationship to Blackness is toxic and features an unquenchable desire?
The wealth that Dr. Flint wasted finding Harriet was created by the generations of slaves bought, sold, and raised by Dr. Flint and his racial caste. The norms of afropessimism–the Herr/Knecht social ontology that sets the racial weather of the United States and much of the globe–are undergirded by the economic and political capital that was provided by chattel slavery. Brandom’s Hegel provides some conceptual tools to understand how the norms of Herr/Knecht are played out on top of the wealth created by the Knecht for the Herr.
To start to answer this question, consider the story of Josephine, Stella, and the landlord from Afropessimism (2020). Josephine is what we might call a woke northerner who works in a university studying nuclear physics. Josephine wants Stella, who is Black, to be her friend, and she wants Stella to want that friendship. She barges in at any hour and dutifully ignores the increasingly serious complaints about privacy. Josephine sees Stella as a Knecht: Josephine has authority over who Stella wants as a friend, so Stella cannot seriously protest Josephine’s intrusions. When Stella publicly embarrasses Josephine and asserts her own authority, Josephine, the Herr, is faced with a dilemma. If Stella can reject Josephine, then Josephine is not the Herr and Stella is not the Knecht – a conclusion Josephine cannot accept. Instead, she engages in the “struggle for self conception” that Hegel describes and that has been fought time and time again between the White Master and Black Slave. She finds her position reinforced through the white property master, Cody: “Josephine and Cody had never been friends… But the bond they formed against Stella in the courtyard that day was formed spontaneously and with the ease of mental telepathy. Cody’s feet guided him to stand next to Josephine” (Wilderson, 2020, pg. 85). Together, they use Josephine’s position at the university to deliver radiation poisoning to Stella’s apartment. The gratuitous violence inflicted upon Stella and her child is done as a group activity for Cody and Josephine.
But this beyond mere ally-ship in struggle: there is a positive “bond” formed between the Herrs as they inflict gratuitous violence. Wilderson identifies this bond with the sadism shared between the plantation owning family:
“One thing that makes this sadism life-affirming and communal (as opposed to destructive and individual) is the fact that it is a family affair. In his book [Northup, 1853/2014], Solomon Northup recalls episodes of Patsey’s beatings with details that are crucial and missing from the film. ‘Mistress [Mary] Epps,’ he writes, ‘stood on the piazza among her children gazing on the scene with an air of heartless satisfaction.’” (Wilderson, 2020, pgs. 92-93)
A bond is formed between the White family as they violently dominate their Knecht/Slave. This pattern is repeated in the history of lynchings: men, women, and children would gather from miles away to partake in the violent domination of a Knecht/Slave. As James Cone writes: “Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the [lynching]. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs” (Cone, 2011, Chapter 1). What the victim was accused of is not important–their real crime was being Black. The punishment of the Black body allowed the White town to come together in joy. But how? How can a scene of such gratuitous violence also be the scene of community and love among the perpetrators?
The Brandom-Hegelian framework can provide one explanation. The dyadic relationship between Herr and Knecht can never be fulfilled. What the Herr wants from the Knecht – authority without responsibility – is ontologically impossible for Hegel. The un-recognition of the Knecht can be a stressor for the Herr, as seen in the case of Dr. Flint. But while there can be no fulfillment between Herr and Knecht, there can be robust recognition between Herr and Herr. Every Herr/Human takes part in the struggle for domination over the Knecht/Slave. I bring back the triadic structure of orectic awareness, but with anti-Black domination as the attitude instead of hunger. Herr/Humans can recognize each other as having authority over their Knecht/Slaves, and in this way achieve a form of robust recognition. It might not be fully satisfying to simply mutilate a Black man, but if it is done with the community in a shared act of violence, the co-recognition is an antidote to the un-recognition. This type of robust recognition that is shared by the slave-owning family and the lynching community is what Wilderson says unites Humanity: “What civil society wants/needs from Black people is far more essential, far more fundamental than land and profits. What civil society needs from Black people is confirmation of Human existence” (Wilderson, 2020, pg. 219). Hegel offers for afropessimism a social ontological framework for understanding how the robust recognition of Herr’s engagement in gratuitous violence is in fact a result of the relationship between European slave owners and African slaves. In order to sustain the violence necessary for chattel slavery on a massive scale, the norms of Humanity are continually reaffirmed through acts of gratuitous violence against Slaves.
Let us take stock. Starting with the afropessimist thesis as the desideratum for a Hegelian social ontology, we can make sense of the relationship between the African slave and American slave owner as a struggle of Mastery in the Hegelian sense. The total economic exploitation of the chattel caste of African slaves created the Black race in the United States. The past culture and personhood of the imported Africans were wiped away and a Black identity coextensive with slavery and Knecht-hood was stamped. No matter if a non-Black had nothing to do with the plantation, the Black can only ever play the role of some form of Knecht. The allegory of the Herr/Knecht shows how this relationship creates an ironic tension within the Herr, and a robust recognition was found between the Humans who shared this tension. Blackness mutated from the mere Knecht-hood that the colonized, proletarian, or queer might share toward something with greater ontological significance for Humans. That the Black is a Knecht is needed for the non-Black to recognize each other as Human. The domination of the colonized or proletariat is only necessary for material and economic exploitation; the domination of Black people is necessary for non-Black people to see themselves as Human. Every non-Black is allowed into the possibility of robust recognition with other non-Blacks over the violent domination of their shared Knecht/Slave. This is the crucial aspect of afropessimism, and it can be reconstructed with the tools of Hegelian attitudes and norms.
- Concluding Remarks
I will now sketch some implications of this reading. For one, what type of praxis would be desired in response to this social ontological structure? George Yancy desires some kind of “de worlding” of Whiteness (Yancy, 2015). An anti-racist should seek to make the structures of Whiteness unconcealed for Whites, so that they may be able to see the violence towards non-Whites and Blacks that come from their racial hierarchy. However, for the afropessimist, the conceptual target cannot just be Whiteness, but Humanness. Humanness, is necessarily funded by the violence it inflicts on Blackness. There is no Humanity without anti-Black violence. If there were no anti-Black violence, there could be no co-recognition of Humanity among Humans. The category would fall apart. Un-concealing this violence, like Yancy might desire, would not cause the Human/White to reject this violence, since that would mean rejecting themself. De-worlding is not enough. The afropessimist social ontology qua Hegel was created for and with the economic and social power that chattel slavery provided. The norms cannot be changed by the destruction of the norms, but instead with the destruction of the economic and political pillars those norms play out on.
There is another conclusion that thinking of afropessimism in these terms allows: What happens during co-recognition between the Knechts/Slaves? Like any good model, the Brandom Hegelian account obscures some features to focus on others. This account tries to explain the relationships between Herr and Knecht and Herr and Herr but is not able to offer resources for understanding the relationship between Knecht and Knecht. This is because the Knecht is taken to be an empty vessel for the Herr to impose their attitudes. If robust recognition occurs between two Knechts, then the allegory of Herr and Knecht has no weight since the allegory allows no robust recognition to be possible for the Knecht. This ontological space exists outside the explanatory capacity of the afropessimist Hegelian norms described here. Following this line of thought to explore what is possible in this space – along the lines Sharpe’s “wake work” – escapes some of the central social ontological structures of Humanness and Blackness.
Ultimately, the possibility of a world where the afropessimist thesis doesn’t hold remains only a possibility. We can try to replace or de-world our racial norms, but norms can only play out on top of a material basis. While the material basis of racial capitalism remains, afropessimism will not go away. However, new material conditions are necessary but not sufficient; a new social ontology must also be dreamt and built. Understanding what to leave behind, including the afropessimist norms of Humanness, is imperative.
References
Ballinger, Lee 2015. “Slavery is the Root of all Evil.” CounterPunch, 10.
Brandom, Robert. 2019. A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Harvard University Press
Cone, James H. 2011. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Orbis Books.
Hegel, Georg W. F. 1807/1979. Phenomenology of Spirit (A.V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Jacobs, Harriet. 1861/1988. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Oxford University Press.
Northup, Solomon. 1853/2014. 12 Years a Slave Graymalkin Media.
Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and being Duke University Press.
Wilderson III, Frank. 2020. Afropessimism. W. W. Norton & Company.
Wilderson III, Frank. 2021. “Black Existence is a Flat Line of Historical Stillness.” V/A – Various Artists.
Yancy, George. 2015, December 24. “Dear White America.” The New York Times.
