Skin, Flesh, and Affect: Toward the Conceptualization of and Inquiry With/in Racializing Affect

• In Event: Educational Research at the Intersection of Contemporary Black Studies and Posthumanism: Risks, Possibilities, and Purpose

Abstract

1. Purposes: Speaking on the ontopower of preemption, Massumi questions “What are the existential effects of the body having to assume, at the level of its activated flesh, one with its becoming, the rightness of alert never having to be in error?” (2015, 203; emphasis my own). I italicize “flesh” to pull it into focus here. While Massumi’s conceptualization of the flesh is based on its sensorial relation to the autonomic nervous system, his reference to flesh also provides an opening to engage with the sociopolitical flesh that Sylvia Wynter, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Hortense Spillers conceptualize. While Massumi argues that affect is pre-symbolic and pre-discursive, there is an important distinction that must be made between the skin and the flesh and this distinction is key to theorizing the racialized matter in the affective flesh of the body.
Like Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi’s conceptualization of affect is non-representational and, thus, affect precedes and exceeds social constructions of difference such as race and gender: coming into account through backward formation. As Massumi states, “Gender, race, and sexual orientation also emerge and back-form their reality. Passage precedes construction. But construction does effectively back-form its reality. Grids happen. So social and cultural determinations feed back into the process from which they arose” (2002, 8). As such, for Massumi, affect also exceeds the discursive formation of difference. While affect is not pre-determined by the social, symbolic, or discursive, Massumi states, “The field of emergence is not presocial. It is open-endedly social” (9). In other words, until its actualization in particular social grids or formations, affect is indeterminately (autonomously) social. Schools, curriculum, assessment practices, are all a part of these grids. Taking educational institutions as the setting, this paper asks whether it is plausible then that sociopolitical and racializing affective forces may already be incorporated or materially shaped as the body and as part of the passage of an event? If so, how might the skin and the flesh be key in this process?
2. Theoretical frameworks: Brian Massumi’s theories about affect have been a foundational influence on contemporary posthuman thought. In this paper I reconceptualize Massumi’s articulation of affect in relation to the paraontology of Blackness. To do so, I draw on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Hortense Spillers, Michelle Stephens, and Fred Moten.
3-4. Modes of inquiry and Data Sources: This paper will provide a close reading of Brian Massumi’s conceptualization of race and affect and diffractively read radical Black thought through the flesh toward developing what I have characterized as racializing affect.
5. Substantiated conclusions: Racializing affects move recursively through science, technology, matter and the corporeal; they have no beginning point or ending point. Specific implications of this condition for educational research design will be presented.
6. Scholarly significance of the work: There is a need for new directions in study of raciality, racializing processes, and racism in education that builds on new developments in Black studies and posthumanist philosophy. This paper offers such a contribution.

Author

• Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author