After Race, After Justice, After History

The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2009) Vol. XLVII

After Race, After Justice, After History

Paul C. Taylor Temple University

You may have noticed that I find myself preoccupied with afters. This preoccupation is first of all an accident of biography, a consequence of recent opportunities to consider in writing the proliferation of post talk in and around race theory and Africana thought. Prominent figures have borrowed the post from postmodernism and used it to develop lines on postblack art, postsoul culture, postcivil rights politics, postcolonial conditions, postindustrial cities, and more besides. Post-talk is in its way an Oedipal idiom: it enacts a space-clearing gesture, as Professor Appiah says, marking the distance between a somehow complete past and a still-unfolding present. But it also marks the incompleteness and indefiniteness of the present, and its consequent dependence on the past to find its meaning and specify its horizons. The post in postsoul, we might say, is the post in posterity, if we understand posterity in the manner recommended not just by Oedipus but also by Macbeth and Belovedas a thing haunted by ghosts and relics. If post-talk is simultaneously about historical novelty, historic debts, and inchoate presents, then the use of this temporal rhetoric calls for reflection. We have to ask: Just what are the prospects for this new and still-forming present? How do the ghosts of the past establish and exert their hold over us? And what can we do to exorcise them? Questions like these have woven themselves tightly into the intellectual chatter around Senator Barack Obamas presidential campaign, in, for example, discussions about his relationship to the civil rights movement, the meaning of his campaign for black politics, and the possibility that he has established or revealed the postracial condition of U.S. culture. Similar questions also arise in and around race theory and Africana thought, especially in connection with expressive culture and the arts. The line I found myself developing in response to these questions led me to think of afters in a second way. I am and may always have been a postanalytic philosopher, in a sense of the expression that rose to prominence in or around the late 1980s. This should not be a scandalous thought: we are all, most of us, postanalytic now, especially at gatherings like this. But I have recently started to think that it might be of some use to declare 25

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this allegiance in relation to the preoccupations of my work and to develop its requirements with care. I received the invitation to this gathering with these afters in mind, which is presumably what led me to the phrases in my title. My burden today will be to work out what it means to be after race, after justice, and after history, or, better, to work out what it means that these phrases came to me as I thought about the conference theme. Working this out will be a matter less of solving than of groping. The present under consideration here is still in the making and struggles to take shape in the shadow of epochal but waning historical landmarks. (Call these Bertrand Russell and Ronald Reagan.) Under conditions like that, it strikes me as an evasion to pretend that what follows will deduce conclusions from firm premises or that it will begin to construct the arch of a philosophic system. I have no theorems, though what I have instead will take some time to say.

2.
According to a study of the postanalytic turn in the philosophy of education, the postanalytic shift does not involve an abandonment of the analysts regard for rigor, logic, and language, [or] a loss of attention to key analytic concerns such as rationality, epistemology, and critical thinking. Instead, it involves [a] continued interest in post-positivist philosophy of science, a relatively new appreciation of literary theory, and a renewed respect for normative philosophy.1 The author of the study goes on to add that philosophy after analysis turns away from obsessively analyzing language and logic and uses the tools developed for those purposes to explore, as Dewey would nearly have said, the real problems of real people. The foregoing account uncritically accepts a fair bit of the more self-serving analytic self-representations, but we can let that pass. Still, we might revise this picture somewhat, to include, say, a broader engagement with literature itself, and not just with literary theory; a richer sense of history and of the history of the discipline; and a subordination of conceptual analysis to empirical, even experimental, inquiry. But the basic outlines are clear enough, and plausible. In light of this picture, we can say that a great deal of socalled analytic philosophy and most of analytic race theory is inherently postanalytic. One way to be assertively and vocally postanalytic is to invoke neopragmatist resources. And one of the more promising ways of doing that today is to embrace the normative turn of pragmatisms third wave, in the work of people like Cheryl Misak, Jeffrey Stout, and Robert Talisse.2

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3.
One of the more interesting applications of the new pragmatism is in political philosophy, where Robert Talisse and others have used it to rethink the prospects of liberalism, deliberative democracy, and republicanism. In Democracy After Liberalism and elsewhere, Talisse distinguishes liberal philosophical theory from liberal democratic politics and argues that the theory cannot support the politics in the way that liberal philosophers have hoped. He argues further that to give up the quest for support, in the manner, say, of Richard Rorty, is to concede too much, and to underestimate the importance of having some ground for evaluation. (This is the core of the third wave movementcomplaining of second wave dalliances with relativism and searching for firmer normative grounding than the brute facts of current practice.) So Talisse argues that liberal political theory, with its twin aspirations to democracy and to neutrality, is hopeless, and some variety of perfectionist republicanism must take its place. In deference to the demands of pluralism, this perfectionism must be very thin; the formative politics, as Sandel puts it, of the republicanism we need must insist on virtues that no one can reasonably reject. These requirements lead Talisse to Peirces pragmatism and to an epistemic perfectionism that insists only on the virtues associated with truth-seeking. Once we grant this move, as Talisse thinks we must, the rest follows: truth flourishes more readily under certain social, political, and cultural conditions. Specifically, it requires the conditions of what we might call liberal democracy, except that weve replaced the liberal commitment to neutrality with a commitment to cultivate the epistemic virtues. I mention Talisses argument here because I wish to endorse the outline of his approach, while rejecting its argument and complicating its starting point. The argument has its merits, among which I count its ingenuity and elegance. But it also has problems, among which I count its indifference to context. Attempts at justification do their work, if they do, in response to specific requests, and in specific settings. Talisses Peircean democrat offers what appears to be a general justification, but only after weve considered the internal relations between thinking, believing, inquiry, and democracy, and after weve wrestled with the thought that this chain of implications is meant to provide some leverage in an argument with a fascist, or with Bill OReillyonly after all of that do we discover that this argument is meant less to persuade the antidemocrat, which it will typically not do, than to shore up the confidence with which we already-persuaded democrats endorse and defend our arrangements to each other. Having gone in search of something more satisfying than Rortys this is our way, theyve come back 27

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with Rortys fiat transposed into a polyglot dialect of Rawls and Habermas. For these reasons and others, some of which Ive begun to discuss elsewhere, I cannot adopt the full Peircean line. The failure of Talisses argument aside, the contours of the discussion are instructive. Distinguishing liberal theory from liberal politics enables us to approach the central question that liberalism poses to anyone with interests in emancipatory social theory. How do the practices connect with the stories that swirl around, emerge from, and feed into the practices? I say stories where Talisse speaks of liberal theory and philosophy because this is the point at which the setup needs elaboration. The point ought not to be just that liberal theory doesnt properly ground liberal democratic practices and institutions but that the theory and the institutions are both rooted in a deeper, not expressly theoretic set of meanings and associationscall this the liberal social imaginaryand that the work of this third aspect of liberalism also requires scrutiny. I have been speaking quite generally of liberalism, as if there were a single thing that answers to that name. Im inclined to say with Jeff Stout that we are in general better served by avoiding talk of liberalism as such, and by talking instead about particular arrangements, practices, and institutions. Liberalism as such will have something to do with the view that, as Sandel puts it, government should be neutral as to conceptions of the good life, in order to respect persons as free and independent selves, capable of choosing their own ends.3 This is a view that prizes the priority and autonomy of individuals, and that enshrines these values in a state that interferes with individuals only to keep them from interfering with each other.4 But these general values and commitments mean little until they are, forgive the expression, operationalized. The need to operationalize general values is precisely what makes the liberal social imaginary an important topic. A social imaginary, in Charles Taylors sense, is the way in which many of our fellows imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows. It comprises the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. 5 This vision of social life is carried in images, stories, and legends rather than in theorems and postulates, which is to say that it is not a social theory: it is widely shared, rather than the possession of a small minority of intellectual or cultural elites.6 On this approach, liberalism is a collection of tropes and images: it is a way of speaking and thinking and envisioning that frames, positions, and inflects our arguments about justice, the right, and the good. This will not be news to any of you, but I suspect it would be if youd not strayed from mainstream political philosophy to read in your various critical and emancipatory traditions. Ill develop 28

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this suspicion into the following hypothesis and invite anyone with better relations with the mainstream to correct me: the quest for justification is to the study of the social imaginary as ideal theory is to nonideal theory. And as Charles Mills and others have convincingly argued, insisting on inquiry into the ideal allows us to obscureor repressthe robust interconnections of the nonideal with the conceptualization and implementation of the ideal. (This for me adds poignancy to the failure of third wave pragmatism: to refuse the nonideal just is to enact Deweys quest for certainty, and as such ought to be an easy target.) Because of this obscurantism, and because of its status as the disciplinary ideology, it falls to the philosophic equivalents of area studies to theorize the nonideal. This effectively ghettoizes and buries it, as it becomes the special province of Africana thought, feminist theory, queer studies, and the like, leaving the rest of the field to continue as before. What is at stake for me here is the liberal imaginarys tendency to shape liberal democratic practice while routinely helping itself to images and myths about human kinds. As many people have argued, the pursuit of liberal justice is in practice hemmed in by the normalization and naturalization of entrenched, identity-based privileges. To put it the way Lou Outlaw might: the individual at the heart of liberal theory has since the beginning been a white, heterosexual, middle class (or propertied) man, and the institutions have been cut to fit the outline of his figure. The liberal imaginarys normal expectations are this mans expectations; and these expectations have become normal against a background of unjust takings and exclusions. The imaginary provides the resources and cover stories for justifying these expectations, with ideas about individuality, character, fairness, equality, and the like. When someone not this hegemonic man enters the picture, these norms provide the language with which to brand any deviation from the status quo as unjust. I am waving at considerations that have been comprehensively developed by others, including by other contributors to this conference. For example, the point here is closely related to the work McGary and Lawson have done to rethink notions like freedom and resistance in light of philosophic resources from the Africana intellectual tradition. It is perhaps more closely related to the mild puzzlement that they and others have expressed at the need to suggest that enslaved persons might have something interesting to say about freedom and resistance. It is, though, perhaps most closely related to arguments made in continental traditions, drawing on the likes of Lacan and Foucault. The point is that we might spend less time contemplating the failures of liberal theory and more considering the efficacy with which liberal mythologies have constrained the theory. It is that we might spend less time parsing 29

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the norms that govern liberal practice and that provide the subject matter for liberal theory, and spend more time exploring the values and virtues that recommend and sustain a critical orientation to the liberal imaginary.

4.
One way to make these ideas about the liberal imaginary more concrete is to trace their relations to the increasingly fashionable idea that the United States has achieved a postracial or postracist condition. There are superficial and critical ways to take both parts of this idea, and the critical mode is in both cases a commentary on the superficial one. This will be a place to consider more carefully the meaning of Senator Obamas campaign. The superficial idea of the postracist condition envisions a society that has left behind the old ethical errors of white supremacist racism. The superficial idea of the postracial condition envisions a society that has left race-thinking behind. Ill think of this idea as an implication of or corollary to the superficial postracist vision. On this approach race-thinking is principally a resource for racism, or the beginnings of it. This is the ideology of colorblindness, according to which distinguishing by race just is discriminating, in the pejorative and objectionable sense. This discrimination is unjust and antiliberal because of its refusal to treat individuals as individuals. So getting beyond racism means, or requires, getting beyond race. On a more critical orientation to these ideas, the postracist vision is an obfuscatory and ideological self-image. It is a way for a society to represent itself, to itself, as having left white supremacy behind, while at the same time, as Robin Weigman puts it, enacting this disaffiliation rhetorically rather than politically. 7 This means, among other things, diminishing the ideological reach of white supremacy, by promoting ideologies of diversity, integration, inclusion, and multiculturalism, while also expanding the material scope of white privilegeusing facially race-neutral but discursively race-saturated arguments about such things as immigration, welfare reform, affirmative action, and crime. The function of this idea is to make whiteness innocent and ahistorical, in the sense that the conflation of multiculturalism with justice obscures the relationships between race and social location. In the grip of this idea we wipe the historical slate cleanracism is so yesterday , after alland treat social stratification as a function of the differential cultivation of social and human capital.8 Youll have guessed already where I mean to go with this. The superficial idea of postracism is clearly wrong, in my view; but the deeper, critical use of the idea, call it a therapeutic use, is just as clearly right. And we can see all of this at work in the phenomenon of Barack Obama. For the postracist, postracialist 30

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thinker, Obamas successes are evidence that racial reasoning is on the decline and that racist prejudices are on their deathbed. For the critic of postracist ideology, who subjects this optimistic orientation to critique, the rhetoric around Obamas successes reveals the work of the postracist idea. Because he has succeeded to the extent that he has, whites can congratulate themselves, dust off their hands, and declare the work of racial reconciliation complete. Obama in fact becomes a vehicle for this psychocultural alchemy: he succeeds, and becomes attractive to many people, one might argue, because the public symbol he has become does the same ideological work that welfare and crime do. He is in this way, again, as a public figure, the successor to Willie Horton and Sister Souljah, or, perhaps better, to the nonexistent black kidnapper that Susan Smith invented to take the blame for her own willingness to murder her children. He is another excuse for the hegemonic demonizationby people of all colors, for thats what hegemony means in this contextof those black and brown people who have not managed to escape poverty, underemployment, and the rest. None of this is new or innovative, so far, though it does serve to put me on record with regard to these issues. These claims are in a sense subject to the test of empirical inquiry, as there is a fact of the matter about why the people who prefer Obama do so. But what empirical testing means in this context is itself an interesting question. It is a fact that people will give one response or another if asked why they prefer Obama; but it is also a fact that there are all sorts of contexts in which we do not know our own minds, even, perhaps especially, when we think we do. This is one of the arguments for therapy, and psychoanalysis, and, in the forms that I prize, cultural criticism. In light of this fact, and in light of the distinctive and proven relevance of this fact to racial formation processes, insisting on the empirical question here cannot have the effect it might otherwise have. This is not a brief for a poll, but for an ethical posture that continuously scrutinizes the relationships between the self, the will, and the environing social context.

5.
The ethical posture I have in mind will be familiar. It has featured prominently in emancipatory thought, from Biko to Baraka, as well as in the line of classic philosophicalor antiphilosophicalreflection that runs from Marx and Emerson (through Nietzsche and Freud) to Foucault and Butler. I have little of value to add to these canonical statements of the position, so I will simply gesture at the overall picture they describe, to fix ideas. One way to begin is by further refining the complaint against ideal theory in political philosophy. Except for some 31

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underappreciated moments in Hobbes and Rousseau, the political theory I grew up with renders the political realm in a dishearteningly two-dimensional manner. For one thing, the citizensubjects in this picture have little depth. Their choices are their choices, and the factors that condition their choices remain largely unnoticed. This approach to politics leaves the systematic social processes of individual will-formation to run in the background, overlooked until were moved to defend freedom of thought or complain about propaganda. To make matters worse, instead of depicting power as something that flows in and through individuals, constituting and enabling them as well as constraining them, this picture makes power out to be a baton in a relay race, or in a scuffle with the police. Someone has it (the people, the prince, the state, or whomever) and this someone confers it on, takes it from, or uses it against someone else. This vision of the political realm, and of political actors, is profoundly inadequate to any postsupremacist society. Postsupremacist societies are social formations officially in recovery (which is not yet to say that this recovery is effective, or even sincere) from prolonged bouts of systematic, identity-based, de jure oppression. (I use the language of social formations here to dispel the appearance of central planning in what Im about to say. Formations are complex and dynamic but still shaped by coherent trends. Coherence, not central planning, is what Im after.) These formations have distributed the benefits and burdens of social cooperation by appeal to notions about human kinds or types, a fact that by itself ought to trigger a richer, more three-dimensional approach to the political. Identity-based oppressions work explicitly through the will: they encourage and constrain individuals to form their wills, their self-concepts, and their life-plans in accordance with the horizons established by the reigning philosophical anthropology. They posit norms about proper human comportment and aspiration, and they maneuver to have individuals subjectively endorse these norms, using everything from public policy to popular culture as mechanisms of promulgation and enforcement. Supremacist formations make these norms second nature, by making social identities into repositories of subconscious and unconscious psychic resources. As a result, if a society is to be at all effective when it forswears identity-based privilege, responsible moral agents must excavate and confront the fixations, assumptions, desires, and biases that typically, as weve said, run in the background. In light of all this, postsupremacist societies need a vision of the political that entails a perfectionist ethic. The perfectionism I have in mind is not the political view that rejects neutralist liberalism, or the potentially elitist view that privileges the cultivation of some fixed set of virtues or traits. 9 This perfectionism insists on the cultivation of character, in just the way 32

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that has in recent years led to the study of virtue theory in all the major approaches to ethics. But it also insists on a critical orientation to the sociocultural forces that buffet and inform us as we attend to our characters. There are many ways to trace the philosophic pedigree of the key ideas here: from Marx by way of Gramsci, from Nietzsche by way of Foucault (and Foucault by way of Butler), from Freud by way of Lacan, from Emerson by way of Cavell. But all of these figures argue, in their different ways, that social forces work on and through individuals, that this work usually escapes notice, and that, as a result, human excellence requires self-excavation not just to compare first- and second-order volitions but in relation to the social. Butler, writing on Foucaults behalf, describes this self-excavation as selftransformation in relation to a rule of conduct.10 (George Clinton described it by saying, free your mind.) Taken to its most interesting conclusion, this sort of perfectionismcall it genealogicalleads in the direction of an aesthetic ethics, which approaches self-creation the way an artist approaches the blank canvas or empty page. On this view, the truly ethical life will be creative and imaginative, thereby unstiffening ones sense of the world and opening new horizons of possibility. We will have occasion in a moment to return to this sort of language. For now I mention this approach to bracket it, and the problems that come with it. Aesthetic ethics, and genealogical ethics more generally, tends to inspire questions about justification. Why choose one life over another, this line of questioning goes, if its just an aesthetic choice? Doesnt this just give up the work of ethics, which is supposed to tell us not whats more attractive but whats better, or good, or right? A postsupremacist perfectionism neednt take on these questionsat least, not right away. The burden of this kind of ethics is to deepen a form of normative inquiry that is already underway, and turn it back on the self. It assumes the validity of certain existing norms about interpersonal conduct and seeks to root out the unconscious and subconscious obstacles to fully implementing these norms in ones own life. I often find questions about justification ill-formed and diagnose them as expressions of the quest for certainty, or as indirect ways of doing some other kind of philosophic work. But an ethical engagement with the postsupremacist condition begins after the point at which those questions would get traction. It begins, in this sense, after justice, by presupposing a wide array of pretty definite norms and then seeking to interpret and apply them, as it were, therapeutically.

6.
Postsupremacist perfectionism neednt involve a thoroughgoing aesthetic ethics, but it should attend to the aesthetic in some fashion. Ill start to conclude by considering a couple of possible 33

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connections in this vein. The first will return us to the prospect of a postracial condition, and the second will explore a proposal at the intersection of ethical and aesthetic theory as a resource for postsupremacist ethics.

6.1 After Blackness

The idea of making ones life a postsupremacist work of art puts me in mind of the idea of postblackness. Thelma Golden, the curator at the Studio Museum of Harlem, was the first person to articulate this idea in the form that I know. She uses it in connection with U.S. artists who count as black, in the familiar and obvious ways, but who use their work to complicate this easy identification.11 Having been born, for the most part, after the civil rights movement, postblack artists experience race differently from their predecessors. Very broadly speaking, they have achieved some critical distance from the forms of black countermodernity that we associate with the soul era. They have come to this in part as witnesses and heirs to the uneven consolidation of the civil rights movement in mainstream U.S. practices and policies. So positioned, as inhabitants of a postsoul and postcivil rights worldI promise not to indulge this post-talk any more than necessarythey have lost the soul eras confidence in stable and prescriptive black identities and cultures and the civil rights eras confidence in stable and clear lines of race-based political affiliation. As a consequence, they are uneasy with and irreverent toward the traditional meanings and political burdens of black art. This unease and irreverence expresses itself in art that takes the phenomenon of blackness as its principal subject. We might say that postblack artists are chronicling the end of racial history, in something like Hegels sense. To be posthistorical in this sense is not, as Hegel would have it, to be superseded as a vehicle for the achievement of some cosmic purpose; nor is it, as Hegel inspired Fukuyama and others to think, to have exhausted the possibilities of human cultural development and to have decisively vanquished all ideological competitors. It is simply to have left an old telos behind for the cooler comforts of an inchoate present. The events that make up black life no longer seem ordered by the kind of unfolding drama that once made them into capital-H-History. Now we simply have events, piling on each other without the benefit of an overarching plot or prefab framing narrative. This may mean groping for new meanings to organize our practicesas seems to be the case with postcivil rights politicsor reveling in the openness that comes with the decay of the old meaningsas with (some proponents of) postblack art and postsoul culture. To be sure, the openness that comes with the end of black history cannot mean what the more euphoric students of racial 34

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politics have taken it to mean. It does not mean that racial justice has been achieved, racism is no more, racial identities are completely optional, and racial disparities should be no concern of society or the state. It just means recognizing that racial identities are valuableas epistemic perspectives on a still racialized social landscape and perhaps as existentially significant points of entry to race-inflected forms of life. And it means accepting that racial practices are contingent, mutable, unsupported by the telos of human history, and fair game for artistic parody and scrutiny. I am trying to talk myself into granting the possibility that artists and other icons of postraciality can be useful models of disaffiliation from oppressive racial scripts. This is not an idea I have in the past had much patience with, mainly because its proponents too often conflate the experience of racial contingency with the evasion of social location. But the idea has begun to look bettera little betterof late. I think of india.arie and Trey Ellis here before I think of Goldens postblack artists. But that may simply be because I am a philistine, and I visited the Studio Museum for the first time just this past summer. Still, we might continue to flesh out the idea of postblack aesthetics by thinking not about the Freestyle artists but about Barack Obama. If it isnt clear to you just how Obama counts as an aesthetic icon, I have three words for you: clean and articulate. That is nearly to say: if Obama looked or sounded like John Lewis or Al Sharpton, or, for that matter, like John Singleton or Allen Iverson, he would not be where he is today. His body, his bearing, his speaking style, his performance of his public persona, the choice of settings for these performances all of these mark Obama as a descendant of the civil rights era and, at the same time, as someone seeking distance from it. This is not news, given how publicly the Oedipal drama with Jesse Jackson and others has played out. But it is worth considering the specifically aesthetic dimensions of this phenomenon. While aesthetics is in one sense about artworks and selfconsciously expressive practices, it is in another sense about a dimension of human experience. This second approach, taking its cues from Alexander Baumgartens linking of aesthetics to what he called sensuous cognition, focuses on cognitive immediacy. 12 We experience this immediacy when judgments and interpretations become second nature to uswhen we learn to see or otherwise just perceive things that we once had to puzzle out, consciously and deliberately: strings of symbols, chord changes, defensive coverages, ritual pageantry, and the like. We experience immediacy in another sense when gardenvariety cognitive states like belief and doubt intermingle with more narrowly aesthetic considerationswith judgments of attractiveness or beauty, or with the demands of style and expression. 35

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Just as concepts streamline our journeys through the world, helping to reduce the dynamic flux of experience to familiar categories, immediate judgments about which concepts to apply, and when, enable even further streamlining. In addition to being influenced by more narrowly aesthetic considerations about beauty and attractiveness, this process has features that we routinely associate with more narrowly aesthetic judgments. It unfolds swiftly and intuitively, without recourse to consciously managed processes of cognition. The judging agent is often unable to account for the judgments that he or she makes and has to work to find words for them. And the judgments register certain immediately recognized constellations of meaning, each of which can be as directly meaningful and affectively charged as a work of art, ritual artifact, cultural symbol, or other expressive object. There are many examples of this rapid or immediate cognitioncall it aesthesis. Popular author Malcolm Gladwell presents numerous examples under the general heading of thin-slicing. 13 Among his cases are poultry industry professionals who cannot explain just what theyve done after immediately, and accurately, discerning the sex of chicken hatchlings; and experts on ancient statuary who distinguish convincing fakes from authentic artifacts on the grounds that the fakes dont feel right. But you may have guessed about the examples that move me: Im thinking of the well-known cases of American police officers gunning down innocent peoplelike Amadou Diallowhose dark skin makes them look like criminals.14 Im thinking, more broadly, of the galvanizing fears and anxieties that the sight of black bodies can elicit from people with the power of the state at their disposal, whether they wield this power with guns or with legislation. And Im thinking of the way that Barack Obama looks not dangerous but clean. If the perception that a thing is superficially beautiful, or ugly, can prompt immediate, unexcavated judgments about that things deeper traits; if, in the case of humans, judgments about surface beauty have for several centuries been indexed to ideas about human types, with lighter-skinned types tending to count as more beautiful; if racialized judgments of beauty feel immediately to fit in ways that immunize them from critical introspection; and, finally, if this fittingness holds the key to the distribution of social goods up to and including the ability to survive routine encounters with the state; if all of that is right, then studying aesthesis gives us a pretty fair start toward understanding what Frantz Fanon invites us to call the fact of blackness.14

6.2 Cultivation and Clarity

I have been exploring a double-barreled idea about aesthetics of cognition. The first claim is that our ideas, beliefs, capacities, and 36

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convictions can train our powers of perception in ways that enable, or condemn, us quite literally to perceive extremely complicated, conceptually loaded phenomena. The second claim is that this cognitively funded perception then recruits into its operations the feelings of pleasure and satisfaction that some thinkers have associated with the experience of formal beauty. With the right background and training we can see, immediately and without conscious deliberation, and often without being able to explain the grounds of our judgment, whether a hatchling is male or female, or whether a statue is a genuine antique or an elaborate forgery. Similarly, a certain cultural training prepares us to see, and to see immediately and viscerally, that black male bodies are dangerous or that scantily clad female bodies are flirting or sexually available. The second kind of training, based on assumptions about social identities and human types, is much easier to come by than the first, and it is much more likely to produce erroneous judgments. Consequently, it will pay us to find ways to excavate and retrain our powers of aesthesis. As it happens, one of the principal training sites for rapid cultural cognition is also a promising site for retraining. Expressive practices like painting, literature, and film can mobilize, exploit, and reinforce these loaded perceptions. This is the point behind Deweys favorite examples of immediate experiencethe paraphernalia of nationalism, like flags and anthems, and the objects of ritual observance, all of which work in the general run of cases by tugging directly at our emotions, without the intervention of conscious reflection on what these things mean.16 But expressive practices can also help us excavate these funded perceptions and help us examine and evaluate them. By stressing the chain of associations that typically attends racialized bodies in U.S. visual culture, a work of art can lift these associations from the domain of common sense and make us interrogate our perceptions, commitments, and convictions. The idea that aesthetic experience can help retrain our rapid cultural cognitions points toward the literature on art and ethics and adds to my earlier invocation of perfectionism a version of the clarificationist or cultivationist approach to narrative and moral education. On this approach, art has the potential for ethical value, principally for two reasons. It can help us to cultivate certain ethical skills and powers, like discernment, empathy, and imagination; and it does this at least in part by giving us opportunities to clarify our understanding of ethical concepts and principles, by inviting us to apply and develop our ethical concepts in response to works of art.17 Noel Carroll begins to explain clarificationism in this way: We learn many moral rules and concepts, but they are very abstract, and we may not be able to connect them to particular situations. By employing detailed examples, fictions help us 37

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evolve a sense of how to employ the abstractions intelligibly and appropriately.18 Martha Nussbaum adds, Moral knowledge is not simply intellectual grasp of propositions; it is not even simply intellectual grasp of particular facts; it is perception. It is seeing a complex concrete reality in a highly lucid and richly responsive way; it is taking in what is there, with imagination and feeling.19 There is much to argue with here, and much to say to flesh out the picture. But something like this is surely right. Ethical practice, as opposed to ethical theory, depends on what Nussbaum follows Henry James in calling responsible lucidity. We cant apply our rules and concepts until we interpret the morally problematic situation to see which rules apply. Sometimes the right interpretation is not obvious, and conscious, perhaps protracted deliberation ensues. But often enough, outside of classes and textbooks in ethics and law, the right interpretation is obvious, and so obvious that it recommends itself viscerally and immediately. We can just see that certain actions, states of affairs, or characters are right or wrong, noble or base, praiseworthy or contemptible. And artworks can help us learn to see better, to train the discerning perceptions that lead to moral knowledge. And once again you will have anticipated what Ive been working toward. If moral knowledge is perception, then the misperception that led to the killing of Amadou Diallo was more than a mistake of fact. The people with the guns saw a complex ethical reality in a simplistic and muddled way. They saw it in the way that innumerable cop shows, action films, commercials, political campaigns, editorial cartoons, and much more have trained us to see black male bodies. More to the point, they saw it in accordance with the moral rules of white supremacy, which has long relied on the pedagogical resources of expressive culture. Those rules, though, have been officially annulled, which means that expressive culture will in cases like this do its clarifying work after justice. Antiracist art will excavate and criticize these problematic perceptual habits. But even art that falls short of effective criticism can be useful. By inviting us to apply and refine racist habits of perception, by inviting us, for example, to see black and brown men as dangerous brutes, or black and brown women as oversexed and hyperfertile, these ethically flawed works will create a kind of ethical dissonance between what we know and what were invited to see. This dissonance can help us monitor and root out any lingering affective attachment that we feel to invidious stereotypes and judgments.

7. Conclusion
I have been trying for some time to make sense of the thought that race, racism, and liberalism have entered some kind of post38

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After Race, After Justice, After History

historical phase in the twenty-first century. The result has been a long brief for a postsupremacist virtue theory, where virtue means something like what Foucault meant by it, and for importing aesthetics into critical race theory. But these recommendations have come surrounded by thoughts about being after history, after race, and after justiceand the odd thought about presidential politics. We are after history now in the sense that the purposive history of race has come to an end. The concept once seemed to be the key to grand historical progress. The world would witness a Du BoisianHegelian pageant of peoples bringing, or failing to bring, their gifts to humanity; or we would construct a biopolitical utopia, one that could cultivate a wise citizenry and/or stalwart labor force by managing the racial stock of its populace; or, more modestly, we would simply use the concept to achieve a kind of unified theory of human variation, with biological difference and social stratification neatly understood by appeal to a single principle. And now, after all this promise, we are left with a modest, existentially salient and perhaps instrumentally useful concept, shorn of its world-historical importance and used to keep track of certain social dynamics in certain forms of life. The end of racial history of course also brings the end of race, in a couple of ways. In a postmodernist sense, the metanarratives about racial identity and community have lost their appeal for us, and many enterprising people have rushed to fill the resultant void with experiments in self-creation. Some of these experiments are polycultural performances of postblackness, while others are irresponsible and self-deceiving acts of evasive disaffiliation. But all are working out their social identities and locations without appeal to the idea that race is a progressive historical force. This is the second, suitably domesticated Hegelian sense, of postracialism. The world doesnt stop when history ends, for Hegel or for Marx. The activities that drove history forward are simply relieved of their historical burdens. Something at least like these activities can and will continue, only with a new openness, or playfulness, or, perhaps, pointlessness. Because racial formation processes continue even after the historical burdens are set aside, ethical questions still persist. But these questions for me point away from notions of justice, and away from the liberal frameworks that give those notions their clearest specification. They point instead to a perfectionist ethic, one that subjects the self to critical scrutiny, one that excavates and examines the inarticulate fixations that put liberal democratic values in tension with the liberaltheoretical imaginary. Aesthetic practices are central elements in this imaginary, and in the public philosophies of our modern racialisms. But these practices can also be valuable resources in the struggle to disinter and disarm problematic habits of perception and judgment. 39

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Paul C. Taylor

Notes
1 H. A. Alexander, After the Revolution, the Normative Revival in Post-Analytic Philosophy of Education, Philosophy of Education (1992). 2 Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality (London: Routledge, 2000); Robert Talisse, Democracy After Liberalism: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics (New York: Routledge, 2005). 3 Michael J. Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 19. 4 Talisse, Democracy After Liberalism, 3334. 5 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 23. 6 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. 7 Robyn Wiegman, Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity, Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 11550. 8 Weigman, Whiteness Studies, 121, 127. 9 I am borrowing from Stanley Cavell, who says that the perfectionism he finds in Emerson and elsewhere is not a competing theory of the moral life, but something like a dimension or tradition that spans the course of Western thought and concerns what used to be called the state of ones soul. Stanley Cavell, Moral Perfectionism, in The Cavell Reader, ed. Stephen Mulhall (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 355. 10 Judith Butler, What is Critique: An Essay on Foucaults Virtue, in The Political, ed. David Ingram, 217. 11 Thelma Golden, Introduction, Freestyle (New York: Studio Museum of Harlem, 2001), 1415. 12 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica, 1, p107; cited from Paul Guyer, 18th Century German Aesthetics, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2007/entries/aesthetics-18thgerman/ (citing Hans Rudolf Schweizer, sthetik als Philosophie der sinnlichen Erkenntnis: Eine Interpretation der Aesthetica A.G. Baumgartens mit teilweiser Wiedergabe der lateinischen Textes und deutscher bersetzung (Basel: Schwabe, 1973)). 13 Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). 14 Amadou Diallo was a Guinean immigrant to New York who was mistaken for a criminal suspect and killed by the NYPD in 2001. Diallo was unarmed (and, if it matters, was legally employed, and had no criminal record), but the several police officers who surrounded him downed him with a flurry of 41 bullets when he made what struck them as a threatening gesture. He reached for his wallet to identify himself. Protests and formal charges ensued, as did, among other things, a Bruce Springsteen song commemorating the tragedy. 15 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 16 John Dewey, Art As Experience (1934; New York: Capricorn, 1958), 31. 17 Noel Carroll, Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research, Ethics 110, no. 2, (Jan. 2000): 35087, 367; Noel Carroll, The Wheel of Virtue, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 1 (Winter 2002) 326; Martha Nussbaum, Finely Aware

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After Race, After Justice, After History and Richly Responsible: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature, The Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 10 (Oct. 1985): 51629. 18 Carroll, Art and Ethical Criticism, 367. 19 Nussbaum, Finely Aware and Richly Responsible, 521.

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