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Introduction: The Human and an Economy of Exchange
Rhetoric and the Reproduction of the Human
The Entanglement of Writing, the Human, and Temporality in Civil Society
Writing and the Ontologization of Origins
Conclusion: A Way Out
The critics fear that an absence of any independent ground or neutral observation-language from which to assess and possibly modify our present beliefs and practices would lead to a world without controls – where unmoored subjects would act as though ‘‘anything goes’’ and where rational inquiry and communication would be impossible. –Gaonkar, pp. 18
Throughout this paper, I argued that Western grammars, in a Derridean sense, are integral in (re)producing the carceral and anti-Black category of the Human. This occurs in three primary ways. First, the West constructs the (Black) non-Human as oppositional to the (White) Human in civil society. This is done by attaching Blackness and Whiteness to signifiers, such as guilt and innocence, to justify mass incarceration, surveillance, and police brutality against Black bodies. In political institutions, particularly the judiciary, the visual and rhetorical signifier of Blackness is associated with suffering. This creates semiocapitalism and racial capitalism as images of quotidian anti-Black violence are normalized, circulated, and consumed across civil society. Second, the West intertwines temporality with writing to create narratives of political progress and historical amnesia. By reading the past, present, and future as distinct temporal zones, the state divests itself of responsibility from the slave trade and settler colonialism, violences that were, and remain, integral in the creation and evolution of civil society. In tandem with this, the future is constructed as a space of safety that must be secured through expanded warfare. Warfare thus extends beyond the battlefield and into simulations of potential futures through planning. By expanding surveillance through both technological innovation and military intervention, the West maximizes its data collection to perfect preemption against all bodies considered inherently threatening (non-Human) to justify genocide and the expansion of empire. Finally, the origins of Western grammars are ontologized in the slave trade. Writing, in the West, creates its own originary moment in the slave trade to mystify the ateleological nature of grammars, making static the temporality of rhetoric to render it predictable and obfuscate the creation of the Human.
I further asserted that, as a political praxis and epistemology, abolitionism is one way to create alternative grammars and dismantle the Human. This is because abolitionists imbue present movements and protests with historical memory to shape visions of different futures. By connecting genealogies of struggle with affects of rage and desire, abolitionists disrupt and evade the process of temporal and rhetorical capture that produces the Human. As such, abolition disrupts the matrix of predictability that Western grammars produce, making simulated warfare impossible. The entanglement of writing, temporality, affect, and kinship in the project of abolitionism thus creates alternative grammars geared towards deconstructing the Human.
Considering this, can writing ever escape its construction in civil society? I argue that, yes, it can. Abolition demystifies the obfuscation of Western grammars, a process that is intrinsically intertwined with non-linear temporalities as abolition undermines the ontologization of origins. Specifically, Derrida argues that “the ideal of the language of origin…a language that has not yet been corrupted by articulation, convention, supplementarity. The time of that language is the unstable, inaccessible, mythic limit between the already and this not-yet: time of a language being born…Neither before nor after the origin” (265, emphasis in original). To suspend Western grammars from their “originary” moment of the slave trade is to find a liminal zone of existence, a positionality that is both already and not-yet here. Abolitionist pedagogies, through non-linear temporalities and non-Western kinships, are thus always already being born in new iterations. Rather than being divested of meaning through (re)signification, abolition finds a grammar in a condition of (im)possibility, an envisioning of purportedly unrealistic political and social goals to build new futures.
I cannot say, however, what a world without Western grammars or the Human would look like as that world does not yet exist. As Derrida states, “For that world to come and for that within it which will make the values of sign, word, and writing tremble, for that which here guides our future anterior, there as yet is no exergue” (5). Ultimately, abolition can only be an ongoing struggle to undermine the carceral and anti-Black category of the Human, creating new modes of writing and language imbued with affect. While this future is uncertain and unpredictable, a dissolution of Western grammars remains a necessity in escaping the Human and its production of difference.
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what is revolution without
the ghosts of the past
the cries of the present
the light of the future
to guide us
as we seek
something other than
Human
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