Category: aesthetic

For Anti-Racism: Against NYC’s Monuments Commission

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date January 15, 2018

Third International Eugenics Conference exhibit on Roosevelt

The NYC Monument Commission was a failure. It delivered a hot mess of recommendations for more: more bureaucracy, more signs and “>more monuments. This is called an “additive” policy. Without a commitment to anti-racism and decolonial practice, none of it makes sense. The missed opportunity is that a good faith anti-racist, decolonial project could show people of all backgrounds, including Italian-Americans, why the monuments must fall.

This is not trivial. While liberals want to make the racist president fall, they can’t even agree to take down statues of racist presidents. That’s why the monuments matter, as the white supremacists have long known. White racism remains “deniable,” even when said out loud, as the latest Trump scandal shows. It works as a particular structure of feeling, invisible to those on the “inside” (known as white) but all too real to those excluded. The monuments are palpable, immensely material nodes in the network of white supremacy.

What I’m arguing for is precisely an “art”–including museum practice, education at all levels, and activism–that takes decolonizing and anti-racism as its first principles.

In what follows, I examine

how the report comes to decide to do nothing in the case of the President Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
how the Memorial visibly incarnates concepts of racial hierarchy and was designed to be part of the Museum’s advocacy for eugenics
how that agenda is an active part of the anti-immigration movement today
how an anti-racist approach might offer a positive means to make the monuments fall.
TL; DR? Skip to the action section at the end!

Before beginning, I want to note that the Commission was often divided and many members would probably agree with much of what I’m going to write. Somehow, the status quo always prevails, even when there is an exact divide as in the case of Roosevelt. Mayor de Blasio opted for no change in all cases, except for the statue of Marion J. Sims–a decision that now has to be reviewed by the community board and then the Public Design Commission, so don’t expect to see a removal any time soon.

1. Complexity

How did the decision to keep the Roosevelt Memorial, protested by the American Indian Movement as long ago as 1971, get taken? The key principle for the commission in relation to evaluating monuments is “complexity,” which receives an unlikely definition:

acknowledging layered and evolving narratives represented in New York City’s public spaces, with preference for additive, relational, and intersectional approaches over subtractive ones. Monuments and markers have multiple meanings that are difficult to unravel, and it is often impossible to agree on a single meaning.

This watered down version of the deconstructive principle of undecidability makes little sense. Complexity is the interpretation of how complexes work: a situation with multiple, intersecting elements but not a synonym for unintelligibility. Nor is it endlessly relative: in given situations, one vector is often determining. If monuments were really so unintelligible, it’s hard to imagine why so many of them have been built, let alone why people are so keen to defend them and why the Commission wants more to be built.

2. Making Race Visible

Here’s how this works in practice. While half the group clearly saw the Memorial as depicting racial hierarchy, “complexity” resulted because:

Some Commission members pointed to art-historical interpretations of the two standing figures as allegorical, representing the continents of the Americas and Africa, emphasized by the animals in relief on the parapet wall behind them. This analysis included evidence that the sculpture was meant to represent Roosevelt’s belief in the unity of the races. In this interpretation, the figures are in no way abject.

This statement is remarkably tendentious. Roosevelt’s 1905 speech on race made it clear that he believed in a limited equality of opportunity for both the “forward” (meaning white) and “backward” (meaning Black) “races.” But as the terms indicate, he did not for a minute think the “races” were equal. Historian Theodore Dyer noted in his 1980 book on Roosevelt and race that the president believed in “Anglo-Saxon racial superiority to American Indians and American blacks.”

Now, it is enough for someone to have an alternative point of view for there to be deadlock. Note that we are not discussing Fox News here but a sophisticated and widely-recognized group of art world luminaries and other professionals. But critiques of “race” or colonialism were not the priority of the majority who declared their

paramount values [to be] art, public space, and civic discourse

Paramount for whom? To what end?

Let’s look at the Memorial itself. In the two splendid photos by An Rong Xu above, it’s clear that the animals on the wall–we are, after all, at the Museum of Natural History–have no visible connection to the Memorial. The strikingly disproportionate scale of the figures discredits any idea that these figures are equal or unified. That’s even before the racialized stereotyping of the Indigenous and African figures are considered. And note the absurdly over-muscular and newly hirsute body of the Emperor-President as well. The contrast is unmistakeable and intentional.

The Commission’s claim that sculptor James Earle Fraser meant for the figures to represent the continents of Africa and America is advanced only in a Metropolitan Museum catalog entry to another sculpture without reference or documentary support. It is unconvincing. While there are well-known precedents for the Four Continents, like Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s 1872 group sculpture, The Four Parts of the World Holding the Celestial Sphere, I know of no precedent for a two continent sculpture before 1939.

On the other hand, New York City knew well Daniel Chester French’s famed sculptures of the four Continents on the Custom House downtown (1903-07). His America was a group in which an allegorical female figure actively dominates Indigenous figures: by that analogy, Roosevelt would be America and the two figures his dominated subjects. And that surely is the right way to see the sculpture. The group depicts Roosevelt dominating an African and American Indian as representatives, not of continents, but of “races.”

This analysis suggests why the Commission is so reluctant to act: if Roosevelt must fall, what is the case for French? Perhaps it’s a better sculpture in formal terms. But does it make sense that this vision of America trampling Quetzlcoatl underfoot is outside the New York Museum of the American Indian? And if so to whom?

3. Eugenics and Immigration

Display of eugenic sterilization at AMNH (1932)

Why did the AMNH want a statue of Roosevelt at all? Because Roosevelt epitomized the eugenic, imperial racism the Museum wanted to promote. The Report suggests:

Approximately half of the Commission: believe that additional historical research is necessary before recommendations can be offered.

Direct information linking Roosevelt, the AMNH, the Memorial and eugenics is, in fact, widely available: here is a summary.

The AMNH was a bastion of eugenics under the long directorship (1908-33) of Henry Fairfield Osborn. In 1916, Osborn wrote the preface to Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (later much admired by Hitler):

Race implies heredity, and heredity implies all the moral, social, and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government. Conservation of that race, which has given us the true spirit of Americanism, is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country

Environmental conservation was not, then, the “good” side of the AMNH in contrast to its “bad” racism: they were part and parcel of the same race politics. Roosevelt supported eugenic principles, saying in 1914

I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done.

Osborn unsurprisingly campaigned for a Roosevelt Memorial at the AMNH as soon as the president died in 1919. He gained his greatest success in helping pass the Immigration Act of 1924 that severely limited immigration, especially from Eastern and Southern Europe. This Act inspires the current administration’s opposition to immigration, leading to Osborn’s race theory being quoted on the front page of the New York Times this weekend. In other words: this is not over.

In the context of rising fascism and support for race science and eugenics, the Third International Eugenics conference was held at the AMNH in 1932. Osborn’s keynote was a jeremiad against birth control and for what he called “birth selection.” He repeated that environmental conservation was a key part of “improving the race,” meaning white people. His address noted six “overs” in the then-present:

Over-destruction of natural resources….Over-population…with consequent permanent unemployment of the least fitted. I have reached the conclusion that overpopulation and underemployment may be regarded as twin sisters

In short, his proposed solution for the mass unemployment caused by the Depression was eugenic birth selection, including forced sterilization, as the exhibit made clear (see image above), noting that over 15,000 enforced eugenic sterilizations had been performed by 1932 in the United States, including a small number in New York State. Upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927 in an opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, there would ultimately be over 70,000 such sterilizations in the US.

Good examples of birth selection were on display at the Eugenics Conference as well, such as the all-white membership of Congress. Notably, there was a display of the eugenically desirable “pedigree” of Theodore Roosevelt.

In case there is any doubt as to the connection of the Memorial under construction at the AMNH to this chart at the time of its display, a sculpted bust of Roosevelt is placed at the top left.

And the AMNH Trustees said as much when the Memorial was opened in 1936, just after Osborn had died:

For more than sixteen years the late Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn had given his time, energy and thought to produce a structure, which he felt would best memorialize Theodore Roosevelt. …The trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, who will later control the operation and maintenance of the memorial, have pledged themselves, …, to carry out the educational purposes laid down by their late President Osborn for their guidance.

Central to Osborn’s life work was the racist hierarchy of eugenics, the control of immigration, the deportation of unwelcome migrants, and the enforced control of human reproduction. It is impossible that the Trustees meant anything else.

4. Eugenics Now

Nor are these eugenics solely a thing of the past. This week it emerged that University College London has been holding a series of eugenics conferences, calling for the “phasing out” of “populations of incompetent cultures.” These events are funded by an unpleasant US-based outfit called The Pioneer Fund. This group was founded by Wycliffe Draper, a collaborator of Osborne’s. His nephew Fairfield Osborn was a founding director and continued to work with Draper until they split in the late 1950s.

Today, the Fund supports white supremacist Richard Spencer, who was active at Charlottesville, and it continues to promote old-fashioned Jew hatred.

But it’s not just the lunatic fringe. The continuance of eugenic ideas occurs every time someone calls someone else a “moron” or an “imbecile,” which were categories of eugenic deficiency. Or when Donald Trump says “laziness is a trait in blacks.”

Trump is adept at the art of racialized provocation. The day after his “shithole” remarks, he appeared to the press in front of a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt.

There is no danger that Roosevelt will be forgotten or erased from history if his statue is removed. The point is rather that his statue is part of an active network of racialized signification. Which is to say: how does race have meaning? It connects. It links Trump to Roosevelt via the idea of the dominant Hero, whiteness, and white supremacy.

5. Why Everyone Should Want the Monuments to Fall

In the Commission Report on the Columbus Monument, the 1891 lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans is cited to explain why the Monument was needed. Indeed, this period saw the notorious “one drop” rule in Louisiana, meaning that a person with any non-“white” descent at all was considered “colored,” to use the terminology of the time. In 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a segregated railway train in New Orleans, leading to the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson that upheld “separate but equal.”

It was in this intensely racialized context that the Columbus Monument was erected in New York. The claim Italian-Americans were making was to be “white.” And it’s not hard to understand why, given the then-ongoing violence of white supremacy. But that is no reason to sustain the argument today. Without even considering Columbus’ devastating impact for Indigenous peoples–though of course in a wider frame we should– present-day Italian-Americans and other “whites” should not want to be white in the manner of 1892. And that’s what this Monument means. But it didn’t work.

The 1924 Immigration Act set the annual quota of any nationality at 2% of the number of foreign-born persons of such nationality resident in the United States in 1890. According to eugenic theory, there is not a single “white” European “race” but rather three. The eugenically preferred “Nordic” race is truly “white.” Distinct were Southern Europeans–mostly Italians for practical purposes–and Eastern Europeans, meaning Jews. The 1924 Act intended to promote Nordic immigration and limit that of Southern and Eastern Europeans.

The results of the Act were dramatic. From 1901-1914, 2.9 million Italians immigrated, an average of 210,000 per year. Under the 1924 Act, only 4,000 per year were admitted–a 98% decrease. These restrictions did not end until 1965 and Attorney General Sessions has cited the 1924 Act as an inspiration for current attempts to limit immigration.

In short, while Italians in 1892 certainly had a case that they had been violently subjected to white supremacy, their perhaps understandable attempt to join its ranks by means of the Columbus Monument did not succeed. Today, no one questions the “whiteness” of Italians and all Europeans are considered “white.” But this is not a club that anyone should want to belong to.

Just as several Italian-Americans advocated at the NYC Commission hearings, anti-racist Italians should support removal of the Columbus Monument. An anti-racist campaign would connect Italian-Americans to a different history, the long arc of justice. But prominent New York leaders like Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio have made it clear they want no part of this anti-racist rethinking of whiteness. The majority of the Commission followed this lead.

6. Action

All the monuments are connected. The Columbus Monument made the claim that Italians were white in the moment of legalized segregation. Roosevelt’s support for eugenics was why Osborn and the American Museum of Natural History wanted a memorial. The same people supported the 1924 Immigration Act that cut Italian immigration by 98%. In short, the “whiteness” these monuments embody excludes almost everyone and perpetuates systemic and hierarchical racism.
The monuments must fall not because people were bad then and we are good today but because the racism they embody is still active and growing.
Building more monuments or putting up signs is not a substitute for the long and difficult work of anti-racism. Anyone can say “I am not a racist.” The question is “what are you doing to end racism?
The Commission thinks that action should be taken in regard to monuments if there is: “Sustained adverse public reaction (two years of more); and/or Instantaneous large-scale community opposition.” So let’s give it to them.

aesthetic gender white supremacy whiteness

The Misogynist Aesthetics of Visuality

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date November 14, 2017

“All hitherto existing visuality becomes aesthetic by being misogynist.”

This is the necessary update to my earlier claim that “the right to look ….is very much a feminist project.” Visuality is “masculine” or heroic because it is misogynist. It is that misogyny that enables its claim to legitimacy, that is, to make and embody law. The permanent and constituent crisis that visuality visualizes is that which claims to require patriarchy as its solution, a rear-view mirror engagement with the present. Case in point: Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the classic Blade Runner (1982), on which every visual culture scholar has opined.

Before beginning this rewrite, let’s take a moment to say that I’m aware that this is not just any modulation of an analysis. It’s an admission of past failing that has been made glaring by present conditions. It’s up to you, the reader, to decide what to make of that. This is me beginning to try to do better by working it through.

In The Right to Look, the patriarchal authority to visualize is set against collective, democratic forms of countervisuality, yes. But I’m a little bit surprised looking back at it now to see that the feminist/gender/sexuality analysis is not well worked out. Why? I’m male identified, so that probably doesn’t help. There was a foregrounding of a masculine seriousness about war in the period I was writing (2003-10). I think, too, that I wrongly assumed the gender dimension of the ridiculous hyper-masculinity of the Heroic tradition to be both well established in visual culture analysis and so obviously reactionary that it did not need as much focus. And I was wildly wrong. Let’s start again.

*

misogynist visuality

“Visuality” is the specific technology of coloniality formed on the plantation by the overseer, generalized as a technology of colonial war, and later named in English by Thomas Carlyle (1840). All such misogynist visuality is the property of the Great Man or the Hero. To understand what this means, it is only necessary to know that present-day alt-right considers Trump to be such a Hero.

Colonial visuality operates in complexes, which classify (free from slave, for example) and then separates the classified orders. That order holds because it produces an aesthetic, that which Fanon called the “aesthetic of respect for the established [patriarchal] order.” This aesthetic is always nostalgic, always bound to what Carlyle called “Tradition,” always haunted by the fear of its imminent disappearance. Which is to say, it is always violent.

In the era of neo-colonial war in Iraq and Afghanistan, enabled by the drone, there was a return to overt ideology of “commander’s visualization,” to quote the US Army’s Counterinsurgency Manual. It also seemed as if that visualizing was not hegemonic. The “aesthetic” of permanent war (in movies like The Hurt Locker) felt unfinished and thereby contestable because there was no way to make it feel necessary and right.

That analysis underestimated the necessity of unfinish to the neo-imperial masculine aesthetic, the need it has to feel threatened and on the verge of being overwhelmed, to sustain and reproduce itself. “Chaos” is visuality’s always feminized other in Carlyle and in all subsequent claims to Heroism. The opposition to Heroism was, according to Carlyle, “the female Insurrectionary force,” always already racialized as “black.” Carlyle did not even bother to consider the possibility of a female Hero, which would (in his view) produce monstrous forms like Amazons and Maenads. “Female force” is Heroism’s internal challenge to be overcome, as a constitutive, embodied part of itself. This ideology is phantasmatic, even ridiculous, to be sure, but it has had very real effects.

Indeed, coloniality has now created a new form of heroic masculinity for the aftermath of the conquest of (M)other nature. Surviving in the midst of climate disaster is the new heroism visualized in Blade Runner 2049, in ways that bear little resemblance to lived experience. Today’s self-proclaimed Heroes embrace the earth system crisis as their chance to wage permanent misogynist war. Real men eat GMO, use pesticide, burn coal and master the resultant chaos because mastering (female) chaos is what (male) Heroes do. What follows is the spectacle of Trump minions advocating for coal at the climate conference, while only 8% of college-educated Republicans “believe” in climate change, as if it is a branch of theology. In this view, faith rests in the Hero, who welcomes climate chaos as a test of his strength.

2049 is now

Misogynist coloniality has created a nostalgic aesthetic, such as that deployed in the self-consciously “epic,” which is to say, “heroic” film Blade Runner 2049. It failed at the box office but so did Trump. For my generation of visual culture studies, the first Blade Runner was canonical, taught over and again. So its return was nostalgic for me too. Like Bertolt Brecht siding with the cowboys during Westerns–as he admitted he did–I can’t deny enjoying watching it, both for its intense cinematic experience of sound and image and for the postmodern Proustian resonance of rediscovering past media time.

But this film not only visualizes the white supremacist masculinity that is making the world toxic, it takes active pleasure in the toxicity of the world. It is now the visible analogy of the hidden-in-plain-sight violent, abusive, misogynist Hollywood system evoked by the name “Weinstein.” Everywhere you look in this extended exploration of white masculinity there are available, conventionally attractive, young, white female bodies, floating on the side of buildings; or activated as software when the Man returns home to his miserable apartment; or standing on the street waiting for sex work. In this future, a (male) wish fulfillment if there ever was one, no one is trans or queer, and hardly anyone isn’t white.

In Blade Runner 2049, the new white male hero, known only as K, is literally a machine. K (Ryan Gosling) embodies the Heroic interface of the corporation and the police, which Gramsci called Caesarism. K marches through the orange desert in post-apocalyptic Las Vegas in search of the lost original Blade Runner, Deckard (Harrison Ford). It’s radioactive but he doesn’t care because he’s a machine. If such orange effects usually result from desert winds, recently seen in the U.K., the hyper-smog today enveloping Delhi and Lahore is a suffocating grey that locals are actively comparing to Blade Runner. Without the “conquest of nature” anaesthetic to make it palatable. Unlike Blade Runner, helicopters can’t even fly in the dense, gritty air mass.

Caspar David Friedrich, *The Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog*

K’s wandering through radioactive Vegas is a digital upgrade of the industrial-era Romantic fantasy of the conquest of nature. In Caspar David Friedrich’s much-reproduced painting, the wanderer, known only through his bourgeois suit, is colonial master of all he surveys, like Keats’ Cortés, “silent on a peak in Darien.” What lies beneath him is said to be fog but most such precipitation in the period was coal-induced smog. It’s not so far from the Wanderer to K, except that the “human” (which is to say “white” masculine) gaze is now automated.

the machine gaze

How does the machine visualize? The first shot of BR 2049 fills the screen for a second: an all-seeing blue eye, with blond eyelashes. It is that of a replicant, an artificial person. Nowhere else in BR 2049 does this combination of blue-eyed blonde appear, so it is not the eye of a character. It is the ideal of machine vision, the machine as Hero. In the next instant, blink and you miss it, we zoom into the eye, into swirls of blue, and emerge in a giant solar panel array, converting the tomb-like sky into power.

All puns are intended by director Denis Villeneuve: the replicant’s eye is replaced by the solar “eye,” where neither is an “I.” Power is all, electric and social. If “we,” the spectators, are, as it were, in the eye of the machine, in their mind, then where are we? And who are “we,” when people are not always human?

The primary work of visualizing is classification, creating here an imagined distinction between the “human” and the machine, or replicant. Any such classification is a reenactment of the colonial hierarchy of the human, in which most people do not achieve the fully human status that is reserved for “whiteness.”

In Blade Runner 2049, all the major characters are machines. The only human that plays a role is the police officer Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), desperate to keep “order,” meaning the separation between human and machine. It’s already too late. She’s killed by a replicant. The fully human “humans” are elsewhere in the place the film calls “off-world,” the new interstellar colony.

The replicant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), who kills Joshi, achieves perfect machine visualization, sublimely reflected in her sunglasses that act as her remote screen vision. A machine-Medusa, Luv directs a lethal missile attack to protect K in his hunt for the natural-born replicant, a mechanical messiah. In the animation of her cyber-eye, Luv embodies all the current dreams of power, like that of the wide-angle drone apparatus named The Gorgon Stare. What Luv cannot do, the film suggests, is love. She is all war, the female counter-insurrectionary force machine, the necessary counterpart to the heroic drive of corporate leader Wallace (Jared Leto).

wish fulfillment

The sardonic displacement of “love” into Luv acknowledges the misogynist violence at the center of the story. Blade Runner 2049 centers around the pursuit of a child born to the replicants Rachael (Sean Young) and Deckard (Harrison Ford). In the first Blade Runner film (1982), Deckard falls for Rachael. When he tries to kiss her, she pulls away. He slams the door, pushes back into the blinds and makes her say “I want you.” Then she acts out the kiss. Did she love him? Or Luv him, as directed by her software? Deckard doesn’t care.

The YouTube post of Deckard’s assault on Rachael (labeled a “love scene’)

Deckard, we learn in BR 2049, was programmed to desire Rachael (meaning that he is himself a replicant, as everyone except Harrison Ford has worked out long ago). So the first film literally engenders the second with the birth of their child, which conveniently causes Rachael’s death. In BR 2049 we discover Deckard living out a bro-noir life of mourning and drinking in ruined Las Vegas hotels. Captured, he again causes the death of a newly re-replicated Rachael. Like Wallace’s casual murder of a newly-created replicant, this misogynist killing has no other function than to continue the wish fulfillment that violence is power.

For Deckard’s assault plays out the elemental pornographic fantasy that whatever a man wants, a woman does too. In the recent HBO series The Deuce, the sex worker turned porn film director Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaall) keeps reminding everyone that porn is “fantasy.” It’s as if she’s speaking out of character here in this sadly misogynist and racist series–beautifully staged and shot, just like BR 2049–as the present-day actor addressing the audience.

In the minds of assaulting men, anything can be a justification. Women’s words play no significant role in this justifying narrative. Yale students chanted “no means yes, yes means anal” in 2010, so this is (by the hierarchy’s own standards) a rot that spreads from the head. Maybe now Sean Young’s claims to have been abused by a studio head and Warren Beatty might be finally believed.

fetishism

In BR 2049, K doesn’t bother with complicated replicant Luv. He has an A.I. called Joi (Ana de Armas) instead, a software construct designed to meet his every need. Joi makes home dinners for him and then changes into vampy outfits, the digitized remake of the 1950s every MAGA man needs. The fetish she offers K is the siren call of whiteness: “You’re special.”

Joi “believes” this–or, more exactly, has been programmed to say it–so that K continues to do his work. In just the same way, the “wages of whiteness” like racist statues, the national anthem, and not being shot by police compensate for the not so perfect lived experience of actually being “white.”

Only K finds out that, despite his fantasy, he isn’t special, he’s not a naturally-born replicant, but just another shop-bought off-the-shelf model. Rather than give up his fetishism, he transposes it into the “noble death.” The rebel replicant leader suggests to him that such a death is the most human thing he can do, like Sydney Carton in Tale of Two Cities–whose 1935 movie ending was oddly watched in The Deuce as a form of sex work. K dies happily at the end, the first time he has smiled during the entire film.

But why would a machine that can see what humans have done to the world want to be human? There’s no reason that makes “sense” within the narrative, it’s just the old colonial fantasy that what “they” want above all is to be like “us.” And it’s the job of the Hero to stop them. Within the film narrative that doesn’t quite make sense but the real Hero is, in the cinematic fantasy, the male spectator, now aspiring to be a machine, a metaphor that also saturates sports fantasy.

condensation

K does achieve one notable visual first. Freud imagined Western male (hetero)sexuality to revolve around the (m)other/”whore” classification. These roles must then be separated to feel right and, goodness knows, a whole lot of “aesthetics” has followed from that separation. In a world where, according to the New Yorker of all places, incest is the top-rated theme in porn, such distinction seems more than a little quaint.

In BR 2049, K manages to have it both ways by inserting his eroticized (m)other Joi into the body of a replicant sex worker Mariette (Mackenzie Davis). The resulting not quite perfectly overlapping three-way was a tour-de-force of animation and white male peculiarity. What does the white (machine) man want? To fuck (with) his own software. Apparently.

white supremacy

What does machine visuality want? To sustain the separation between the human and the enslaved. In the first Blade Runner, the replicants are to be pitied as they are hunted down. Now the replicant capitalist Wallace demands the production of an enslaved machine labor force, creating a new hierarchy between the human machine and the enslaved machine.

The enslaved machine will be known to be enslaved in the same way that the United States knew its enslaved to be so: because they were their mother’s child. An enslaved person could be of many phenotypes and genealogies. But there was no gainsaying partus sequitur ventrem, literally “the offspring follows the womb.” Control of the womb is, as United States politics amply demonstrates, central to all coloniality. As Saidiya Hartman puts it, “the master dreams of future increase.” Androids may dream of electric sheep but the ones in charge dream of primitive accumulation.

In the imaginary of Blade Runner 2049, the ever-more perfect replicant can defeat the test as to whether it feels. But it cannot refute being its mother’s child, although that “kinship loses meaning,” as Hortense Spillers argues in the context of slavery, when “one is neither female or male.” Enslaved or machine, the meaningless of the non-human condition continues. The patriarchy wins on both sides of the film: the replicant natural-born child lives (win for Wallace’s slave patriarchy). Deckard lives, and like a latter day father of the Horatii, gets to claim the same woman as “his” child, free of both her mother and K, her potential love interest (win for replicant patriarchy).

the end of patriarchy. or the end of the world?

It turns out that it is not the end of capitalism that is impossible to imagine over that of the end of the world. It is that of patriarchy. Worse, for patriarchy to continue, it now imagines that its conquest of nature must continue, whether in the machine body, the transformed planet, or the racialized hierarchies of the human and the enslaved.