Health care workers stand in the street in counter-protest to hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol to demand the stay-at-home order be lifted in Denver, Colorado, U.S. April 19, 2020. REUTERS/Alyson McClaran MANDATORY CREDIT. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
The corona virus was supposed to be the great equalizer, a leveler of the divides of race, class and gender. Instead, the invisible pathogen has not only made existing inequalities palpably visible, it has weaponized them. The far-right, last seen at Charlottesville, is back with a new claim: the right (for you) to die. The old settler-colonial slogan “Liberty or Death” has been revamped: “my (white) Liberty in exchange for your Death.” In one week in April, the virus has become racialized.
The far-right activism has followed from a perverse and reverse act of self-recognition. Those white people inclined to an overt declaration of white supremacy became aware that Black, brown and Indigenous people were being disproportionately affected. Hearing this, they concluded that they are immune.
Or more exactly, when “protestors” were asked if they thought the epidemic was real, they agreed that it was but claimed that they were protected by a “higher power.” This phrase comes from the rhetorics of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step groups rather than Christianity. It was used to carry a double meaning in the familiar dog-whistle locutions of US white supremacy: the higher power is God, manifested as whiteness.
Learning to see in reverse
Let’s track how the “invisible enemy” constantly evoked by Trump became visibly non-white people. In a ten day span, the virus became racialized domestically, congruent with the ongoing xenophobia attached to the disease as being “Chinese.”
It had been predicted in March that minorities would suffer economically. But it was not until early April that media began to report on the disproportionate rates of death and infection in these communities. A wave of reports began in national media around April 7, 2020. By April 17, the Center for Disease Control was reporting that of those cases where racial and ethnic identity was known, 30% of COVID-19 patients were African American and 18% were “Hispanic/Latino.”
A week after this media wave broke, the first “protest” against stay-at-home measures happened in Michigan on April 15. Organized by Trump front groups like the Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC), the event was quickly co-opted by the far-right. The MCC called for people to stay in their cars. Instead, rifle-carrying men in combat gear posed on the steps of the Capitol. While police might have intervened–imagine this with protestors from the Nation of Islam–this unpermitted, armed action was allowed to continue and garner wall-to-wall media coverage.
Lansing, MI, April 15, 2020.
It was right after a Fox News segment on April 17 covered the event that Trump sent out his “LIBERATE” tweets. As at Charlottesville, the far-right received presidential endorsement, even as the MCC now urges its followers not to attend follow-up Operation Gridlock events later this month. But the Betsy Devos-funded Michigan Freedom Fund, a co-organizer of the event, is still all in, calling the stay at home order “arbitrary and capricious.” The president and a leading cabinet member are conspiring against their own policies in other words.
If Michigan saw assault rifles, two days later on April 17, Denver saw a white woman in a top-end Dodge RAM 1500 tell a medical worker to “go back to China.” Not because he was Chinese, but because social distancing is communism, and the virus “is” Chinese. So it makes “sense.”
Health care workers stand in the street in counter-protest to hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol to demand the stay-at-home order be lifted in Denver, Colorado, U.S. April 19, 2020. REUTERS/Alyson McClaran
You just know this woman has 5,000 rolls of toilet paper in her McMansion alongside a freezer or two full of food. While she feels herself to be a brave anti-Communist, she did not in fact dare to walk the streets. The next day in Kentucky the all-white “protestors” chanted “Facts Not Fear,” a Fox News slogan, even as cases peaked in the state.
There is, then, a range of class and political positions among the white activists. What they share is a fear that whiteness is being dissolved in the emergency created by the pandemic. When they say–as they all do–that they would rather work than receive a government handout, it expresses the long-standing belief that welfare is only for people of color and so-called “white trash.” Being required to stay home and receive government funds provokes a furious–if small in number–backlash at being reframed as a dependent person, understood by them to mean a person of color, rather than a “free” person, meaning white. Slavery is never far away in the US.
It has all had an effect. On April 9, 81% of Americans supported stay at home policies, including 68% of Republicans (Quinnipiac). A week later (April 16), Pew Research found 66% concerned that the country would reopen too quickly. By April 19, that support had dropped to 58%, with less than 40% of Republicans in support (NBC News/WSJ). Other polls are close to that number with some as high as 64%. Polls are fickle, and biased, yes. But let’s not presume that a handful of activists can’t change minds, just because we intensely disagree with them.
Facts really don’t have much to do with this. Whiteness connects by emotional cathexis. White supremacy contains a volatile mix of anger, resentment and fear of failure, which is then combined with violence, especially against women. “Lock Her Up,” a slogan again in use at the Michigan protest, remains its watchword. Guns are its iconographic form. Its vocabulary is selectively drawn from the 1776 settler-colonial uprising in defense of slavery, also known as the American Revolution
Breaking the frame of whiteness
What’s at stake now is whether the far-right variant of white supremacy becomes hegemonic over the new conjuncture. Or if something entirely new can be imagined, as thinkers from Gramsci to Grace Lee Boggs, Stuart Hall, Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have long exhorted us to do. It will take what Hall called “a profound cultural transformation” to undehumanize the settler-colony and imagine something different.
Whiteness “works” as an ideology because it provides a frame to sustain contradiction, or as Hall put it:
it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference
Hall, “Gramsci and Us”
Its goal is to make xenophobic white supremacy the ‘common sense’ (which is not to say ‘good sense’) not of politics as a whole but of the right. And, as Hall put it, they have ‘totally dominated that idiom, while the Left forlornly tries to drag the conversation round to “our policies.”‘
To break the frame offered by white supremacy will have create what Arundhati Roy calls “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” It will be both digital and material. A portal is not quite a frame. It that may have edges but not borders. It creates a sense of relation not of exclusion. The intensity of white reaction responds to their sense that that gateway is, paradoxically, now more visible than it has been for some time. How this plays out depends on how the several waves of Covid-19 infection are imagined and configured. I really don’t know what will happen.
What does white nationalism look like today? It looks like Etihad Man. A 41 year old ex-soldier in Northern Ireland turned civil engineering manager, whose idea of entertainment is physical and verbal racialized violence at the Etihad football (soccer) stadium in Manchester. He embodies how Thatcherism’s Great Moving Right Show turned into Brexit.
Man. Utd’s Fred being hit by one of several lighters thrown from the crowd at Etihad Stadium. Photo: Tom Jenkins/Guardian
On Saturday, as you can see above, Etihad Man was among a reassuringly similar group of (mostly) middle-aged (almost entirely) white Manchester City fans, hurling objects like lighters and water bottles at Manchester United’s Brazilian midfielder Fred, while chanting racist abuse. His team were losing.
Etihad Man outlined at right, 41 year old Anthony Burke
Anthony Burke, outlined above, happened to be photographed and video-ed while making so-called ‘monkey’ chants and gestures at Fred. No one chants by themselves, Burke was simply the most visible of the racist collective. As the video plays, you can lip read him chanting ‘You Black B*st*rd,’ together with the sweet white-haired older woman to his right (our left) and everyone else in shot.
Etihad Man was born in 1978, the year that Stuart Hall first diagnosed Mrs Thatcher’s ‘Great Moving Right Show.’ That movement has brought us to Brexit-Trumpism and doesn’t appear to be finished yet. It is embodied in Etihad Man. He lives in the suburbs. You know he voted for Brexit. He’s separated from his wife. He even has Black relatives. He wrote on Facebook: ‘Listen, I’m only racist c*** because I had a screen shot that made me look it.’ Never mind the video, then.
His well-paid job offers physical comforts. He must have paid at least £50 for his ticket–far more if it was being resold. He’s got a down vest and a nice jumper in case he gets cold. But jumping up and down like a ‘monkey’ will keep you warm too.
That’s actually his defense–he named himself and gave interviews. According to him, he was putting his hands in his pockets. Will it get him off? It might well–he’s out on bail already. But none of the others that share in his psychic rage at the sight of Blackness will be inconvenienced in any way.
For this segment of Middle England, the £50 race riot is the participatory equivalent of being at a Trump rally. Football crowds are self-directed with chants originating from the fans, not prompted by the club. And like the Trump audience, they’re enjoying themselves–only they get to direct their resentments and hatreds at an actual person, right there.
In class-ridden British stereotypes, ex-Army middle managers don’t throw objects and make racist chants. But they do. So while the response has concentrated on excluding one white person, the issue is all these white people in general. Or, more exactly, how does a city go from singing ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ together in 2017 after the bombing at Ariana Grande’s Manchester Arena concert, two miles away, to singing that?
It’s not all of Manchester, I know. But it is less than a week before a general election that has seen the Conservatives’ embrace of white nationalism return them to polling at the 43% level that elected Mrs. Thatcher on three occasions. According the right-wing ‘think tank’ Onward, this election was going to be determined by ‘Workington Man’:
‘an older, white, non-graduate man from the North of England, with strong rugby league traditions and a tendency to vote Labour.’
Almost immediately dismissed, Workington Man faded quickly and the alleged report is not to be found online anymore. But Etihad Man is all too real. Burke works for the Kier Group, a construction conglomerate who made £124 million declared profit on £4.5 billion revenues in financial year 2018-19.
Their webpage entitled “Quality, Diversity, Inclusion” features a group photograph of all white men in hard hats and hi-vis vests, cheering at the camera, as if a goal has been scored:
This idea of inclusion brings together the white nationalism of the football crowd with the Brexit-y uniform of the Yellow Vest. That’s right, the anti-Europeans have appropriated a European symbol of anti-austerity to indicate their support for the UK’s Brexit party of austerity.
Kier do quietly admit:
“We know things aren’t perfect yet – for example, we would like to see a greater number of women and people from ethnically diverse backgrounds fully represented in our organisation.”
One would be a start.
Etihad Man takes his whites-only football culture from work to football and back again. It doesn’t trouble him that his stadium is named after the airline of the United Arab Emirates, whose money has turned Manchester City from an also-ran into one of the top clubs in Europe. I wouldn’t turn up at the Etihad in a keffiyeh though, let alone a hijab.
The response from organized football has been to call for Burke to be banned and for ‘education.’ But Kick It Out, the official anti-racism group, make the limitations of this approach visible on their home page.
While there are three visibly Black British men in this banner, they are all cropped by the frame. Only the young Black woman at bottom left can be fully seen. Meanwhile five white people, including England captain Harry Kane, can be fully seen with two more cropped. It’s a step up from the Kier Group but not very far.
For Etihad Man loves Harry Kane, the white English center forward, wearing the Cross of St George beloved of white nationalists. Etihad Man might be part of England Away, the notorious England traveling fans who routinely vandalize European cities while drunk on cheap beer. He was definitely part of the Army in Northern Ireland, where he served with the Cheshire Regiment.
Etihad Man is already old news. Today’s headline in the Manchester Evening News is a ‘black alert’–it means that a local hospital can no longer guarantee patient safety because it’s so overcrowded. Did no one think for a minute about that name? More work for Kier Group, perhaps–they are in the top three health construction firms. All the people depicted on their Health webpage are visibly white.
“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
Blade Runner 2049
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
Opening shot Bladerunner 2049
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.
The Solar Eye
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.
Luv’s Eye
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.
