William M. Paris, "Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation" (Oxford UP, 2024)
01:12:17 Share

Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? Monday.com is different.

No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

Have I Got News For You is back for another season. Roy Wood Jr., Amber Ruffin, and Michael Ian Black are finding the funny in the week's biggest stories. Have I Got News For You, Saturday at 9 on CNN and streamed next day on Max.

When the game tips off, the NBA action is just beginning on FanDuel, America's number one sportsbook. Because FanDuel is your home for NBA live betting, however you want to play. Now is the perfect time to join. Make every moment more with FanDuel, official sports betting partner of the NBA. 21 plus and present in Virginia. First online, real money wager only. $5 first deposit required. Bonus issued is non-withdrawable bonus bets which expire seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver, and I'm co-host of the channel, along with Carrie Fichtor, Robert Talese, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry.

Today's interview is with William Parris, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His book, Race, Time, and Utopia, Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation, is just out from Oxford University Press.

How does time figure in racial domination? What is the relationship between the capitalist organization of time and racial domination? Could utopian thinking give us ways of understanding our own time and its dominations? In Race, Time, and Utopia, Paris uses the tools of critical theory to draw out the utopian interventions in the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Delaney, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs.

arguing that utopian thinking gives us normative purchase in the problems of our time. Paris shows not that these historical figures can tell us how or to what end we navigate our current crises,

Rather, their insights and failures help us denaturalize our mode of life and develop self-mancipatory practices to realize what is not yet possible under the current conditions of injustice in which we have come to be. William Parris, welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you here. So will you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background as a theorist, and how you came to write this particular project? Sure.

Yeah. So I think if I wanted to give a sort of a intellectual charting of how I came to write this book, I did my PhD in philosophy at Penn State University, which was known for amongst other things, continental philosophy, phenomenology. But, you know, as concerns this book, critical philosophy of race.

When I started working on critical philosophy of race, you know, I didn't come in knowing anything about philosophy of race, but as I was reading these figures, I realized I was less interested in questions about, you know, what race is or what the best concept of race, race was instead. And this is what eventually became my dissertation. Um, a whole dissertation on, um, invention and race and gender was reading these figures as trying to undo, um,

racial descriptions, trying to find the creativity within what has been imposed upon you. And this notion of invention, if I wanted to give a sort of a broader trajectory of it, eventually became this question about utopia. How is it that we can generate novelty within past historical relations? Where can we find novelty when it can seem so much of contemporary daily life, oppressive structures,

are repetitions of the past. Not repetition in terms of the same thing over and over again, but that the structure keeps reappearing again and again. And so I think the real germ of this project, the transition from talking about invention itself into utopia and time and race is honestly the pandemic and the George Floyd protests.

You know, you're stuck inside and you're watching this movement in the streets that I will say for myself, I had never seen anything like this. It wasn't it wasn't I thought everything would change overnight, but I felt as if something new were happening. And I'm looking at this night and I just find myself thinking again and again, this cannot be all there is. There must be something else, you know, beyond, you know, this social situation, right?

So I had access to the Northwestern Library. I was a postdoc there at this time. And luckily, Ernst Bloch's three-volume work, Philosophy of Hope, was digitized and online. And I just devoured it.

I would just spend hours reading through it. And it didn't make a lick of sense at first. I was like, there's something here. There's something going on. What is this notion of your utopia as tendency looking at the past, trying to find these fragments? And I thought, wait,

That's actually not how I've heard other people talk about utopia. I've heard it talked about in terms of sort of a pejorative of your, well, you know, that's wishing for too much too soon or the perfection and possibility, or even when it's talked about, um,

positively. It's usually this idea that we need to have these ideals to compare to reality. We know we'll never achieve it, but it seems to be almost ahistorical. And then I'm reading this Marxist Ernst Bloch, and that's not what he's doing. And so

Partially, this came from my deep need to try to think my own moment, but also my frustration with how people just assume utopia is a dictionary definition and you can either say yes or no to it. What Block is saying is you're already doing it.

And, you know, in using the tools of phenomenology and Marxism and all of that, he shows that this continually recurs through history. And I started thinking, well, why don't I try to figure out what that concept is? You know, enough of this. You know, we're doing, you know, you're doing utopia. I'm doing science. I'm a realist. I'm a pragmatist. In fact, what we find with utopia, what I try to argue with the book is it's not about being anti-realist. It's actually about a conflict over what's going to count as realistic, right?

And this book emerged from that, me trying to work with these figures I was already familiar with and some I wanted to know more about. And I wanted to put them in, let's put it this way, a different historical archive, that they're not just talking about what's being done to them, but that there's actually the presentiment of some future other form of life in them that requires hermeneutical and investigative work. And I wanted to make that real for the readers. I love that. Yeah.

those three volumes were available to you because you take these very cryptic statements from Bloch and then motivate them within the terms of the book to help us understand why we might want to talk about utopia and what it might be doing. So let's, you've already set this up beautifully. You talk about the relationship between consciousness and social relationships. And I can hear in the story you just gave us about this experience of needing to

to develop a consciousness of what's going on in social relationships that took you into BlacksWork. So will you tell us how you understand that relationship and its potentialities?

Yeah. So in the book, and this was also a previous article, this is probably the piece of writing where you can really see me not just struggling or wrestling with the George Floyd uprising of 2020, but it's aftermath. It's seeming a failure in all of that. And I can say more about the relationship between utopia and failure because that also really animates me. But let's talk about the consciousness piece first.

Well, you know, the aftermath of the George Floyd uprising, it left me ambivalent. It seemed to me that one of the lessons being drawn from it, and even though no one explicitly endorses it this way, is the idea that consciousness and social relations and institutions can change simply by virtue of the fact of making people aware that there's something wrong in the world.

that racism is wrong, capitalism is wrong, ecological devastation is wrong. And in the book, I call this the awareness model of consciousness that almost presumes that consciousness is passive reflective rather than practical reflective is how I will understand it. And so instead, I thought, well, no, what's actually happened to George Floyd protests is not this idea of trying to make people aware of injustices.

It is, you know, in a symptom. It is, you know, an experience of crisis. It is an experience in which, you know, consciousness that we, that I understand tries to articulate itself in, you know, cogent practices, you know, going to the store, going to work, you

You know, paying the rent, et cetera. And all of a sudden, not all of a sudden, but, you know, quite suddenly, this is thrown up into crisis and catastrophe. Our expectations drawn from the past no longer align with the present moment.

And I thought, well, then that's a more interesting understanding of what's happening. It's not that people now know that racism is wrong. It is that they actually cannot continue on with their practices that allow them to make sense of and cohere their reality.

So what then what is utopian consciousness? Well, I thought, well, what is actually also happening is not just there's a moment of crisis, there's a striving to resolve that crisis on a different set of terms. And, you know, these different set of terms, they're not a fully fleshed out theory. It sometimes emerges a slogan such as, you know, abolish the police.

And wherever you fall on that, my interest is the idea that it is a striving of creating a set of practices that don't actually cohere and anchor with our present state of the world. And thus, you know, allow us to ask, well, what kind of social conditions would allow that practice to exist?

fully develop and actualize. And then I started, you know, and so what I worked through is that there seems to be a, what I will call an uneven, non-synchronous relationship between crisis consciousness and utopian consciousness.

If I wanted to put it rather plainly, crisis consciousness is fragmented. It's a passive undergoing. No one chooses to go into crisis. Crisis seems to come from the outside. While utopian consciousness, I would call it this way, is fragmentary. It tries to fragment the status quo. It's striving to come forward. But it's not wholly realized because if it were wholly realized, it wouldn't be utopian consciousness. It would be a fully realized set of practices.

And so working through that relationship of fragmented and fragmentary, I realized, well, what starts to happen, unfortunately, is we're not always guaranteed that the emergence of crisis consciousness will mean that utopian consciousness comes right up right alongside. There can be myriad objective conditions why that's not the case.

But the big lesson or idea I wanted to offer is we need to get a way of thinking about racial domination as a problem of ignorance, as a problem of even necessarily character, and more think about it as, well, what practices are allowed to cohere in the reproduction of our daily lives and what practices are not? And that led me to this idea of the problem is time.

that you're trying to cohere a set of past practices that seem to no longer fit the present moment, but you're also trying to cohere a set of future practices in which the objective conditions no longer seem to be there. And so I want to set that as the problem space.

to say, well, if we want to look at the failed at George Floyd moment, it's not because people forgot that racism is bad or forgot the interrelationship between capitalism, racism, et cetera. It is that the conditions for cohering a new set of practices did not emerge.

the organizational strength to bring those, those relationships into existence were not there. However, I don't sit well with the idea of, so it was in the complete failure and we should forget it. Instead, I want to rescue that, you know, that fragmentary utopian consciousness plum into its depths and ask, well, why,

what would have allowed it to be successful? And eventually that leads me to this idea of, well, I was looking for a set of practices that could anchor it in social reality such that it can't be easily reversed. But we can talk more about that as we go forward.

Yeah, because there's a way in which I think each of the points we're going to touch on involves you looking at a theorist and thinking about the failure that we can carry forward with us from them in a way. And I very much am thinking in what you were saying about how important mutual aid networks have been in Southern California during the fires and in the recovery from them, right? And these organizations

These are practices from within the pandemic that really got new life under the pandemic and that are now saving lives and helping people comprehend the trauma of that experience.

Even practices that, quote unquote, fail, that don't bring about a wholly new situation, we still inherit them. They still lay the groundwork. And so much of what I'm doing in the book, I think about time on a variety of levels. But one persistent level, the reason why I look at these historical thinkers is one, that's what I'm comfortable looking at. But two is because I want to ask questions as to what can we inherit from them?

And what, in fact, have we inherited from them? Much of what I look at in the book, I also hope, as people read, they see that there are fragments of these ideas that persist in the present that you might not have known that these figures were talking about, that you might not have realized you were enacting.

for me to strengthen utopian consciousness is not to simply strengthen our powers of imagination, but I think it's to strengthen our understanding of the tendencies and possibilities that we've inherited from the past that as of yet are unactualized and yet do shape our conduct.

Yeah, well, let's yeah, let's talk about Du Bois then. As you said, time is so central and the idea that people can live in these differentiated and fragmented social temporalities that we're not all living in the same time, and that this is a key feature of racial domination and its reproduction. So will you unpack that a bit? And then how does Du Bois help us understand that?

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

You just realized your business needed to hire someone... yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. With Indeed's sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs.

Don't wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash P-O-D-K-A-T-Z-12. Just go to Indeed.com slash P-O-D-K-A-T-Z-12 right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring? Indeed is all you need.

So I imagine that, you know, anyone listening might, you know, wonder what, if you're talking to racial domination, why are we also talking about time? I should say that, you know, me as a theorist in this book, in some ways I'm a reductive thinker. Um, by that, I don't mean, I hope I don't mean I'm simply simplistic in the idea of it's very thin reading. I, I think that there are a good number of ideas, not too many in there, but what I mean is I like trying to isolate, um,

a central and essential feature of social life that we could not do without. And when I started thinking about racial domination, I started thinking, well, consciousness understood sort of practical, reflective, you know, engaging with practices, but

Everything we do revolves around time, how we mobilize it, how we consume it, how it's displaced, how it's wasted. You cannot understand anything like the reproduction of a form of social existence, our practices, without understanding time in terms of your past, present, future, time in terms of how we synchronize our practices and cohere them with others.

And time understood as, you know, who do we consider to be our contemporaries? Who do we understand as deserving of acknowledgement or having the power to enforce our acknowledgement of them? And so when you look at racial domination, it's easy to think about it as a sort of discriminatory definition, one group of people oppressing another group of people.

But we want to burrow further. Well, what does racial domination look like? It looks like you're not having access to particular types of jobs, not being able to live in particular types of neighborhoods, acquiring debt.

that persists over generations, being uprooted from prior coherent social practices. Time just keeps popping up. And the point is not to leave it abstract, but to concretize it. And so I started thinking, well, you can only practice racial domination insofar as you're able to dominate the time of others.

You're able to cohere or disintegrate their practices. You're able to either ascript them to your norms of how life ought to go, what you ought to aim for, or lock them out of it. And so I began with this idea that racial domination, it can only obtain insofar as there's a conflict over the time of our practices, that one group of people

has the power to arbitrarily interfere in the practices of another group of people. And I want to reduce that to this question of time. And so when I'm reading Du Bois, and I stick with the early Du Bois, the early Du Bois, and this is, you know, I don't know how controversial this will be, but I'll leave it to people to read the chapter. There is a deep Platonism in Du Bois of how he understands the

the conflict of racial domination so soon after the end of slavery, maybe go 30 or 40 years. What do I mean by this Platonism? Well, Du Bois, he understands the potential ideal of the polis, a political society, is one in which all the parts are harmonized with one another.

that all are integrated and able to share and play their role. And there's a type of unity to it. And this unity for him is forestalled because on the one hand, he thinks even though slavery has been formally ended, he thinks the habits of

the practices of slavery, they still, in a sense, infect many black people. Those who think of Du Bois as an elitist, I'm not interested in defending him from that. Every thinker I engage in the book, it's never a wholehearted endorsement. I, in fact, just want to read them on their own terms and see what's the insight there. And so he thinks that, you know, I'll call them the black masses or the black proletariats.

Part of the problem is they're not able to integrate into a rapidly modernizing world. And so he realizes that they will not be able to be productive citizens insofar as they are constantly viewed as out of joint, non-synchronous is the language I get from Ernst Spock, with contemporary reality.

And so he takes up this idea of the talented 10th, a sort of vanguard educated elite of African-Americans as their mission functionally is to mediate between the, quote unquote, black proletariat and modern society. Now, this might sound like he thinks that, you know, the black proletariat, the black masses, they have nothing to contribute that, you know, they just need to get with the program.

But that's not it at all. And there are two other questions of temporality that I'll conclude with, and then maybe we can talk a bit more. One, he thinks even though maybe economically and politically the black proletariat, they seem backwards, their cultural practices, what makes them distinctive, he thinks that some of it is a holdover from African traditions, give you a glimpse of

of what a new form of life could be, one that is fully integrated, that sees black people as fully human, and that is their gift, he calls it, that they need to contribute to allow the white polity to fully denude itself from its enslaved past.

But the other issue he runs into, and this is what I find most interesting, with this invocation of the talented 10th, he is actually dealing with the question of leadership. In order to be an effective leader, you need to be synchronized with those who would like to lead. But where did this talented 10th come from?

You know, he likes to, you know, in the souls of black folk, he kind of mobilized the allegory of the cave that the talented tenth of the ones who have seen the son of truth and it's their responsibility to descend back down to the cave and free the benighted black proletariat and lead them out. But as we know in the allegory of the cave, those who descend back down, they're not greeted as heroes or liberators. In fact, they're fought.

And Du Bois mobilizes this, and I actually think he starts to, even this early, starts to rethink this notion of a talented tent vanguard because he realizes they themselves are split within their solidarity with the black people they're supposed to lead, but their sense that they actually don't belong with those black people, that they belong to white modern society. And so they are out of joint, even with the very people they're supposed to lead. What conclusion do I draw from this?

I hope that this shows that conditions of racial domination, contrary to what we may hope or want, don't necessarily unify those who are dominated absolutely.

that it actually even fragments the social relations within them such that there will always be those who can live in relative freedom vis-a-vis the others. And, you know, that relative freedom might seem like that offers the potential for them to lead the masses to freedom, but it's just as likely to, you know,

alienate them from those that they are meant to be engaged with. And he has this nice chapter in the Souls of Black with the one piece of literature called Of the Coming of John. And it's literally the story of a figure, Black John, who leaves the South and goes North, allegory of the cave.

gets an education, realizes how wrong racist society is, realizes that he also isn't a part of Northern society. He encounters racism while he's up there and goes back down south to be like, well, then I will be the savior of my people. He goes to a church and he tries to tell them you need to leave all this religious mysticism behind. You need to become modern. And he has this really nice sentence where he says, you know, the people did not understand Black John because he spoke an unknown tongue.

And what Du Bois is trying to say there is Black John doesn't even understand the very people he claims to be leading. And I want to say that Du Bois is understanding how our character and political relationships become disjointed, non-synchronized in racial domination, and he's trying to exemplify a

new set of social relationships where yes the talented 10th play their role but also they can be led and saved by the black masses rather than them just simply saving the black masses so

But I use that to say that this is a persistent problem, a persistent problem of where do leaders come from? How do they synchronize their social practices and how can they cohere in a sort of robust, organized force? Yeah. And this I mean, it seems so consonant with questions that are so old within Marxism.

Right. And seeing seeing how important that is carrying through. And I was thinking about somebody like Kiyonga Yamada-Taylor's sort of analysis of, for instance, Obama's leadership as this out of being out of sync. Right. And she really focuses on the moment when he goes to Flint and drinks the water. Right. And like how out of sync this is with what people have been doing and organizing to do.

Yeah. And so I hope no one reads my book as because one of the critiques of utopia is that is is a type of vanguardism. It is, you know, some intellectual dreams up the perfect, perfect world and then imposes it on others from the outside. But my book argues that utopia is a constant tendency in historical life.

It isn't about, you know, we need to find the right black people to give the right ideas to other black people. Instead, I want to show that actually utopia is a site of conflict. It's what allows us to see that there are contradictions. And we should take the lesson from Du Bois. If back then he couldn't make the talented 10th concept work because of these risks of temporality, we have no good reason to think we can make a version of it work now.

And so that requires us to rethink what is going to allow these social practices to cohere. And it's not going to be, well, well-educated people who have drawn their ideas that often from spaces that often serve to conserve the status quo. We just need more of them to chastise and condescend to these unruly black people who don't know what's good for them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's let's then turn to black nationalism.

to keep going forward in the analysis of, um, the way that you read black nationalism as helping us to understand the social transformations of the organization of time is necessary to end racial domination. Um, and here again, you're alive to the critiques and you're also saying that there's something vital that we need now. There's, there are these, these fragments that we need now for thinking. Yes. Uh,

our crisis so will you talk about these critiques that we need yeah so let me you know um begin by saying it might be surprised if you you know my general commitments and the general commitments of the book why in the world do i talk about black nationalism especially because there's a strong marxist thread in the book and you know uh traditionally marxism is um at

best ambivalent about nationalism. Withering away. Yes, exactly. At worst, thinks it's always reactionary. It serves to divide the dominant, the proletariat, etc. And then when you look at the fact that I am writing on not just Martin DeLay, but Marcus Garvey, whose politics are completely antithetical to mine.

I wanted to show that you can still find something in these figures that is worthwhile to rescue. Why? Partially the reason why I look at Marcus Garvey is, whether you like the politics or not, it is an undeniable historical fact that not simply due to his personality, but the UNIA was one of the largest mass organizations of black people in the United States.

Caribbean, Latin America to South Africa. If you want to talk about changing the world, you might at least want to be curious about why that happened. What need was that meeting?

And, you know, partially something I say, you know, rather quickly in the book is that even after, you know, Garvey's nationalism fell apart, it's not as if those people who are animated by this, you know, promise of creativity, organization, self-determination just went away. In fact, some of the at least the historical record seems to show a lot of them start pouring their energies into a nascent civil rights movement. Some of them actually just became communists.

And so that's interesting. That tells me that we don't just reject you a series of thoughts because we don't like the politics. I'm trying to say, so let's try to figure out what is the mechanism that makes it work. So this brings me to the question of nationalism and what I think about the concept of utopia.

Well, utopia, I'm realizing these investigations, is not simply about trying to tell a story of a perfect world or something else. In fact, I think it's actually rarely about that. When you actually look at what utopia is doing as a concept, as a tendency, is it searching for what I call in the book, and I get this concept from Eva von Redeker's Praxis in Revolution, is a search for new anchoring practices. What

What I mean by that is, you know, a search for institutions or social relations that will allow particular practices to persevere throughout time. That will also give them their particular coherence and synchronicity and reasonableness.

So when I look at Delaney and Garvey and their call for a black nation, one, I try to show that they think of a nation as a type of anchoring practice. One thing that they are trying to say is that merely being formally admitted into the state, so Martin Delaney looks at this, even while he's writing, while slavery is happening, there are some black people who are free. There are even some black people who, for whatever accounts, can vote.

And he tries to say, don't confuse the fact that you can you appear to vote like other white people vote that you are a citizen. What you actually have is a privilege, because when he looks at what the nation that underwrites the state is.

He thinks it's a racial nation. It's a white polity. And, you know, it is an act of voting where, you know, you're able to participate in this simulacrum of political participation, but you're not actually able to rule. You're not actually able to hold office. And he will say, so what looks like a right to you is actually a privilege you have that will always be hinged to the whims and the desires of those who truly have power.

And so he calls for the creation of a black nation because he's trying to say,

We can only have rights insofar as our practices are anchored in some form of self-determination. And given that the character of the U.S. nation as it is functionally almost seems to be essentially excludes black people from being what he calls a ruling element, then we need another anchoring practice and we need to create that ourselves.

And so the chapter is me trying to say how the nation functions both as a type of utopia insofar as it contests the status quo. It offers a radical alternative, almost an explosion of the settled terms of agreement. But also it tries to instantiate what would have to be accomplished in order for these social relations to truly be changed.

And in the nation, people found a sense of honor. The nation works insofar as it gives people a sense that we all live on the same page. We are simultaneous with one another. That what happens to one person in the nation also happens to me.

And it creates a sense of these bonds of solidarity. And I tried to show, well, why would this notion of the black nation keep appearing from, you know, in between diverse historical context of Delaney when slavery is existing and Garvey, you know, in the 1920s? And it's because there's this need for an anchoring practice, something that says that we can create something for ourselves and we don't merely need to understand progress as integration into the dominant terms of order.

Of course, I think that there are obviously regressive aspects to this invocation of black nationalism, especially when we look at Garvey. Garvey, not to get into all the finer philosophical details, you know, buy the book, read it and all of that. But, you know, for him, the nation almost becomes this sort of paranoid racial essence you need to constantly and jealously guard.

The black body for him is the site of the nation. Even though he talked about Africa, actually the metaphysics of his philosophy, the fundamentals of it is that no, your body itself is an effect of what he calls universal intelligence, what he calls God.

And he's like, the nation is actually there. It's not in a geographical place. So you need to be able to anchor your own body, have control over it. And he takes this so far when he gives these speeches on African philosophy. He's like, that means you need to even watch what food you eat.

He talks about two to three eggs a day, making sure that you are clean, not unkempt, because if you hold yourself in that type of regard, you would never want others to see you to be disheveled. But this kind of turns into almost a conservative philosophy of the body is always a site of creativity and a site of conservation. And I'm open about that.

But I want to say what we should try to critique and rescue is that, you know, Garvey and Delaney are enunciating this idea of you need to be real about what it means to have power. You don't have power if you don't control what anchors these social relations. And you need to find the power to control and anchor those social relations within yourself.

And I use that to show that, wow, so also what utopia offers us is it contests the idea that the only way to understand progress in terms of racial domination is insofar as black people are absorbed into the state.

In fact, what seems to be important is this notion of separation. And the separation is important because it challenges the idea that the governing anchoring practice is the only one that can cohere our social relations. And without that belief,

that there are other possible ways of anchoring our practices, then we're going to be going in circles and be wondering why domination keeps emerging in ever more complex but disastrous forms. And I want to rescue that idea. Even as I say there's a risk of making the nation anchoring practice, especially when it comes to racial domination, because it can make it seem as if race really does have an essence, a life of its own.

something that needs to be conserved and thus actually forego the promise of a utopian break with our status quo.

Well, and this concern about this view of race that you're talking about, I think, then comes out really clearly in the chapter where you're going to use Fanon to talk about racial fetishism. And I just want to note that it makes a lot of sense, your earlier interest in invention, when reading Garvey, his interest in creativity and self-determination, and then being concerned about...

The sort of closure of that creativity and self-determination. How he portrays it. Yeah.

And it makes sense because you're really tracking that to see both that opening and closing in his work. As I said, utopian consciousness is fragmentary. You're not going to find it wholly realized. And so I lean into that. And I don't think that that means that Garvey wasn't an interesting thinker or this shows that utopia is wrong. I actually think that this is a necessary condition for any utopian consciousness.

And critical theory needs to be comfortable with the fact that the bad side of history is going to be entangled with the possibility of the good. Yeah, yeah. So then let's talk about racial fetishism. Like, what is it? And why do we need to be aware of it?

Yes. Okay. So I turned to Fanon for this account of racial fetishism and I focus on the black skin, white mask. I know it might seem to make more sense to have focused on Fanon of wretched of the earth, but you know, here is my reasoning for not doing that. This book, as your finance has a black skin, white mask, it is a product of its time. Wretched of the earth is a product of, um,

and imminently revolutionary times. It really did seem when he's writing this book in 1961 that the world was going to change. He's looking at all these anti-colonial revolutions. He's looking at the conflict between capitalism and the socialist states. And it seemed like there is this...

opening. It will be hard. It'll be complex. We can't know where it's going to go. But an opening for the charting of a new humanism, which he understands as a new set of social relations that are founded on mutuality, freedom, and reason. I think Fanon is really a thinker of reason.

We're not in that moment. And so I want to look at, you know, the phenomenon of Black Swim Light Mass, which is not an explicitly revolutionary book on my reading. And yet there is something interesting going on there.

Racial fetishism, as I understand it, is a particular feature of what we can call capitalist societies. It is, you know, societies, of course, you know, where there is exploitation and domination. But the anchoring practice of those societies are practices that are outside the control of those who are subjugated.

So when I talk about racial fetishism, what I think that Fanon realizes is that in societies that are ordered on terms of racial domination, where their anchoring practice is outside the control of most of the people who are members of those societies, they will appear as if race really does have a life of its own.

That, you know, the people who are poor, the people who are in prison, the people who are murdered, there must actually be something about them that deserves this. Because, you know, how else to explain it unless I have to actually admit that I don't really control my society. And so he thinks that colonial societies are ones that in gender type of pathology where we act as if

race truly is a force of its own. And it can make it seem as if all we can do is simply try to follow that through, try to discover the essence of race and hopefully that there is freedom. But what Fanon actually tries to show is that the problem of racial fetishism isn't first a problem of consciousness, it's a problem of our social practices.

And he's trying to unmask that, elaborate that and show that, you know, colonial societies are ones in which to use a phrase that my friend Yeta Moulage once used to describe Freud's work. It is there are societies in which the past has you rather than you having the past.

Anyone who reads Black Skin, White Masks will no doubt miss that Fanon actually has this, you know, strong argument against the notion of reparations. And, you know, it's incarnated in the sense where he says, I am not the slave of, you know, the slave of history. And this might be shocking or sometimes people gloss over it because many of us think, no, we have to...

those who have been oppressed in the past. We have no reason to forego them. But your financing's almost invoked this idea of a radical break with history. I love this, the French word that he used that I give so much importance to is dépouillement, which is almost metaphorically like a snake shedding his skin.

He thinks the only way beyond racial fetishism is we actually just have to leave the past behind, not try to redeem it, not try to bring it forth. The issue is that all that accumulation of racial dreck and violence and power, it seems to shape that that is who we are.

And for Fanon, and this is kind of his sort of ontological account of consciousness, consciousness never simply is anything. Consciousness is always self-consciousness. It can always separate itself. And he wants to ask, why aren't we able to do that? And he thinks that's because we are nested within wider social relations that make it seem as if the only way one can be is

is what one has been told they are. Even if internally you know that's not true, you know you're more than simply a black person and a white person, he's examining, again, that sort of temporal non-synchronicity of, you know, I know who I am, and yet nevertheless I must act as one does. I must act as what has been done to me.

And so racial fetishism, I think, is different than racism, which may obtain in non-capitalist societies. If we want a dictionary definition of racism, you know, the hatred of other people based on social characteristics that they have. But what I want to show is that he thinks that racism is not a problem of we need to get our morality correct.

It is a problem of the fact that we are not truly in control of our practices and our time insofar as the future, its creativity has denied us. And so we can only be held by the past. And then race appears to be something that we will always have to reckon with, that always prefigures what we do, even when we consciously know it should not be the case. And that is what I find interesting where he's trying to say it's not about knowing that racism is wrong, it's being able to act

and create a set of conditions in which fetishism could no longer obtain. And that's what he thinks is the way out of the colonial situation by making possible, this is my reading of the famous zone of non-being, making it possible

for black people to enter the zone of non-being to strip away all the historical accumulation and damage and come out something new. Most people read the zone of non-being as that's where black people are forced to be. It's a bad place. But then why does he say rarely is the black able to take advantage of this space that is stripped bare?

I won't bore your audience with his relationship to Sartre, but the zone of non-being is close to what Sartre describes as nothingness and being in nothingness. And so, in fact, what he's saying is black people in colonial societies are filled with too much being. They are already things.

They are already ascripted. They're not able to. And yes, it is a hellish experience because it's the true emergence of responsibility. And I think this is the utopian moment of being able to break free from what has been and know that now it is on you to create yourself.

And I think what the nonce wants to say that that zone of non-being is constantly the beating heart in colonial society. It's what allows us to seize contradictions. And he wants to say we need the courage.

And the desire to truly enter into it so that what he says at the end is so romantic note, so that we are able to touch one another, hear one another, actually feel one another. And that's why he ends in this place of praying to his body. Make of me a man who always questions because it means make of me someone who can always take distance from.

from who I take myself to be and open myself to the reason and the justifications of other people in their own creativity and inventiveness. Yeah, and I think here again that

Reading is so enabled by your attention to invention and creativity. I'm like, what makes it possible for people to do something that's not yet possible? Yeah. So I see how, yeah, because I found that I was challenged by that reading of The Zone of Not Being when I got to read your book. I reread it.

many times to be sure I was I imagine many people people will be you know that that's the William Pears thing so you can you can throw it all at me and all of that well no I mean it's just right I was taught a very different thing and I've always relied on that teaching

And me too. But then I kept going through and I kept thinking, and partially it is me looking at it in the French where he talks about the strip bear. He uses the language of « dépouiller »

And then at that crucial moment at the very end, which is not translated well into English, for some reason it's translated like self-renunciation, is de cuya mont. And he's talking about, no, we need to be able to strip ourselves bare. Yes, there's a side of being able to be vulnerable with one another, but he means packing away the past.

leaping out from it. And again, I'm critical, Fanon. This can't really be possible. And this seems to be rather hyperbolic. But the insight that we can no longer remain in a situation where the past has us

rather than we have it, I think that's still something that we should hold on to today. Because even certain forms of anti-racism seem to make it seem as if the history of race will always be with us. There's nothing one can do. It lives in the unconscious.

Privilege will always accumulate, et cetera. And in a way, even by saying racism is wrong, it reifies it as if, but nonetheless, it will reproduce. And Fanon, he had no truck with that. He's like, we are never always what the past has made us. We are always...

Yeah, yeah. Well, let's keep going with the critique of capitalism. Then you turn to James Lee Barclay.

Boggs, who was the person I knew least of the historical resources you were going to. And you read him for helping us to understand the relationship between capitalist organization of time and racial domination and how inextricable those actually are. So what does he give us that we need for understanding utopia and what it can do that utopian consciousness can do for us?

I should say James Boggs, he, in a way, this book is composed of a motley crew of characters. Some, well, I will say Du Bois and Fanon, I think at this point, you know, they are by the powers that be recognized as card-carrying philosophers and all of that. Martin Delaney, Marcus Garvey, and James Boggs.

They probably sit a bit more uneasily. Martin Delaney, some good work has been done on his thought. Marcus Garvey, I think people still don't want to touch him. But James Boggs, why is he interesting? Well, he's...

He wasn't quote unquote formally educated in the university. In fact, his ideas emerged in relationship with his wife, Grace Lee Boggs, who was your, I believe actually she did get a degree in philosophy, but he was an autoworker.

He was part of a union. And this gives us, again, a glimpse into a different form of life where being a part of this union, it was a rich form of social life. There were reading groups. There were all of these intellectual debates. And I wanted to have James Boggs in there to say, no, really interesting, complex ideas. They don't need to come from the traditional canon of philosophy. In fact, I'm trying to make good on this idea that the early Marx has that

practice is also theoretical. That doesn't mean it's immediately theoretical. Boggs didn't just pop up out of the ground, but Boggs was this Detroit auto worker from, you know, in the 1960s to the 1980s. And his basic thesis is he's looking at, um, the, the, uh,

the rapid development of automation and technology. And he sees what's coming around the corner in the United States, which eventually did happen, I think, for the most part, is deindustrialization. And he thought, well...

given that we do not it seems as if this imperative towards automation um squeezing out more surplus value and reproducing the relations of capitalism we have no control over and we are already you know marginalized in this society we are going to be the ones who find ourselves increasingly locked out of the labor market

And given that, you know, the labor market is one of the dominating anchoring practices of not just having a sense of honor, but literally being able to live and reproduce yourself. He thought, what happens when you are locked out of that?

he's not romantic about it. He thinks you're going to turn to informal means to reproduce yourself, which we call crime. Or you'll just be constantly vulnerable to the whims of others. You'll probably, you know, you'll become more privative and selfish because you'll think the world is dog eat dog. And,

And he was thinking, well, what happens if even the unions that we're a part of, they also get stratified along racial lines? And given that they start losing power, what if they start deciding, well, unfortunately, there are going to be some people we need to keep out in order to protect our members.

And he sees that, you know, American society is structured, again, anchored in this sort of antagonism between the employed and the unemployed. And unfortunately, because of a confluence of historical reasons, the unemployed, at least in his moment, he was thinking, are mostly, you know, populated by the racialized. And so, again, race seems to take on what seems to be a natural fact, but it's anchored in something else.

And so what Boggs tries to think rather dialectically is, well, and we can critique him on this. And again, this doesn't necessarily mean that he's right. We'll have to look at social theory and economics. He thinks the horse is already out of the barn in terms of the drive towards automation. The question is whether we are going to let the drive towards automation be a sort of autonomous power that's enforced upon us.

Or whether we're going to allow to be able to integrate it and submit it to political power or social power is kind of how he thinks about it, where automation will allow us to live lives where work is not the only means of social connection and livelihood. There is something utopian, even though he doesn't like to call it utopian work.

Come on, man. Look at what you're talking about. You're trying to find the fragmentary promise in this mode of automation where work is no longer the sole social bond for respect, life, et cetera. Instead, we'll be able to meet our needs and develop ourselves in other ways. And he's thinking, you know, not to be woo-woo about it, but he's thinking like spiritually, you know, in terms of solidarity and humanity, right?

and peace and all of that. Insofar as the problem of scarcity, that seems to be constantly the ideological explanation for why there must be war and competition, because there simply is not enough to go around this thing. Well, it seems like maybe we've actually reached a historical moment where that's no longer the case. And he's trying to show that, you know, even that idea that scarcity is a permanent condition is part of the muck of ages that, you know, or he calls it spiritual corruption that we need to undo in ourselves.

The vehicle for this project is his particular version of black power. And again, you know, if you're a type of Marxist and all that, you don't like to hear about this. This seems to be needlessly divisive, assumes that there's an automatic relationship between black people. It's identitarian, et cetera, et cetera. It's important to actually read what he's saying rather than go with the slogans or the means of it.

Black Power for him is an organized vehicle for those who find themselves pushed outside of society, who testify to the fact that this society constitutively cannot integrate them. And so they are the ones who need to be empowered to have some type of political say in how society should be organized because they would organize a society in which they could be integrated, that their practices could cohere. And they won't, at least this is his

gambit, they won't be seduced by the idea of integrating to the status quo because they know that that's actually functionally not a possibility.

And so black power, he kind of juxtaposed this to civil rights. Again, that's controversial, but follow his idea. He's writing in the aftermath of the civil rights. He's like, so, and this kind of repeats at a different level or rhymes at a different level with the Delaney and the Garvey. Oh, so formal integration into the state does not necessarily mean we have greater power over our social time.

or a greater power of these macro social processes. And so, you know, I think the generous way of reading Boggs is he thinks civil rights, you know, it was a good step, but then it became a mode of practice that made it seem as if rights are things that can be passively given to people. And that is about what the state can give you.

Rather than what animates his notion of black power is this phrase that I quote that I love is that rights are what you make and what you take. They are meant to be emblematic of the power of self-assertion. And he thinks in this mode of black power that he thinks is organized through these sort of cadre organizations, right?

Black people will be ideologically transformed into new subjects who realize rights are a power. They are a capacity. They are not an ontological feature of the individual, and they're not something that you have to await recognition from the state. They are evidence of what you are able to do and what you are able to prevent other people from doing to you.

And by making that the promise of a new type of anchoring practice, he thinks, well, rights can be a set of democratically held capacities in which we are no longer held enthralled to what seems to be this automatic movement of automation that, you know, as it seems to meet more needs, it also depresses labor participation or at least depresses the ability to have control over your workplace and your life. And instead, we find that, no, it's

The humanity needs to take the center of how we organize our time and cohere our social practices. And Black Power is meant to give you that glimpse at a higher level of reflection, that utopian consciousness that can be practically enunciated in the vision of a radically different set of social relations.

And so I'm clear at the end of the chapter, I don't think Boggs' moment is our moment anymore. I'm not saying we need to return to black power. But what he gets at that I think is really great is that it is important that we develop modes of power that aren't premised on the idea of we need recognition from the status quo, but instead transform people, not just in their consciousness, but in their conduct with each other and the world as black

a set of capacities to be enriched and enlivened. And he thinks only then can we get away from how class society corrupts us into thinking the only mode of reproduction is some people have to lose so that I can win, or the only mode of production is

you know, a type of vain materialism where as long as I have mine, everything else is okay. Instead, we need to be able to break from that ideologically and so that we can break from it practically. And he's trying to articulate that unity, at least in this particular moment. And again, it's a type of failure, but I hope that your listeners are seeing, I think not all failures are failures forever.

You know, it's up to critical theory to re-enliven those failures that allow us to see something else and apply it to our particular moment of what to allow us to ask the question of what do we need now?

Well, I think this is going to make the next question just seem unnecessary, given, I think, what you've just said, and these themes of self-determination, self-assertion, creativity, building capacities and skills that have been, that capitalism needed thus to lose or never gain for its own, you know, purposes. Yeah.

Why don't you tell us what utopia would be? It just seems like a silly question after what you just said. But, you know, because like the project of critical theory is not to tell us what to do, but to make it possible for us to do what we need to do. But so why not? Why not tell us what utopia is? So there are two reasons. One, and I guess we'll talk about this at the end when you ask me what I'm thinking about now. This book increasingly...

from this focus on time and control over time, it also became a book where I started thinking seriously about self-emancipation. And I think about it this way. You might think that actually what matters is simply the condition of becoming free, of negating what dominates you. What does it matter if it's the dominated who do it themselves rather than, say, a vanguard talented 10th who does it?

or simply a product of the iron law of necessity, collapsing capitalism so that communism can come about. Much of this book was me wrestling with, so what is the role of consciousness in social transformation? I'm enough of a Marxist to think it's not simply about changing our minds, but

But if so far as there is a self-directed process of change, well, at some point, it seems like consciousness plays a role. We can disagree about where it comes in, where it's active and all of that, but just grant me that.

And so I started realizing, well, self-emancipation, yeah, there's something instrumental about it where maybe we can only trust the dominated at a certain point to be able to know how to free themselves. But I also think that there is something non-instrumental insofar as it actually matters that those who would be free know themselves to be the ones doing the freeing.

That's really what's so important to say people like Frederick Douglass. But this comes up in Garvey and Delaney that, no, you can't just be given these privileges. You must know that actually it was your own power and your own power. I don't mean individually like a certain social capacities.

So I would think that I am violating, I would be violating this, the animating idea of self-emancipation if I use this concept of utopia in order to say, and so here's what we ought to do. Here's what the perfect world should look like. The more, I don't want to say petty, but the pettier part of it is I'm trying to, I've been trying to actually show that

What I think should be the dominant use of the concept of utopia has little about telling us how the world should be. That's how people can reject it out of hand. Who are you to tell us? You don't know. You're as corrupted by this society as the rest of us are. Or a type of liberal argument of, well, guess what? There will never be a perfect world. That's why politics is necessary. And so, in fact, actually those dreams of a perfect world are dangerous.

So don't do it. And so partially I'm saying you've been misunderstanding this concept, or at least you've chose a particular definition of it that has little accord to the actual historical tendency. Right.

And so I don't want to draw it out, but I don't I'm not just trying to leave you all with the idea of so there's nothing we could say about the future. I think by reconstructing this tendency, showing you not just the failure, but also the fragmentary insight that's being generated, we're left actually with a set of principles for us to understand why.

What would allow us to qualify that we have moved to a wholly new set of social conditions vis-a-vis this world that we live in? And I come up with transparency of social relations. This is a problem of racial fetishism of, you know, I know not why I do what I do. It seems as if it is a power that has me rather than I have it.

Two, it seems that any practice of emancipation and freedom requires control over our time. And I don't just mean the time we spend doing fun things rather than unfun things, but I mean how we actually cohere and synchronize and have our practices relate to one another in some type of functional and dynamic manner.

That can't happen while we are not able to make choices and have institutional powers in order to cohere ourselves with one another. And finally, I end with the idea that it seems like all of these figures, they're trying to give us the insight into the necessity of having equal and justifiable relations of power.

And by that, I mean, whatever institutions we develop, there must always be some way of anchoring contestation modification so that whatever institutions we develop, they don't eventually become nightmares that are bestowed upon the next generation. And then we have to redo the process again.

And maybe, you know, someone will say, well, that will always happen. But then I think but then you don't lose the insight that, you know, it requires constantly striving for equal and justifiable institutions that we actually have the power to critique, not simply to say, oh, that's bad, but actually be able to do something. You know, again, rights are what you make and what you take rather than them being the bearer of individuals for abstract equal relations.

So I don't want to say what the world will be because I think the value of utopia is the promise that those who are dominated will be themselves the author of what it means to negate and overcome these conditions. And I think critical theory can't do that for you.

Critical theory comes up to the limits. It tries to reconstruct these fragments, show the contradictory and negative facets of social life. But all of this is animated from the standpoint of a future self-emancipation that the critical theorist wants to be a part of but cannot do themselves. So what are you working on now?

Well, I'm trying to do this new project on self-emancipation and what I'm moving towards is this idea that there are different varieties of self-emancipation. There's epistemological self-emancipation of being able to

teach myself new things, aesthetic self-emancipation of expanding my imagination, political self-emancipation, social, and kind of in the sort of psychoanalytic tradition, sort of self-emancipation of health and constitution.

And I want to see how these different kinds of self-emancipation, their particular forms of narration, because there's always an element of narration self-emancipation of, you know, I was once this and now I am that. Or this thing, you know, blocks my freedom and now it is gone. But I think these criteria of success for these different types of self-emancipation, they don't necessarily cohere necessarily.

And I'm interested in seeing how even in their conflicts, they give us a richer sense of freedom or how they can intervene in one another. Maybe the imagination can help the political. Maybe the psychoanalytic can help the epistemological. But I want to try to show that self-emancipation itself, and this is kind of what I do with Utopia, it seems to be an obvious concept, and yet when you actually get into its essence,

anchor into its concreteness, there are all of these different layers at work. And I want to find out what those layers are and how they can interact. I can't wait to read up. William Parris, thank you for being on New Books and Philosophy. Thank you so much for having me.