"We
don't realize that we are playing for high stakes
even in the smallest of small talk..."
Robin Lakoff, quoted in Bakewell, Liza, Image Acts,
American Anthropology, March 1998.
"America is a diverse country, racially, economically,
and ethnically. And our institutions of higher
education should reflect our diversity. Yet quota
systems that use race to include or exclude people
from higher education and the opportunities it offers
are divisive, unfair and impossible to square with the
Constitution." --President Bush, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030115-7.html
"This
isn't some kind of metaphor... goddamn this is real!" --Steve
Albini
As a person from a culturally dominant group (visibly Anglo, male,
heterosexual with no apparent disabilities), it's always an awkward
moment for me to outwardly contemplate privilege and oppression
without resorting to rhetoric that simultaneously projects apologetic
guilt and defensive superiority. Like now - as if I should I get
credit for writing this because it's awkward for me. It's become
easy to seemingly criticize my unequal privilege gifted through
violent histories while distancing myself from those histories.
The rejection of institutional racism and sexism can be accomplished
intellectually and emotionally with little change in the material
practice of everyday life. It's easy to do when I'M not part of
the institution. And who really identifies with The Institution
in an Althusserian sense anyway? Most of the spectrum encompassing
the various ideologies of the dominant culture sees itself in
opposition to The Institution - from the Right's opposition to
state-sponsored affirmative action to the Liberal critiques of
mass culture.
To be sure, I don't want to regress into non-dialectal positions
like atomistic relativity and/or autonomous responsibility, but
the terms of institutionalization are important to consider. How
is it that both Liberal Senator Ted Kennedy and White Supremacist
Thomas Metzger can oppose the same systems, but for completely
different reasons? Althusser's definition of ideology as the perceived
relationship between an individual and material conditions serves
as a good starting point. (http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/cultural_studies/althusser_ideology.htm)
I should be clear that this is not meant to be a thorough investigation
of institutional oppression, but rather an attempt to establish
a jumping-off point, so to speak, for looking at these issues
through cultural production. Specifically, cultural objects that
can be seen to provide other ways of interrogating privilege,
with the goal of aiding in the more equitable distribution of
power.
One such cultural object that brought these issues to bear for
me is damali ayo's Rent-A-Negro.com. The work is a visually simple
web site designed with simple bold text and table cells using
flat colors, devoid of any photographic or iconic imagery.
This first web-based work of ayo utilizes textual motifs and emotional
tones that are found in most of her other activities as a visual
and performing artist (http://www.damaliayo.com). Here the artist
establishes a commercial service in which she provides diversity
to those lacking it in their lives - something her Otherness as
a black woman accommodates. ayo will provide services like attending
a party, confronting racist relatives, and give a "black
opinion" to those willing to pay a fee. Personal experiences
as an African-American artist in many predominantly white settings
are blurred with the fictional and theatrical aims of the site.
The services ayo peddles are not just satirical devices, they
come from requests she's actually received from strangers, like
"Can
I touch your hair?"
A tactic that is of the utmost importance to the project is the
lack of photographic and iconic imagery. There are no images of
ayo, no iconic logo, no stock photography of African-Americans,
nothing but text, tables, and the colors blue, red, yellow (ochre),
and black. There is a recognition of how images work here. The
specificity of ayo's personality is denied, and the memorized
images of "blackness" and "femaleness" are
fore grounded. This is the "blackness" auctioned by
keith obadike (http://Obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html) and the disembodied
"female" of Mouchette (http://mouchette.org/), nameless
prostitutes and service workers.
There is a refusal, in this work, of the utopian outlook of earlier
new media work, especially Internet-based work, that saw incompatibilities
between racial and gender recognition and the technology. The
material presence of oppression is visible, even if not in pictures.
We may not see the personís gendered, racialized body,
but this invisibility, rather than making such distinctions unimportant,
makes mediated stereotypes all the more powerful. While illusionistic
imagery and even physical appearances can be dismissed as *unempirical,*
newer imaging techniques like genetic mapping are said to abstractly
represent reality in a kind of mathematical purity. But as the
much-debated book The Bell Curve, and more recent discussions
of standardized testing, illustrate, such abstract data is no
less ideological than pictures.
Despite the lack of imagery, this can be read as a deliberate
"image act." Anthropologist Liza Bakewell and others
have theorized a practice of images, not as representation, but
as actions that affect material culture and language. This conception
of images
problematizes theories of communicative action (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/300024/0)
by disavowing the dichotomy of material and speech in favor of
a view that sees communication as both dependent on and transformative
of material environments. Bakewell asserts that a study of image
acts would begin with the body, not texts or objects. While this
could easily fall into traditional notions of essentialized humanness,
the body here is not a universal one, but rather is one where
the social collides with the perceived individual in an ideological
implosion.
Read in this way, ayo's work can be seen as participating in something
other than the representational strategies of identity politics,
yet still grounded in the coded body. We are not presented with
the artist's identity, or personality via ocular representation.
This work is not educating us about the artist's humanness, nor
that of the larger demographic she is part of. The target of the
gaze is inverted, in a manner similar to Gomez-Pena's reverse
anthropology and Adrian Piper's various public interventions
(like wearing clothing reeking of fish in the subway at rush hour).
The performance, while initiated by the artist, is actually carried
out by the audience - it is their re/actions that are up for scrutiny.
But here, not only is the identity of the observer reflected back,
the material conditions of the gaze become the framework for the
"transaction" of looking. Multiculturalism is big business,
from ecotourist adventures with indigenous people to One World
festivals in places like Branson, MO, where the dominant culture
is not perceived as culture, but as a vacuum that consumes differences
as commodified experience.
What is different here from the strategies of representational
identity politics, coming from a strong humanist tradition, is
that emphasis is placed on the action of privilege rather than
on the set of symbols that we read privilege through. While not
dismissive of symbolic and semiotic analysis, Rent-A-Negro.com
focuses our attention on the manner in which privilege is exercised
in material terms. In fact, it practices a form of exchange overdetermined
by historic and ongoing symbolic systems, but an exchange that
is contextualized economically as well as psychologically. Scientific,
popular, aesthetic, and other systems of understanding, like the
color identification systems explored by the Obadike's in The
Interaction of Coloreds, (http://blacknetart.com/interaction.html)
are becoming inseparable from market imperatives - biology is
now biotechnology. If it's something worth understanding, it's
something that should be exploited in the *free market.* If multiculturalism
is truly a wanted concept, it will also be profitable, so goes
the rhetoric from the neo-cons and liberals alike. But as is fairly
obvious, exposing the contradictions of capital does not so easily
alter the order of things; the battle between moral fundamentalism
and libertarian enterprise is a pillow fight where the pillows
are stuffed with the dead bodies of the oppressed and the rules
change to keep everyone else out of the bedroom.
In the end, we're left with policies that reflect sentiments like
those spoken by President Bush, decrying the "unconstitutionality"
of affirmative action policies in Universities, and I assume anywhere.
We are to celebrate diversity, including "economic diversity."
But what does that mean, "economic diversity?" In such
Orwellian terms, we have managed to separate poverty and lack
of political power from its material roots, as if economic differences
have no ties to other forms of diversity. Only then can we applaud
that both rich and poor manage to exist in the US, so that the
myth of the middle as norm can be represented in the abstract
language of averages, statistics, and sitcoms. How does one resist
this? Or can one even create alternatives from a position of privilege?
Maybe as many, including Deleuze and Guattari, have suggested,
the answer is not to attempt to restrain the further development
of globalization, but rather to push it forward, accelerating
its progress. Resisting the global economy through global tactics
different than what I'm writing about here, but what if we took
ayo up on her offer? What would the impact of such *image acts*
be? Thinking of this not in terms of subversion, but as moments
of exchange capable of generating normative behavior as well as
disrupt it, the act of "renting" the artist for a party
does provide the possibility for learning and transformation.
Reparations owed to the descendents of African slaves certainly
involve economic analysis, as much as the practice of slavery
itself did. Multiculturalism does cost something - consideration
of how and whom it benefits in its current form seems important
to consider. ayo gives us at least some hints on how to begin
this line of thought by presenting racism/sexism within the US
economies of service and information, where highly visible wage-based
service work replaces production labor rendered invisible by geography
and a lack of representation.
One thing that I keep coming back to, however, is that escaping
privilege is extremely difficult. We remain involved in a situation
dependent on "expendable income," the space of art,
sex, and service industries. Someone always looses when there's
"expendable income." Isn't that one of the infamous
contradictions of capital: that profit is by definition the difference
between the money someone's work generates via a product and what
s/he actually gets paid for the labor? Of course, the classical
argument is that access to the means of production, which requires
investments of capital, makes all the difference. Here, ayo's
body, or the idea of it, is both the object of consumption and
the site of production, but not necessarily the means of production.
That still rests with those that have the privilege of celebrating
"economic diversity." Speaking of which, maybe I should
be saving my money... there's a party I'm going to that could
use some "difference."
