Presentation Title
“every time he raised his hand & saw it black”: Virginia Woolf, Fred Moten, and the Possibility of Anti-Racist Phenomenology
Original Abstract
(Note: the actual paper is not nearly as comprehensive as this abstract promises)
In The Universal Machine (2018), Fred Moten adapts Alan Turing’s mathematical proof of a machine capable of all possible computations, thus determining the break between the computational and the non-computational, as a figure for blackness’s “contrarational beauty” (246) and blackness’s capacity to interrupt Europe’s/whiteness’s teleological and omnicidal drive to purify universality of otherness (208). Elsewhere, Moten draws on the universal Turing machine as a figure that conveys black study itself as a dedication “to the thinking of the incalculable, suspended in the break of computation,” thus refusing the reduction of flesh to the data of a slave ship’s ledger, “a mode of quantification that imposes value upon human endeavor” and human being (Stolen Life 171, 226).
For Moten, blackness as universal machine—that is, as an entanglement of performative and celebratory connections that mark the limit of calculation and quantification—also refuses the phenomenological reduction of flesh and thing to the object of a (purifying) gaze. The complicity that Moten theorizes between computational and philosophical reduction frames this paper’s approach to the widely cited and exalted “philosophy” of Virginia Woolf, developed in “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40), of the “whole world” as “a work of art.”
On the one hand, Woolf’s philosophy resonates with Moten’s vision of black study as the study of connections among Black people across space and time and in a variety of (social) ensembles. Indeed, Woolf sees “all human beings” as part of the world-as-work-of-art; moreover, people and places and objects and affects are composed and recomposed in this world-as-work into mysterious, revelatory moments and scenes that also seem to resist calculation and quantification. On the other hand, as a diary entry from 1925 demonstrates, Woolf’s philosophy also resonates with the anti-blackness that Moten tracks through the writings of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and others. In this entry, Woolf records a vision of human universality that comes upon her while accompanying Leonard to a lecture that he delivers at an adult school. This vision is interrupted, however, on the bus ride home when Woolf sees “a n[———] gentleman, perfectly fitted out in swallow tail & bowler & gold headed cane.” “[W]hat were his thoughts?” she wonders, “Of the degradation stamped on him, every time he raised his hand & saw it black as a monkeys outside, tinged with flesh colour within?” While perhaps animated by a well-meaning sympathy and anti-imperialist sentiment, these questions nonetheless presume the exclusion of this man from the vision she experiences earlier in the day and, by extension, from her later aesthetic ontology of the world-as-work. Drawing on Moten’s account of blackness (figured as the universal machine) and on his critique of European phenomenology, this paper studies the modes of reduction (ontological, phenomenological, computational) in which Woolf is complicit and what possible traces there are, despite that complicity, of an anti-racist phenomenology in her writing.
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