SEAN ColonnA

Drug Studies, Aesthetics, and the Decolonization of Subjectivity

To study drugs and the experiences they induce is to study the nature of human subjectivity, a central concern in aesthetic discourse. Common themes like taxonomies of pleasure, the relationship between desire and reason, and the value of self-transcendence emerge in both the study of aesthetics and drugs. In this talk, I explore these themes and demonstrate how theories and methods from drug studies can help decolonize Western aesthetics and reshape our understanding of human selfhood.
    Drawing from diverse disciplines such as anthropology and philosophy, I outline several methodological principles derived from the interdisciplinary field of drug studies. I argue that these principles are invaluable not just for the humanistic study of drugs and their cultures but also for understanding art and aesthetics more broadly. In the second part of my talk, I provide a comparative reading of eighteenth-century German writings on coffee and music. Inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s work on "the coloniality of being," my analysis examines both the fluidity of the aesthetic as a category of experience and how historical writings on music and coffee contributed to naturalizing and universalizing “Man” as the ideal version of the human.

Sean COLONNA is the Felicitas Thorne Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Bard College, where he teaches a variety of courses related to music history as well as the First-Year Seminar. His dissertation, "Musical Aesthetics, Drugs and Subjectivity in Germany, 1770s–1820s," published in May of last year, examines theories of subjectivity as they are articulated in writings on music and drug-induced experiences in Germany during the turn to Romanticism. Some of this research can be found in expanded form in his 2021 article "Coffee and Music: Anthropotechnologies of the Enlightenment," published in The World of Music. His latest article, "Intoxication and Re-Enchantment in German Romantic Musical Aesthetics," is set to appear in The Musical Quarterly later this year. Additionally, Colonna has written on pedagogy and inclusivity in his essay "Using Mastery Objectives to Foster Inclusive Teaching," featured in the book Teaching Gradually (2021). He is currently working on a book project that examines the history of drug culture and musical aesthetics from the nineteenth century to the present.

Speakers

In this talk, Kandice Chuh considers the role of chronoception to the production, legitimation, and sustenance of the sensus communis. Thinking alongside such artists and intellects as Al-An DeSouza, Hito Steyerl, and Thao Nguyen Phan, Chuh attends to the lexicon of terms – futurity, pastness, duration, change, periodicity, and potentiality among them – that attests to the centrality of the sense of time to normative as well as insurgent conceptions of everything from history to social life, and beingness to beauty. Bringing forward the knowledge and sensibilities – the aesthetics and values – emergent from those normatively rendered the untimely, the backward, the somehow ever developing, consigned to the “waiting room of history,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty has put it, Chuh emphasizes the potency and pleasures of being out of (common) time. Attending to time in these ways, she proposes, is necessary to the interruption of the ordinariness of the violences that attend to worlds organized around belligerent accumulation. 

Kandice CHUH is a professor of English, American Studies, and Critical Social Psychology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she is also affiliated to several other units including the Africana Studies program and the MA in Liberal Studies program. Her most recent book is the award-winning The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Duke University Press, 2019), and she is currently completing a collection of essays on pedagogy titled The Disinterested Teacher. She is also at work on Studying Asia, a book length project considering contemporary Asian racialization. Chuh has served as president of the American Studies Association (2017-18) and in a variety of other leadership positions in such organizations as the Modern Language Association and the Association for Asian American Studies, and has been recognized for excellence in scholarship, teaching, and mentorship. She teaches and lectures widely on subjects ranging from aesthetic theories to transpacific studies, queer and feminist theory to considerations of “the good life.”

Jamila M. H. MASCAT

Marx, Slavery and Colonialism:
A Case for So-Called Permanent Accumulation

Marx’s vivid exploration of slavery across his works – spanning from The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) to his articles for the New York Tribune (1852-1862) and culminating in Capital (1867) – underscores the significance he placed on the slave trade and the plantation economy in his theory of the genesis and expansion of the capitalist mode of production. In the last two decades, however, a growing number of scholars (Johnson 2004, Issar 2021, Smallwood 2007, Singh 2016), have questioned the potential shortcomings of Marx’s understanding of slavery, suggesting that he may have downplayed the relevance of slave labor – to emphasize the pivotal role of waged labor in capitalism – and erroneously confined it at the “dawn of the era of capitalist production,” namely at the stage of “so-called primitive accumulation.”
    After mapping what Marx wrote on slave trade, slave labor, and the plantation system, this paper aims at reconstructing his conceptualization of the “slavery character” of capitalism (to borrow from W.E.B. DuBois) along with its colonial dimension. Then it seeks to provide an account of the articulation proposed by Marx of the connection between slavery, colonialism, and the development of global capitalism. Finally, the paper engages with critical readings that stress the limits of Marx’s concept of “so-called primitive accumulation” to make a case for the notion of “permanent accumulation” within racial capitalism.
 

Jamila M. H. MASCAT is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University. Her transdisciplinary research works across the fields of Political Philosophy (German Idealism and Marxism in particular), Postcolonial Studies, Feminist Theories, and Critical Philosophy of Race. Her current research interests focus, on the one hand, on theories of partisanship and political engagement and, on the other hand, on theories of postcolonial justice and postcolonial reparations. 

How can one maintain that “[s]lavery is so vile and miserable an Estate [...] that ’tis hardly to be conceived, that […] a Gentleman, should plead for’t”, and at the same time be a supporter of the slave trade and the enslavement of Africans in America? This question has been left to us by John Locke, father of liberalism but also a key player in English colonial policies in the New World. The spontaneous answer is to suppose an “external” contradiction between theory and practice, the man and his ideas. But this paper will argue that we should rather speak of an “internal” constitutive duality in Locke’s philosophy. It takes its roots in the way he reduces the very concept of slavery (“so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation”) to the situation of English subjects placed under the yoke of absolute monarchy, through a process of metaphorization and concealment of concrete-empirical slavery that would culminate in the Age of Enlightenment. At the beginning of the chapter on the “state of nature” of the Second Treatise of Government, Locke suggests that God, “lord and master” of all men, might have given some an “undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty” over others. This hypothesis, however, is immediately put on hold since it threatens the postulate of original equality on which the entire theory of the social contract is based. Moreover, contrary to what has sometimes been claimed, it is impossible to identify here the premises of the doctrine of racial difference that will later serve to justify transatlantic slavery. Turning to Locke’s epistemology, and to his critique of the idea of species in particular, we shall see that he shapes a different strategy of anthropological exclusion, one based on continuous “small differences” between individuals, to assert the right to absolute dominion of white (gentle)man over “idiots,” poor and vagrant people, white indentured servants, native Americans and black slaves. In conclusion, the paper will advance that, in Locke, a genuine topo-logic of differential functioning of concepts is at work, according to which the same notions, first and foremost that of work (hence servitude), do not have exactly the same meaning and valence on either side of the Atlantic divide.
 

Matthieu RENAULT is Professor in Critical history of philosophy at the Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès (France), and a member of the Research Team on Philosophical Rationalities and Knowledge (ERRaPhiS). His research focuses on the relationships between philosophy and non-European societies, the (post)imperial history of knowledge and its minority rewritings (class-gender-race). He is the author of: Frantz Fanon. De l’anticolonialisme à la critique postcoloniale (Éditions Amsterdam, 2011), L’Amérique de John Locke. L’expansion coloniale de la philosophie européenne (Éditions Amsterdam, 2014), C.L.R. James. La vie révolutionnaire d’un “Platon noir” (La Découverte, 2016), L’empire de la révolution. Lénine et les musulmans de Russie (Syllepse, 2017), W.E.B. Du Bois. Double conscience et condition raciale, with Magali Bessone (Éditions Amsterdam, 2021), and, forthcoming, Maîtres et esclaves. Archives du Laboratoire d’analyse des Mythologiques de la modernité (Les Presses du réel, 2024), Kollontaï. Défaire la famille, refaire l’amour (La Fabrique, 2024), with Olga Bronnikova.

Mary NYQUIST

Pre-Civility, Indigeneity, and War:
Hobbes and Euro-Colonialism

This talk will begin by exploring interrelations between early modern visual and textual representations of Amerindigenes and “allochronism,” that is, the ideologically charged conviction that Amerindigenes live in a time that is not that of their European colonizers (“allo” meaning “other” or “different from”). Throughout the historical era in which Euro-colonialism and capitalism become consolidated, European Christendom considers itself significantly more advanced, developmentally, than nearly all non-European societies. The belief that Europeans long ago left “savagery” or “barbarism” behind facilitates many aspects of belligerent accumulation and what is now known as “de-development.” It also continues to be an influential ideological meme to this day. Thomas Hobbes appropriates Euro-colonialism’s split, disjunctive temporality in theorizing the original condition of humankind, most often known as the “state of nature.” One consequence of this appropriation is that fear of Amerindigenes’ “savagery” serves to rationalize Euro-colonialist violence, which, ostensibly defensive, is both expropriative and a means of ethnic cleansing. Another is that it racializes a condition believed to be “natural.” In associating pre-civility, naturalness, and racialized inferiority, Hobbes, his Euro-colonialist predecessors, and his contemporaries secure a foundation for a variety of social and economic practices that are often unnamed and only later legitimated under terms that are deemed acceptable. It will be argued, further, that Hobbes’s foregrounding of warfare enables him implicitly to racialize contemporaneous institutional slavery and to bind it to pre-civility. I hope to conclude by clarifying the terms of Locke’s indebtedness to Hobbes regarding racialized Atlantic slavery. In my view, these terms are frequently either misunderstood or mystified in an effort to construct an unproblematically “liberal” philosophical tradition, whether that tradition is being critiqued or defended.
 

Mary NYQUIST has taught in four different units at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada: the Centre for Comparative Literature, the Department of English, the Programme in Literature and Critical Theory, and the Institute of Women’s and Gender Study (of which she was a former Director). Her research centres on 16th through 18th century literature as it intersects with Euro-colonialism, Atlantic slavery, law, and political philosophy. Since the publication of Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago University Press, 2013), Nyquist has published essays on Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano, Shakespeare, the language of liberty and slavery, and three major essays on Hobbes. She is currently completing a book on Milton (tentatively entitled Milton’s ‘Man’: Resistance, ‘Race,’ Reception) and is at work on a manuscript on Hobbes. When these are done, she hopes to do a cross-over study of racialized acts of obeisance that has been solicited by Oxford University Press. For decades she has been an anti-war and anti-racist activist and has recently published a poetry collection, Wet Toes.

Robert BERNASCONI

Luis de Molina’s Moralizing in the Face of an Increasingly Autonomous Colonial System

It is tempting to suppose that the Portuguese and Spanish sleepwalked into their slave-based Empire by degrees, but at various moments its basis was rigorously examined, especially from within the Salamanca School. Domingo de Soto questioned the validity of the arguments used to legitimate the Spanish Empire even before Vitoria wrote De Indiis. However, subsequent generations of the Salamanca School were left with the task of reconciling the consciences of both the colonizers and the beneficiaries of the slave trade with a system that was widely recognized as corrupt, in many of its operations unjustifiable, but by that time so well established that it seemed impossible to dismantle. Francisco Suarez, the last major philosophical representative of the Salamanca School, could criticize some of the practices of the colonizers but the “justifications” for what de Soto had been unable to justify were now so well established that they survived until the late eighteenth century largely unchallenged both by Catholics within the Iberian Peninsula and by Protestants in Northern Europe where they had been embraced, albeit from within a different philosophical framework.
    The discourse in which the Salamanca School accomplished their work was an eclectic mixture of philosophy, moral theology, and legal and economic theory, but, equally importantly, it also relied on attempts to investigate the facts. Luis de Molina, who wrote more extensively on slavery than any other member of the School did so on the basis of interviews with numerous participants involved in the trade and indeed a study of global slavery. Whereas Vitoria largely dismissed the need to investigate whether persons have been legitimately enslaved prior to purchasing them, Molina argued that buyers needed to be more scrupulous. Nevertheless, in his work condemnations of the system were combined with advice to confessors tasked to ease the wrestling consciences of individuals who had succumbed to the temptations the system offered. His ability to do so revealed the paradoxes of the institutional basis from which he wrote. He represented a religious order and an educational institution that was at one and the same time committed to another world and yet an interested beneficiary of the commercial activities that were under investigation.

Robert BERNASCONI is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Penn State. A collection of his essays that highlights his work on the history of the concept of race was recently published under the title Critical Philosophy of Race. Essays (Oxford University Press, 2023). He has published two books on Heidegger and one on Sartre. In addition to being the editor or co-editor of a number of collections in critical philosophy of race including Race, Miscegenation, and Hybridity (Thoemmes, 2005), Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Indiana, 2003), Race (Blackwell, 2001), and The Idea of Race (Hackett, 2000), he is the editor of three journals: Critical Philosophy of Race, Levinas Studies, and Eco-Ethica.

Mark NEOCLEOUS

The Social Wars of Belligerent Accumulation

The paper will argue for a recuperation of the concept of social war within Marxist thought. The concept of social war has a long history, stretching back to the Romans and running through the history of political and legal thought. Marx and Engels also often used it. And yet it has been lost to us, usurped by “civil war” or just plain “war,” and also usurped by the liberal claim that capitalism’s social realm (“civil society”) is by definition a realm of peace. This has led to Marxism having its arguments about war determined by non-Marxist thought. The paper will argue that we need the concept of social war to make better sense of the class war and of how the class war is permeated by the countless other social wars declared by the ruling class and the state, not least the permanent “war on waste.” Unravelling such wars offers a way of understanding the process of pacification since, as we discover, carrying out such wars undergirds the police power, and demands that we think of social wars as police wars. In this sense, the concept of social war highlights some of the issues undergirding the idea of belligerent accumulation.
 

Mark NEOCLEOUS is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University London. He is the author of a number of books, most recently The Politics of Immunity (Verso, 2022), taking his ongoing critique of security and interest in the body politic in a new direction. In 2021, a new edition of A Critical Theory of Police Power was published by Verso, 20 years after first publication. His new book Pacification is forthcoming in 2024. Also forthcoming in 2024 is The Security Abolition Manifesto, a collectively-authored book being simultaneously published in English, Spanish, Turkish and Greek. He is currently working on a book called The Most Beautiful Suicide.
 

Schedule Belligerent Accumulation
Conference

Ashley BOHRER

Rethinking Enclosure from the South:
Primitive Accumulation and the Settler Commons in the History of Global (Racial) Capitalism

This talk complicates a familiar story for anti-capitalist analysis: that the enclosure of land in Europe is the historical precondition for proletarianization and hence, for the rise of capitalism. Nuancing this oft-retold story, I foreground the rise of various forms of colonial enclosure throughout the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese empires, arguing for their central importance in the rise of capitalism as a global system rather than as a fringe economic practice of Northern Europe. I trace both differences across these empires’ styles of imposing enclosure, but I also argue for general continuity across several geographical and cultural contexts. In the first part of this paper, I trace how the imposition of European norms of enclosure on colonized peoples and lands was a central aspect of the rise of global capitalism, setting the stage for economic, political, and ideological practices that sustained the rise and reproduction of colonial capital.
    The second part of this paper traces an often-overlooked element of this history, namely that “enclosures” and “private property” are often (mistakenly) treated synonymously in the literature of the history of capitalism. But in the colonies, especially in settler colonies, enclosed land does not always function as private property. Tracing what I call “collective enclosures” and “settler commons,” I focus on the way that white settlers created racially-exclusive “commons” in the process of colonization. As newly proletarianized workers sought material security, adventure, and autonomy in the colonies (and as others were impressed into naval service or penal transport), they often recreated the feudal commons they had lost access to in Europe – places where one could draw timber, hunt animals, gather fruits and herbs, and use water beyond the limits of one’s own private property. This was true across the Spanish, French, and British Empires in the Western Hemisphere and was equally true of the Dutch in South Africa.
    A crucial difference between the European commons of feudal peasantry and the new capitalist commons of the colony: the latter were bounded around racial and colonial lines. The settler commons were not only built on stolen indigenous land; they also excluded indigenous people from their use, often by threats, intimidation, and violence. These commons were far from “common” in the usual sense; they were specifically not designed for the free and open use of all human beings inhabited their environs. Rather, these colonial commons were a central, spatialized mechanism for bringing into existence a settler sphere and a settler class defined through one’s (projected) descent from Europe, a proto-form of what would be shortly concreted as whiteness.
    Mobilizing an analysis of what Iyko Day has called “romantic anti-capitalism,” I argue that we can see these settler colonial collective enclosures as one material practice that turned European refugees from capitalist devastation into vanguard foot soldiers for capitalist accumulation.

Ashley J. BOHRER holds a PhD in Philosophy and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Gender and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Bohrer's first book, Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism (Columbia University Press, 2019) was short-listed for the Deutscher Prize and will be soon available in both Spanish and Greek. Bohrer's next book, Capitalism and Confinement, is forthcoming with Verso Books. In addition to academic work, Bohrer is an activist and public intellectual; you can access a fuller picture of their work at ashleybohrer.com.