Perception, Jurisdiction, and Valorization in Colonial Modernity — On the Nexus of Accumulation, Race, and Aesthetics

Research statement

Placing a special emphasis on theories of (universal) rights, property, and aesthetics, our research project scrutinizes the epistemic violence of European philosophy between the 16th and 18th centuries. The project focuses on three universal legitimization narratives of Western Europe’s transatlantic colonial expansion: the legal defense of the Iberian colonial project; the natural right and natural law justifications of land grabbing, colonial war, and slavery in classic contract theories; and the exclusion of the colonized from the world of sublimation, taste, and moral civility in Western aesthetics. We aim to focus particular attention on the long-neglected processes of racialization and their complex entanglement with economic valorization, patriarchal power, and the domination of nature. On a critical level, our project asks whether and how this epistemic violence is still in effect today, and which partitions and practices of the sensible break with the schemata of possessive universalism and valorization.
    The extended theoretical framework of the project is connected to contemporary debates concerning the processes of capitalist accumulation. We conceive of accumulation as a warlike process underpinning colonial modernity and its aftermaths. Moreover, we understand accumulation to be a historically extended, aleatory dynamic between different societal instances, which run in unpredictable superimpositions while nevertheless remaining interlinked. Formulated in opposition to teleological narratives of progress and (civilizational) refinement – which are as essential for early modern Western aesthetic theories as they are for various strands of Marxism – our project seeks to suspend hegemonic notions of historical time, agency, and universality. Instead of narrating the history of modern Western aesthetics as a history of autonomy and liberation, the project reconstructs how the “freedom” of the modern aesthetic subject cannot be understood independently of the colonial grammar of European expansionist politics and its attendant legal and economic practices. Said grammar enabled racial capitalism to reduce the colonized to a mere resource, ‘detritus’ or ‘waste,’ one which only Western legal, proprietarian, and aesthetic interventions were capable and allowed to valorize or discard.
    Based on analyses concerning the manner in which aesthetic, legal, and value-based conceptualizations of liberty feed into each other, our project poses the speculative question of whether and how an emancipatory notion of the aesthetic can bring decolonial and poststructuralist, Deleuze-Guattarian minoritarian traditions of thought and perception into a new and truly liberatory constellation. By critically examining the foundations of colonial modernity, the project aims to envision a heterodox politics of the sensible that breaks with the concepts of autonomy, subjectivity, and the logic of economic value.