Psycurity

Colonialism, Paranoia, and the War on Imagination

Rachel Jane Liebert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351789325
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Across the world, the rhetoric and violence of white supremacy is rising up. Yet, explanations for white supremacist attacks typically direct attention toward an unreasonable, paranoid state of mind, and away from the neocolonial security state that made them.

Offering a response to US expressions of white supremacy, Liebert reads paranoia as a dis-ease of coloniality by following its circulation within the ultimate place of reason, indeed a key arbitrator of it: Psychology. Through reflexivity, interviews, participant observation, scientific artefacts, and public art, this unique work seeks to argue for and experiment with unsettling the entwined coloniality of Psychology and the current political moment, joining with struggles for a world where it is not only white lives that matter. Tracing the spinning cogs and affective coils of the prodromal movement – a program of research that, capturing potential psychosis, illustrates the serpentine workings of a control society – Liebert argues that, within a context of psycurity, paranoia hides as reasonable suspicion, predicts the future, brands threatening bodies, and grows through fear, thereby seeping into the cracks of white supremacy, stabilizing it. Catching this argument as itself enacting psycurity, she then engages the more-than-human to search for paranoia's decolonizing, otherworldly potential; one that may revive the psykhe – breath – of psychologies too.

Calling for psychologies to leave Psychology's comfort zone and make space for imagination, this performative, interdisciplinary work will engage students, researchers, and activists from an array of disciplines who wish to examine a critical and creative response to present-day racism and fascism.

1

TERRAIN

Blood

I was raised in Aotearoa as a “New Zealander,” first hearing the potential of otherwise from a Pacifica nurse treating me when, 14 years old, I awoke from an eight-hour coma. She was standing over my hospital bed, looking intensely at me, finally asking what ethnicity I was. Confused, I stammered, “New Zealander?” My ignorance answering her question: “You must be Pākehā.”

On my father’s side, my European ancestors first arrived in Aotearoa five generations ago, two decades after the signing of The Treaty of Waitangi and Te Tiriti of Waitangi – two supposedly identical yet significantly different documents, one in English one in Te Reo Māori, soliciting Māori acceptance of British occupation, of colonization. In 1863, my great-great-great-grandfather, Heinrich Pohlen of Germany, moved to the central region of the northern island – Tainui land – to fight in the war against Indigenous sovereignty. He joined the settler militia – a 100-man force known as the Forest Rangers – and soon after helped to lead a massacre against Rangiaowhia, a village designated as refuge for Māori elderly, women, and children during the war, and the main supplier of food for the anticolonial resistance. Eventually murdering 100 people, the Forest Rangers began by surrounding a house with seven people inside, opening fire, and then setting it alight. When an elderly man came outside with his arms raised in surrender, they shot him to death; everyone else stayed inside and died by burning. In exchange for this and other contributions to the war against Māori and Aotearoa, the settler government gave my great-great-great-grandfather 51 acres of stolen land. Three decades later he murdered his settler neighbor over a boundary dispute. Seen then as mad and dangerous, he was incarcerated in a lunatic asylum where he met his own death. Killed by the ownership he killed for. His body was, is buried in Rangiaowhia. Beholden to the land of the massacre that made him, that made my family, that made me.

On my mother’s side, less is told but it is no less telling. My European ancestors were missionaries and wives of missionaries who arrived on the shores of the southern island of Aotearoa – Ngāi Tahu land. Having travelled from the United Kingdom through India, they played an explicit role in the destruction of Indigenous cosmologies, preparing the ground for the global spread of capitalism, colonization, white supremacy.

Skip forward to June 2017, and this past feels right beside me. In Charlottesville, Virginia, a group of white men march with tiki torches, yelling neo-Nazi slogans and violently attacking anti-racist and anti-fascist protestors, driving a car into a group of activists, killing someone. Chanting “white lives matter” and calling themselves ‘Unite the Right,’ the rally is in part a reaction to the increasing power of black, Indigenous, and immigrant resistance in the US. It is also part of a recent surge in the visibility of fascist rhetoric and movements in the global North more broadly – whether far-Right nationalism, securitized borders, militarized police, xenophobic policies, attacks on non-white bodies, swastikas in the street, or the victory of Donald Trump as 45th president of the US. An uprising that reveals colonization as an ‘ongoing organizing force’ (Rowe & Tuck, 2016). For fascism, as Robin Kelley (2000) writes following Aimé Césaire, is not an aberration so much as a “logical development of Western Civilization itself,” a “blood relative of slavery and imperialism” (p. 20).

Indeed, contemporary white supremacy in the US is built on what Andrea Smith (2012) describes as three logics, or ‘pillars’: slaveability, which anchors capitalism; genocide, which anchors colonialism, and orientalism, which anchors war. The first, slaveability, depends on a racial hierarchy to justify the making of one as the property of another, taking the profits of labor. The second, genocide, depends on the disappearance of Indigenous peoples to justify the taking of native land and resources. The third, orientalism, depends on the marking of peoples or nations as both inferior and threatening to justify force in the name of protection. This last pillar presents itself most clearly these days in the ‘war on terror,’ intensified following 9/11 and manifesting as both the domestic surveillance of Muslim communities and the foreign occupation of majority-Muslim countries. Holding these histories and their current-day manifestations close, in this book I use the term neocolonial security state to refer to contemporary US conditions. In doing so I hope to evoke the more commonly used ‘neoliberal security state’ with its intertwining of modern-day capitalism and terror (Katz, 2007), while at the time recognizing that neoliberalism emerged in response to twentieth-century anti-colonial movements that challenged the authority of capitalism (Harvey, 2007), and thus respecting the lead of decolonizing authors who argue that colonization and modernity cannot, must not, be disentangled (e.g., Mignolo, 2012; Sandoval, 2000) – as evoked in the term ‘coloniality’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2006).

Increasingly, as this neocolonial security state swells more and more around us, I try to return to my ancestors, to feel what they felt, to think what they thought. How could they have – knowingly or unknowingly – participated in genocide? There are many ways that others have entered and answered this question. For me, its power has remained in it being insoluble. Ultimately a mystery, my ancestors’ violence obliges, urges me to endlessly watch for colonization’s grip. This watching, they tell me, is part of my ability to respond, my present response-ability for their past actions.

It was Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) who first got me thinking about ‘response-ability.’ She writes of ‘responsibility’ as invoking not simply our contribution to something but our ‘ability to respond’ to it. And yet, while we live in cultural and political contexts saturated with calls for responsibility, these same worlds simultaneously ‘shackle’ us in ways that undermine this ability: “We do not engage fully. We do not make full use of our faculties. We abnegate.” (p. 43). These words are quoted from La Frontera: Borderlands; this book, and Anzaldúa’s writings in general, have been indescribably influential on the chapters that follow. As a Pākehā New Zealander, a descendent of European settlers, I was often not included in Anzaldúa’s ‘we,’ whose theory explicitly emerged from her own flesh and lands – that of a Chicana philosopher and poet. Her guidance thus came to me not as an equation so much as a provocation. In this, my own book, I have tried to not simply uproot her work, placing it out of context and away from what animates it, to deaden it. But to plant it somewhere that shares Anzaldúa’s spiritual and political commitments, to nourish its liveliness. That is, to ask for guidance as I try and create something that also challenges – in content and in form – a white supremacy built on not just human but more-than-human genocide.

In particular Anzaldúa’s writing directed me to my own flesh as a source from which to do so. Frantz Fanon’s (1952) Black Skin, White Masks, likewise argues and shows that “digging into the flesh” (p. 3) is a necessary tactic for expelling coloniality. While Fanon himself, a Martinican psychiatrist, was writing from and to an experience of blackness, it was digging into this that enabled him to also acutely theorize whiteness. For him, while a violently different experience to being black, white people are similarly both captive and core to coloniality; the way that whiteness is done, which does not necessarily require white skin, enables colonization to hold on. Thus, as with Anzaldúa, his words were a guide not for equating my experience with his own but for provoking it toward similar commitments. That is, to destroy whiteness as we know it, to decolonize.

With their shared attention to ‘flesh,’ Anzaldúa and Fanon challenged me to consider two kinds of response-ability within conditions of coloniality. The first: a listening to inspirited, embodied, worldly knowledges. Both scholars demonstrate that the colonial episteme can only be punctured with ‘antennae’ – a term they both use (see Anzaldúa, 2002; Fanon, 1952). The second: to consider the particular response-ability that comes with my white skin. Of course, white skin is not the same as whiteness,¹ and there is more to my body than my skin color – I am female, disabled, working class, immigrant. But don’t let my words and intersectionality trick you. I move easily through the world, smothered in an inherited lube. In blood. My skin and veins are the skin and veins of my settler ancestors, of militia and missionary. Poisoned by coloniality (Césaire, 1955). If I am committed to decoloniality, I must include my body. What follows, then, is a response to the work of Anzaldúa, Fanon, and many others; an attempt to engage my flesh as a source for learning from and being in solidarity with an intellectual decolonizing movement that has been challenging white supremacy for over five hundred years.

I remember clearly the first time I saw white skin. It was only eight years ago. I was 29 years old and had just returned from South Africa where, staying with a black friend and colleague who grew up there, I had spent more time in solely black spaces than I had before. Back in New York City where I lived at the time, I was on the M-train when something caught my eye.² A white hand wrapped around a silver pole. My hand wrapped around a silver pole. I took it off and looked at it more closely, moving the muscles and bones of my fingers to push and pull at the skin. It’s white. Before then, I knew I was white. I identified as white, regularly named whiteness, organized against white supremacy. But it was in this moment that I saw it. It was as though the light suddenly refracted off my skin and struck my retinas from a new angle. Or my retinas themselves had changed shape, receiving the light in a new way. I don’t know what or how it happened, or barely even how to describe it. Only that the skin, my skin, now had a kind of glow to it. It stood out to me. Perhaps what Sara Ahmed (2007) would describe as ‘surfaced.’ I looked up and around the subway car and saw a similar skin encasing about half of the bodies around me. Not bodies, white bodies. Not people, white people. Reality shifted half an inch to the right. I felt faint, spinning.

I started to see white skin whenever it was there. Family, friends, students, colleagues, workers, partiers, strangers, mirrors. White people, so many white people. Sometimes I was completely surrounded and a feeling of slow terror would spread over my skin. My white skin. I was trapped. I had been trapped my whole life. And I was going to be trapped forever. On the white side of W.E.B. DuBois’ (1903) veil, seeing the world through whiteness, whiteness as the world.³ Closing in tight, I felt a desperate desire to tear it apart. To destroy. To escape. To breathe. Four years later and Eric Garner, a black man, was choked to death by police officers for selling cigarettes on the streets of New York City. His final words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for black liberation and decolonizing activists around the US, UK, Western Europe, and South Africa. For “breathlessness,” as Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2016) writes in his Ten Theses on de/coloniality,⁴ “is a constant condition in the state of coloniality and perpetual war, but it increases in certain contexts” (p. 5). The difference between mine and Garner’s experiences was and is stark and screaming. Fanon (1952) writes of white people sealed in whiteness, black people sealed in blackness; the former suffers through ignorance or anguish, the latter suffers through harassment or death. And yet to deracinate this murderous episteme, Fanon continues, we need to deracinate both.

Fanon concludes that the decolonizing potential of the body lies in its capacity to provoke questions. Having white skin surface after three decades of being white and half a decade of challenging whiteness, spun me out of a comfort I did not know I felt. Not to suddenly ‘see,’ arriving at a decisive state of ‘woke-ness,’ but to enter a perpetual mode of discomfort. Ever alert to the possibility of ignorance, complicity, injustice. And practicing how to turn this possibility into a driving force. This book is in many ways a product of this kind of uncomfortable praxis (Pillow, 2003); a reflexivity that does not simply purge the poison, leaving myself supposedly clean and others repeatedly cleaning up – whether with sympathy, interpretation, or reparation (Alcoff, 1991). But that creates questions that oblige my own response. Not with The Answer; with more questions. A spiraling Q&Q. Generating an energy that moves, struggles, unsettles. . . . If my blood is poisoned, does it affect my reasoning? My vision? My respiration? Is my experience of breathlessness an appropriation of black and Indigenous struggles? A manifestation of my own white paranoia?⁵ Of seeking to know, control, own? Am I simply evoking the spirit of my great-great-great-grandfather? Can I, should I expel him? Or does his presence make me alert, hold me accountable? Can I reclaim my flesh, revive my flesh, the flesh, without taking the air of others? Is air finite? Can I join forces with people to create fresh air? Or am I then ‘saving,’ bleaching, evoking the spirit of my missionary ancestors?. . .

Scratching and piercing with my nails, stinging, my fleshy questions have spattered all over this book. Albeit tidied up with theories and quotes and citations. It was tempting to leave it that way, to make this first chapter quiet, rational, safe. Yet to do so would be to re-inscribe a colonial hierarchy of Knowledge, Knowing, Knower as detached, objective, universal. White. Peeling away the rational to expose the flesh, I instead have to, get to sense things. The skin is the largest sensory organ in the body, without a defensive layer it can touch and be touched. With this project I want to touch whiteness. To make it, to make me, flinch. Bleeding, vulnerable. Not in a way that welcomes me further along the path of heteropatriarchy and deeper into white supremacy, trading weakness for privilege. But in a way that screams, that fights, that follows the lead of the flesh. White blood cells dripping out of the colonial episteme. Slowly oozing, losing my defense from ‘foreign’ bodies. Exposed to Suzanne Césaire’s “the strange, the marvellous, the fantastic” (as translated in Kelley, 1999). The beside. Strewn, stretched, my surface area increases, my sensory capacity increases. And so my ability to respond does too.

My response-ability as not a white person but a white woman hit me in 2015, with urgency, when I heard about my connection to another massacre by a young white man against people of color. Dylann Roof, an avowed white supremacist, shot nine black people to death during a church service in Charleston, South Carolina. At the time and in his online manifesto and FBI interview, he invoked white women as a reason for doing so: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. You have to go”; “I have noticed a great disdain for race mixing White women wit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Preface
• 1 Terrain
• 2 Machine
• 3 Cogs
• 4 Coils
• 5 Roots
• 6 Compost
• 7 Serpent
• References
• Index