The Racial Logic of Impressibility
Kyla SchullerPlasticity comprises the capacity to change, to be molded, to radically deform and transform under pressure while miraculously retaining self-sameness. Instead of falling apart, plasticity persists in the face of destruction. It may even condense the miracle of life itself—potentiality crystallized, the materialization of growth and change.
As a concept, plasticity describes these fantastical capacities of matter. Yet plasticity simultaneously has a politics. Ideas about the qualities of matter and the potentiality of life itself are far from neutral. Rather, they are foundational to the modern practice of power and sovereignty, to what Michel Foucault called “biopolitics,” which grants life to some and leaves others to die.Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). Western metaphysics depends upon a plastic body, as articulated most famously in the Lockean idea that babies arrive as impressible blank slates. In this schema, growth and progress depend on a person’s responsiveness to the environment around them, as well as their capacity to absorb the effects of these sensory impressions over time. Yet qualities praised as “human” in the abstract have often been restricted (i.e. limited to only some humans) in practice. Plasticity is a battleground.
Plasticity structures the modern, biological logic of race. When nineteenth-century race scientists, including Louis Agassiz and Edward Drinker Cope, codified race as a state of profound physical difference, they relied on an alleged unequal capacity to receive impressions. For Cope, “fine nervous susceptibility” and “mental force” were the exclusive features of Indo-Europeans.E. D. Cope, “Two Perils of the Indo-European” (part 1 of 2), Open Court 3, no. 126 (1889): 2054. Whiteness came to signify “the capacity for capacity,” writes queer theorist Jasbir Puar—pure potentiality rendered in human form.Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 199.
This modern framework of biological racial difference—used to justify racism and white supremacy—denied the capacity of plasticity to colonial subjects and non-white people. People of color were considered immutable in body and mind, insensitive and incapable of absorbing impressions over time. Cope, for example, condemned African American bodies as “dead material” housing a “mind stagnated” by a life of “fleshly instincts.”Cope, “Two Perils,” 2054. Blackness became allegedly inert or hyperreactive matter, raw material (at best) capable of being molded and manipulated, especially through labor, but incapable of dynamic change on its own. Rather than a blank slate, Black life came to signify “flesh.” “Before the ‘body,’ there is ‘flesh,’” writes Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers, “that zero degree of social conceptualization,” the state of being stripped of social meaning, that attempted to hold captive and deny the possibility of growth.Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67–68. Envisioned as unable to accumulate experience, captive Black flesh became capitalism’s “living laboratory,” a site of “total objectification,” for extraction, in the form of slavery, of medical experimentation, and of the economies which they built. Meanwhile, the scientific theory that Blackness was a hardened state benumbed to progress radiated outward, shaping an anti-Black modernity that stigmatized and delimited, among other aspects, Black people’s relation to pain, intellect, and criminality.
Plastic materials and environments extend the racist and colonial dynamics of plasticity into new arenas. Currently, the toxic burden of plastic accumulates in the Global South as islands in the ocean and as endocrine disrupters in the glands. Yet this movement can also open up ways to reconceptualize the body and power altogether. Anthropologist Vanessa Agard-Jones draws on interviews with people in Martinique concerned about the little-regulated flow of toxins throughout their bodies and land. In her hands, plasticity becomes a tool of interrogating, rather than reproducing, power. How bodies take shape in dynamic relation with the chemical products of the post-colonial economy exposes “the multiple levels at which our material entanglements—be they cellular, chemical, or commercial—might be connected to global politics.”Vanessa Agard-Jones, “Bodies in the System,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 192. As it forms and deforms, blending the line between bodies and materials, plasticity crystallizes as the interface between life and power.
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).
E. D. Cope, “Two Perils of the Indo-European” (part 1 of 2), Open Court 3, no. 126 (1889): 2054.
Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 199.
Cope, “Two Perils,” 2054.
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67–68.
Vanessa Agard-Jones, “Bodies in the System,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 192.
