In her landmark essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers theorizes one of the central cleavages of the modern world, wrought and sundered in the cataclysmic passages of racial slavery: that of body and flesh, which Spillers takes as the foremost distinction “between captive and liberated subjects-positions”:

before the “body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies – some of them female – out of West African communities in concert with the African “middleman,” we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and males registered the wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard. [1]

Flesh is before the body in a dual sense. On the one hand, as Alexander Weheliye stresses, flesh is “a temporal and conceptual antecedent to the body[.]”[2] The body, which may be taken to stand for “legal personhood qua self-possession,”[3] is violently produced through the “high crimes against the flesh.” On the other hand, flesh is before the body in that it is everywhere subject to and at the disposal of the body. The body is cleaved from flesh, while flesh is serially cleaved by the body. As Fred Moten suggests, the body only emerges through the disciplining of flesh.[4]

This diametric arrangement of corporeal exaltation and abjection is registered, as Spillers emphasizes, in “the tortures and instruments of captivity,” those innumerable, unspeakable brutalities by which flesh is irrevocably marked:

The anatomical specifications of rupture, of altered human tissue, take on the objective description of laboratory prose – eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle, punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol; the bullet.[5]

The unspeakability of such woundings, however, is not merely a function of their terror and depravity, but rather a consequence of the ways flesh has been made to bear the conditions of im/possibility of and for a semiotics which takes itself to be the very foundation of language, at least in its modern dissimulations.[6] In Moten’s illumination, “[t]he value of the sign, its necessary relation to the possibility of (a universal science of and a universal) language, is only given in the absence or supercession of, or the abstraction from, sounded speech— its essential materiality is rendered ancillary by the crossing of an immaterial border or by a differentializing inscription.”[7] Thus, when Spillers writes that “[t]hese undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural by seeing skin color[,]”[8] we may surmise that what Frantz Fanon termed “epidermalization” – the process by which a “historico-racial schema” is violently imposed upon the skin, that which, for the Black, forecloses the very possibility of assuming a body (to borrow Gayle Salamon’s turn of phrase) – is, among other things, a mechanism of semiotic concealment.[9] (R.A. Judy refers to it as “something like [flesh]…being parenthesized.”)[10] What is hidden and rehidden, the open secret alternately buried within and exposed upon the skin, is not merely a system of corporeal apartheid, but moreover what Spillers identifies as the vestibularity of flesh to culture. “This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside.”[11]

Speaking at a conference day I curated for the Stedelijk Museum of Art and Studium Generale Rietveld Academy in 2018, entitled “There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude,” Spillers revisited her classic essay, drawing out its implications for thinking through questions of touch and hapticality.[12] For Spillers, touch “might be understood as the gateway to the most intimate experience and exchange of mutuality between subjects, or taken as the fundamental element of the absence of self-ownership…it defines at once, in the latter instance, the most terrifying personal and ontological feature of slavery’s regimes across the long ages.”[13] To meaningfully reckon with “the contradictory valences of the haptic” is to “attempt an entry into this formidable paradox, which unfolds a troubled intersubjective legacy – and, perhaps, troubled to the extent that one of these valences of touch is not walled off from the other, but haunts it, shadows it, as its own twin possibility.”[14] Spillers follows with an unavoidable question: “did slavery across the Americas rupture ties of kinship and filiation so completely that the eighteenth century demolishes what Constance Classen, in The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, calls a ‘tactile cosmology’?” If so, then the dimensions of touch which are understood as “curative, healing, erotic, [or] restorative” cannot be held apart from the myriad “violation[s] of the boundaries of the ego in the enslaved, that were not yet accorded egoistic status, or, in brief, subjecthood, subjectivity.”[15]

Touch, then, evokes the vicious, desperate attempts of the white, the settler, to feign the ontic verity, stability, and immutability of an irreducibly racial subject-object (non-)relation through what Frank Wilderson would call “gratuitous violence”[16] as much as it does the corporeal life of intra- and intersubjective relationality and encounter. If even critical discourse on these latter, corporeal happenings tends to assume the facticity of the juridically sanctioned pretense to self-possession Spillers calls “bodiedness,” then “flesh describes an alien entity,” a corporeal formation fundamentally unable to “ward off another’s touch…[who] may be invaded or entered or penetrated, so to speak, by coercive power” in any given place or moment. It is, in other words, precisely “the captive body’s susceptibility to being touched [which] places this body on the side of the flesh,”[17] a susceptibility which is not principally historical, but ontological, even as flesh constitutes, to borrow Moten’s phrasing, “a general and generative resistance to what ontology can think[.]”[18] Spillers brings us to the very threshold of feeling, where to be cast on the side of the flesh is to inhabit the cut between existence and ontology. Black life is being-touched.

Notes

[1] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, Volume 17, Number 2 (Summer 1987), 64-81, 67.

[2] Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 39. For a contrasting interpretation, see R.A. Judy’s brilliant, recently published, Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), xvi, 210: “flesh is with and not before the body and person, and the body and person are with and not before or even after the flesh.”

[3] Weheliye (2014), 39.

[4] Fred Moten, “Of Human Flesh: An Interview with R.A. Judy” (Part Two), b2o: An Online Journal (6 May 2020).

[5] Spillers (1987), 67.

[6] R.A. Judy takes up these questions surrounding flesh and what he terms “para-semiosis,” or “the dynamic of differentiation operating in multiple multiplicities of semiosis that converge without synthesis[,]” with characteristic erudition in Sentient Flesh (2020), xiiv.

[7] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 13.

[8] Spillers (1987), 67.

[9] Fanon (1986). Gayle Solamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and the Rhetorics of Masculinity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

[10] Judy (2020), 207.

[11] Spillers (1987), 67. For one of Fred Moten’s more pointed engagements with this formulation from Spillers, see “The Touring Machine (Flesh Thought Inside Out),” in Stolen Life (consent not to be a single being) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 161-182.

[12] Hortense Spillers, “To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch,” There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude, Stedelijk Museum of Art and Studium Generale Rietveld Academy, 23 March 2018, keynote address.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid. Emphasis added.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

[17] Spillers (2018). As these quotations are drawn from Spillers’s talk rather than a published text, the emphasis placed on the word being is inferred from her spoken intonation.

[18] Moten (2018), 176.