Abstract
Calling for a reconsideration of race in response to ‘post-race’ discourses, W.J.T. Mitchell’s inspiring address at the first congress of the International Association for Visual Culture Studies made at least three major claims.1 First, and perhaps most central to his argument, is that the power of deeply ingrained social ontologies is not to be underestimated. Notions that have served to organize and structure thoughts on the nature of being are neither easily nor quickly altered. Race, it must be recognized, is everywhere. Perception in and of the world is encoded, if often unconsciously or indirectly, through race. This leads to a second claim: that the notion of nature, or of second nature, stemming from the beginning of a critical left theory following Hegel and Marx up to Benjamin and Adorno/Horkheimer, needs to be revived. Cultural studies, indeed the greater portion of the humanities, has become so convinced of its social constructivist logic that it is in danger of neglecting nature – or something like it, a second nature – altogether. Mitchell argues that this is a mistake; that if we neglect the immovable truth of nature, or let’s say the tenacious tendencies of second nature, we run the risk of all-too-easily replacing one socially ontologizing concept with another. The point is well taken: paradigm shifts and social ontologies don’t change overnight, but are rather subject to long, uneasy processes. Following this logic, it is more and more often said that the tendency to prematurely hail the end of an era is a symptom of the time after modernism, and the eagerness to ‘post-’ an era, a logic, a paradigm, or an ontology often runs the risk of being counterproductive: thus we have Mitchell’s welcome call for a reconsideration of race.
Loren, Scott