#joel olson

What is the most damage I can do, given my biography, abilities, and commitments, to the racial order and rule of capital?

Object-extraordinaire of a new-materialist microphysics of the subject, biocapitalist frameworks, and the micrologizing drives of ontological orientations, the molecular names a theoretical conjuncture and conceptual abstraction that calls out to be understood in historical context. What I am calling the molecularization of sexuality is my entry point into that project. In what follows, I wish to focus attention on the molecular’s intersection with queerness, and ask a very simple question: what might queer studies have to illuminate about the ontological turn? My approach … is animated by what the theorist Joel Olson has called a “fanatical approach.” In his unfinished manuscript, American Zealot, Olson poses fanaticism as a tradition of engaged radicalism that occupies a structural position “outside the realm of respectable politics.” Fanaticism, that is, functions as that denigrated location that, as Alberto Toscano has argued, is coded as an “excess of politics,” and thus external to the sphere conceived as legitimately political. I want to suggest that current ontological thought has made its home in this interstice: the space between what is considered properly political and that which is derided as fanatical. What do I mean by a “home in this interstice?” The separation of radicalism from rationality—or the separation of a genuinely emancipatory fanaticism from realpolitik—took place long ago, is constitutive of Enlightenment rationality and liberal governmentality, and is not in need of review here. The point, rather, has to do with the ways in which the ontological turn borrows from a long tradition of radical bewilderment, but unlike the kinds of committed, engaged fervor traditionally linked to fanaticism, substitutes a kind of sheer bewilderment that depoliticizes and obscures the fissure between fanaticism and what has been authorized as recognizably political. The ontological turn, in other words, equips itself with the fanatical character of radicalism, but only as a kind of technical sheen. What I am saying is that, central to ontological thought is a flourishing of the limit to that thought, a limit that becomes internal to and constitutive of that thought. That limit is politics.

The desertion of movement building by the bulk of the contemporary American anarchist milieu has led it to ignore the most important and radical political tradition in the United States: the Black freedom movements against slavery, segregation, and other forms of racial oppression. The intellectual tradition of American anarchism has always looked more toward Europe (and sometimes Mexico) than the United States. American anarchists know more about the Paris Commune, the Kronstadt rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, Paris 1968, the German Autonomen, and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas than they do about the abolitionist movement, Reconstruction, the Sharecroppers Union, the civil rights movement, or the Black/Brown/Red power movements. It’s not that American anarchists and history are ignored—Haymarket, Berkman, Parsons, de Cleyre, Goldman, Bookchin, and Zerzan all have their place in the anarchist pantheon—but these persons and events are curiously detached from an understanding of the social conditions that produced them, especially the racial order that has dominated US history.…      The ignorance of Black freedom movements is so profound that even anarchistic tendencies within them get ignored. Nat Turner led a slave uprising in 1831 that killed over fifty whites and struck terror throughout the South; it should clearly count as one of the most important insurrections in American history. William Lloyd Garrison, a leader of the abolitionist movement and one of the first pacifists, is often described by historians as a ‘Christian Anarchist’ yet is almost never included in anarchist-produced histories. The Black-led Reconstruction government in South Carolina from 1868–1874, which Du Bois dubbed the ‘South Carolina Commune,’ arguably did far more toward building socialism than the Paris Commune in 1871 ever did. Ella Baker’s anti-authoritarian critique of Martin Luther King, Jr. encouraged young civil rights workers to create their own autonomous and directly democratic organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), arguably the most important direct action civil rights group. Further, racial consciousness produced in these has often been more broad, radical, and international than the consciousness produced in other struggles. Yet these persons and events curiously form no part of the anarchist milieu’s historical tradition.

“The white political imagination persists in the color-blind ideal through a conception of race in general and white in particular as a politically neutral identity that simply refers to a set of physical or social characteristics. It endures in multiculturalism through a definition of race as culture that simply considers whiteness one culture among others. Each blanches power from whiteness, defining away the cross-class alliance rather than confronting it. In this way, both ideals provide a surreptitious means by which white democracy can persevere. The result is the sort of racial schizophrenia [...] in which the polity protects white privilege, celebrates diversity, and denies any social significance to race at the same time.”

[T]he anarchist critique of all forms of oppression fails to provide a theory of US history because it is unable to distinguish those forms of oppression that have been central to the structuring and ordering of US society. In other words, it lacks the ability to explain how various forms of hierarchy are themselves hierarchically organized. The critique of hierarchy is persuasive in insisting that no one form of oppression is morally ‘worse’ than another. But this does not mean that all forms of oppression have played an equal role in shaping the American social structure. The American state, for example, was not built on animal cruelty or child abuse, however pervasive and heinous these forms of domination are. Rather … it was built on white supremacy, which has shaped nearly every other form of oppression in the United States, including class, gender, religion, and the state (and animal cruelty and child abuse). Understanding white supremacy, therefore, should be central to any American anarchist theory, and developing political programs to fight it should be a central component of anarchist strategy, even though it is not morally ‘more evil’ than other forms of oppression.

Comprehension must come before critique.