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Narrative environments – Celia Pearce

The following entry brings to attention a number of key themes for the design of narrative environments. They include: storytelling; social imaginaries; immersion; spatial narrative; experience design; illusion of authenticity; agency; identity; community; persistent community; participation; to live; to visit; guest; citizen; stranger; polity; synthetic and predesigned worlds; player-created and emergent worlds; interaction and narration; productive play.

A speculative chronology Part 1: From Lascaux to Disneyland

Celia Pearce (1997a: 329) uses the term ‘narrative environments’ to describe physical or virtual spaces that tell a story or provide an experience for particular audiences. She says that a narrative environment, simply put, is a space that facilitates a story. In her view, the first commercial attempts to create narrative environments as an entertainment form were developed by Walt Disney for Disneyland. Disney fused architecture and cinema and, for the first time, made environments that told a story.

Centuries before Disney created narrative environments for entertainment purposes, Pearce (1997a: 330-331) continues, they existed for religious and educational purposes. In the pre-literate days of medieval Roman Catholicism, for example, when the mass was recited in Latin, understood only by priests, monks and noblemen, the Biblical stories were articulated for the illiterate peasants through frescos, murals, statues, reliefs and stained-glass windows, in short, by pictorial-sculptural means in an architectural setting. The church interior, from this perspective, can be argued to constitute a narrative environment of a sort, articulating visual, pictorial narratives in space while working image into architecture.

Still further back historically, Pearce argues that more examples of the articulation of image and architecture can be found. She cites Ancient Egypt, where giant frescos were the preferred medium, and Mesopotamia, where visual narratives kept alive the lore, legend, history and myth of these civilisations. Yet further back historically, Pearce speculates that the cave paintings of Lascaux may be read as attempts to embed a chronicle of events within the cave dwellers’ environment, perhaps with pedagogic intent, conveying instructions concerning how to hunt certain animals.

In sum, architectures, as environments, have functioned as a narrative medium for millennia.

A speculative chronology Part 2: Disneyland as creative erasure

As already noted, in 1955 Walt Disney opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California, which many regard as the first-ever theme park. A synthesis of architecture and story, it was a revival of narrative architecture, a style that had previously been reserved for religious, ritual functions, from the royal tombs of Mesopotamia and Egypt to the temples of the Aztecs to the great cathedrals of Europe.

In contrast to such highly controlled, ritual-oriented narrative spaces, cities might be said to have rich, emergent folk narratives of their own, one which articulates messy, unplanned stories of ad-hoc expansion (Mumford 1961, Brand 1994). However, such messy actuality can be given a narrative gloss, as in the case of Los Angeles. Through the combined machinations of Hollywood and efficient real estate, Los Angeles’ short and far-from-glamorous real-life history of immigration, agriculture and boosterism was supplanted by a mise en scène of movie backdrops, a ‘social imaginary’ of the fictional histories of Los Angeles (Klein 1997). This was the sociocultural milieu, at the crest of the 20th century, in which Disneyland was born, against the backdrop of a systematically de-historicised, increasingly sprawling, automobile-enraptured Southern California.

This might be taken as one key theme in the design of narrative environments: it is concerned with the creation of ‘social imaginaries’, to use Klein’s term. In other words, the design of narrative environments engages with processes of storytelling that engage with the actual, messy, multidimensional, spatio-temporal articulation of historical unfolding. It does so for some reason or purpose, perhaps to ‘demystify’ some aspects of existing dominant historiographies or, as Klein highlights, to erase memories of particular social histories and put in place a more glamorous story. This is one sense in which the design of narrative environments is engaged in ‘world building’.

To return to Pearce’s narration, she notes that rather than being a mecca for Disney animation, the vehicle for the first modern entertainment mega-brand and the prototype for transmedia, in its initial conception the theme park contained no references to Disney animation at all. It was envisioned as a kind of ‘locus populi’ of narrative space, a pedestrian haven for families, traversable only by foot or by train (Hench and Van Pelt 2003), representing a return to a more innocent past and perhaps a reaction against the suburban, freeway-interlaced sprawl that Southern California had become.

Cities like Paris, London and Athens, or even New York and Boston, are urban centres rich in history and interwoven with centuries of overlain narratives. In those contexts, there was no pressing need to create synthetic stories in the architecture. Cathedrals and castles structured the narratives of European cities. New York’s emergent stories are inscribed in the wrinkles of its weatherworn edifices. Disneyland, in contrast, was created to fill a vacuum that was uniquely regional and historical or, more accurately, ahistorical.

In some sense, Disney was trying to re-historicize Southern California. It fulfils a deep need in contemporary mass culture, particularly in the United States, for a human-scale, pedestrian experience of immersion in a three-dimensional narrative. In Europe, and even in the northeastern United States, such immersion is commonplace; in Southern California, it is not.

This last paragraph brings to attention a second key theme in the design of narrative environments: the concept of immersion. In the example above, this is represented by Disneyland bringing to Southern California a kind of immersion which is commonplace in Europe and to some extent the northeastern USA: human-scale, pedestrian experience of immersion in a three-dimensional narrative. Such immersion is not ‘total’, in the sense that attention may be broken at any point by the continuous accidental character of pedestrian experience.

A speculative chronology Part 3: Video games

Thanks in part to the advent of 3D and eventually real-time 3D in the 1990s, video games have come increasingly to resemble theme parks in terms of both design and culture. Both can be classified as ‘spatial media’ (Pearce 1997).

Digital games, with their conventions of real-time 3D and highly spatialised storytelling techniques, can be viewed as one step in the development of narrative environments with their own unique poetic structures (Klastrup 2003).

In addition to making use of the major facets of theme park creation, that is, spatial narrative, experience design, illusion of authenticity and, as already mentioned, immersion, digital games and networks also introduce three new key dimensions to spatial media: agency, identity and (persistent) community. All of these concepts are crucial for the design of narrative environments.

While spatial gaming has its precursors in text-based adventures, i.e. MUDs (Multi-User Domains) and MOOs (MUDs Object-Oriented), it began to emerge in visual form in games like the Monkey Island series (1990-2000), the landmark Myst (1993) and creative masterpieces like Blade Runner (1997) and Grim Fandango (1998). In these, the illusion of authenticity and the integration of space and story are at their highest level of artistry.

In addition to extending the player agency of the earlier spatial games through features such as added navigation, interaction with non-player characters, quest-based gameplay and dynamically interactive battle scenes, the integration of a network into MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) creates two additional dimensions of gameplay: identity and community.

Unlike at Disneyland where every visitor is a ‘guest,’ in MMOGs, every guest is a ‘resident,’ a citizen of the online world, if you will. Following a model more akin to Renaissance fairs and live action role-playing, players are not simply spectators, but rather take the roles of elves and orcs fully engaged with the narrative and conflicts of the game. Unlike at a costume party or on Halloween, however, these identities are ‘persistent,’ meaning the player maintains the same role over time.

One game that has tried to walk the line between players having a ‘role’ and playing ‘themselves’ is the recently relaunched Myst Online: Uru Live (2003/2007). This kind of persistent identity is a prerequisite for the last and final game dimension created by digital networks: Community.

While Disneyland has generated a fan community, it does not fully realise Walt Disney’s aspiration to recapture the small town of his youth. One key reason for this is the lack of a persistent identity amongst visitors. Community arises when agency blends with persistent and recurrent attendance and an ongoing sense of participation, neither of which is afforded by the infrequent visitation scheme of theme parks.

By moving players beyond the role of spectator and towards the role of a full participant in the narrative, MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) allow players to ‘live’ in their magical worlds as (fellow) citizens, rather than simply to visit them as guests, or strangers, once or twice a year.

This brings to attention a fourth dimension emerging in new virtual worlds such as There (2003) and Second Life (2003). In such worlds, players are not merely citizens of someone else’s fantasy world. Rather, they have a hand in constructing the fantasy themselves in what might be called ‘productive play,’ where play merges with creative production (Pearce 2006a/2006b).

For example, in There, players can design their own houses, vehicles and fashions, which then become part of the world and can be acquired by other players; while in Second Life, virtually everything in the world is created by the players.

These ‘co-constructed’ worlds merge MMOGs with user-created content such as that seen on websites like MySpace and YouTube. Yet they go beyond the scope of these latter sites by combining all player creations within a single, contiguous virtual world.

An interesting confluence of synthetic and predesigned worlds and player-created and emergent worlds, Pearce notes, is the emergence of an Uru fan culture within the player-created worlds of There and Second Life. When Uru closed in early 2004, not wishing to see their communities destroyed, players from the game migrated en masse into other virtual worlds where they began to re-create numerous cultural artefacts of their former ‘home.’ Thus, members of the ‘Uru diaspora’ in Second Life created a near-exact replica of Uru, while another group of Myst fans created a totally original Myst-style game. In There, players continue to create Uru and Myst-inspired artefacts and environments, such as a recreation of the ‘Channelwood Age,’ a game level) from the original Myst game.

A speculative chronology Part 4: Theme Parks, Cities, Massively Multiuser Online games … Theme-park-city-online-game: narrative-environment as polity

Pearce poses the question of whether MMOGs are the new theme parks or the new cities? Perhaps, she responds, in some respects, they are both. They provide the human-scale pedestrian fantasy of Disneyland, a respite from the modern, homogenous, standardised reality of automobile-based suburbia. Yet they also provide the level of ongoing participation and contribution afforded by pedestrian-friendly cities.

Furthermore, when players can contribute to the world itself, they become more like ‘theme-park-cities’ or ‘theme-park-polities’ in which players bring their own fantasies to bear on the environments.

Pearce concludes that, irrespective of whether they are highly synthetic and predesigned, like World of Warcraft, or player-created and emergent, like Second Life and There, these virtual ‘theme-park-cities’ or ‘theme-park-polities’ appear to respond to a longing that parallels Walt Disney’s initial inspiration in the mid-20th century: the desire to be part of a ‘small town,’ a community to which one can belong and, in the case of digital virtual worlds, potentially contribute creatively. In other words, a vision of a comprehensible ‘polity’, a ‘political’ vision, even if a vitally confused or paradoxical one that intermixes politics and entertainment; small scale and large scale; heterogeneity and homogeneity; and simplicity and complexity.

Narration and Interaction

Pearce (1997b) comments that, traditionally, interactive narrative has been synonymous with ‘nonlinear storytelling,’ or branching, video-based genres. Virtual reality seems to offer a more interactive alternative, which might be called ‘omnidirectional storytelling.’ However, this poses a challenge: the more interactivity, the more difficult it becomes to facilitate the story. Does relinquishing this control mean that an entirely new paradigm for story structure must be created? Can the seeming contradiction between ‘interaction’ and ‘narration’ be resolved?

References

Hench, J. and Van Pelt, P. (2003). Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Art of the Show. New York, New York. Disney Editions.

Klastrup, L. (2003) A Poetics of virtual worlds, Proceedings of the Fifth International Digital Arts and Culture Conference, pp. 100–109. Available at: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=812f7bbf5f347366591aa425dd535567b9b4c5de (Accessed: 30 December 2022).

Klein, N. M. (1997) The History of forgetting: Los Angeles and the erasure of memory. London, UK: Verso.

Pearce, C. (1997a) The Interactive book: a guide to the interactive revolution. Indianapolis, IN: Macmillan Technical Publishing.

Pearce, C. et al. (1997b) Narrative environments: Virtual reality as a storytelling medium [panel], Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH 1997, pp. 440–441. doi: 10.1145/258734.258901.

Pearce, C. (2006a) Productive Play: Game Culture from the Bottom Up, Games and Culture, 1 (1), 17-24.

Pearce, C. (2006b) Playing ethnography: A study of emergent behaviour in online games and virtual worlds, Ph.D. Thesis, SMARTlab Centre, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.

Pearce, C. (2007) ‘Narrative Environments: from Disneyland to World of Warcraft’, in Borries, F. von, Walz, S. P., and Böttger, M. (eds) Space, Time, Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. Basel, CH: Birkhauser, pp. 200–205. doi: 10.1007/978-3-7643-8415-9_3.

Other Resources

Celia Pearce Lecture: Virtual Reality and architecture as a narrative art (1996), SCI-Arc Media Archive

Whiteness Studies

RELATED TERMS: Black Studies; Intersectionality; Native Studies

Use for: Critical Whiteness Studies

Kenan Malik (2022) discusses the work of American historian Tyler Stovall, particularly his final book, White Freedom, a book, Malik says, that while demonstrating the significance of his work also exhibits the confusions that plague contemporary thinking about race.

For Stovall, liberty and racism are inextricably linked, because ideals of freedom and liberty assumed the exclusion of non-whites. In so doing, Stovall concludes, freedom and liberty bear the “stamp of whiteness and white racial ideology”.

While it must be conceded that many thinkers who helped to shape modern ideas of freedom and liberty, such as Locke, Kant, the revolutionaries in France who proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Abraham Lincoln, held racist views and supported exclusionary practices, nevertheless, Malik points out, Stovall’s own work shows that the struggle over the meaning of freedom was more complex than can be captured by a notion such as ‘white freedom’.

Malik argues that it was not primarily racial concerns but rather political considerations, particularly fears of social disorder, that led to demands for certain groups be excluded from the benefits of freedom. Stovall shows that throughout the 19th century France was torn between “the radical vision of democracy championed by … the sans-culottes of the French Revolution” and the liberal desire to “not endanger private property”, a struggle which provoked the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and the 1871 Paris Commune. The institutionalisation of more restricted notions of freedom followed on from the crushing of these revolutionary challenges. This tension, which goes back to the 17th century, continued into the 20th century.

The language of race, by providing a means of casting inequalities as natural and inevitable, became the justification for enslavement, the brutal treatment of colonial subjects and the denial of rights to non-white peoples both in Europe and America. It was also the justification for suppressing working-class rights since, In the 19th century, the working class was viewed as a distinct and inferior race.

Racial divisions thus came to serve as a means to dismantle challenges to the ruling order by persuading white workers that their interests lay in their ‘whiteness’, not in their status as workers. In the American south, for example, so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws that imposed apartheid-style segregation were mainly enforced at the turn of the 20th century in response to the ‘Fusion’ movements, which brought together black workers and poor white farmers, to challenge the established order and, in North Carolina, win power. The Democrats, the ousted ruling party, launched a violent ‘white supremacy campaign’ to rupture the coalition, win white working-class support for treating blacks as outcasts and regain political control.

Malik contends that this complex relationship between liberties, race, class and whiteness is ill-served by a concept such as ‘white freedom’. This is not just an issue of only historical significance because the notion of ‘whiteness’ has become fetishised today both by racists and by many anti-racists. The former claim that all white people have a common set of interests. The latter reframe racism as ‘white privilege’. In so doing, both, in different ways, obscure the political and structural reasons for racism, on the one hand, and the social problems facing the working class, on the other. This makes it more difficult to challenge either racial discrimination and violence and class oppression and alienation.

According to Andrew Hartman (2014), the best work in the field of whiteness studies is Alexander Saxton’s The Rise and Fall of the White Republic. Saxton, Hartman writes, was one of the first scholars to publish an explicit examination of whiteness. He anticipated the criticism of those, such as Eric Arneson and Peter Kolchin, who argued that, “whiteness studies has been plagued by three deficiencies: a problem of definition; assertions that immigrant groups such as the Irish had to become white on arrival; and the use of whiteness as a psychological wage” (Hartman, 2014: 23). Historical investigations of whiteness should be measured against The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, a work, Hartman suggests, that is so good and so far ahead of its time that it will render obsolete the very thing that it sought to build: whiteness studies.

References

Baum, B. (2011) On the history of American whiteness [a review of The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter, Reviews in American History, 39(3), pp. 488–493. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23014351 (Accessed: 3 November 2022).

Engles, T. (ed.) (2006) Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies. Urbana, IL: Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Hartman, A. (2004) The rise and fall of whiteness studies, Race and Class, 46(2), pp. 22–38. doi: 10.1177/0306396804047723.

Kolchin, P. (2009) Whiteness studies, Journal de la Société des américanistes, 95(1), pp. 117–163. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24606420 (Accessed: 3 November 2022).

Malik, K. (2022) We talk a lot about freedom – but not enough about whose freedom is at stake, Observer, p. 47. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/02/race-class-freedom-liberty-and-work-of-historian-tyler-stovall (Accessed: 10 January 2022).

Painter, N. I. (2010) The History of white people. New York, NY: W W Norton.

Ethnomethodology

RELATED TERMS: Actor-Network Theory; Anthropology; Ethnography; Method and methodology; Sociology; Participants

Ethnomethodology is an approach within sociology initiated by Harold Garfinkel (1984, 1967). It seeks to uncover the methods and social competence that people, as members of social groups, employ in constructing their sense of social reality.

Ethnomethodology is mentioned by Bruno Latour (2005, fn. 54, p. 54) in a footnote in Reassembling the Social, as being one of the sources of actor network theory. Latour writes, “It would be fairly accurate to describe ANT as being half Garfinkel and half Greimas …”

References

Garfinkel, H. (1984, 1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity

Jary, D. and Jary, J. (2000). [Harper Collins Dictionary of] Sociology, 3rd ed.. Glasgow: HarperCollins

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Agency

RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Actor-Network Theory; Post-Humanism;

De-centring the subject, situating the subject and distributing agency across a network

From the perspective of design practice, the interest in ‘agency’ lies in how it may be conceived so that the action of designs over a prolonged period of time can be comprehended, once they have become part of material culture. One opening for developing a notion of such extended, distributed or networked agency is through Peircean semiotics and structuralist-poststructuralist thought, which de-centre the sovereign subject of the modern epoch, but without effacing human agency. Similarly to such poststructuralists as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, although they would not characterise themselves in such terms, C. S. Peirce is as much interested in situating or contextualising subjectivity as he is in de-centring it. Peirce’s writings exhibit a grasp of human beings as somatic, semiotic and social actors caught up in processes over which they have very limited control and about which they have only fragmentary, fallible and distorted, often very distorted, understandings (Colapietro, 2007).

It is this set of shifts. i.e., de-centring and situating the human, without erasing human agency, which partly motivates the use of the terminology of ‘actant’ and ‘actantiality’ in respect to how designs act, terms which have a high degree of resonance with Peirce’s concept of the ‘interpretant’. This enables the recognition that agency is not necessarily, or even usually, a property exercised by specific people. Instead, agency can be distributed across time and space, between or among sub-individual and supra-individual units, and over types of entities, such as humans, non-humans and more-than-humans (Ahearn, 2007).

Paul Kockelman (2007), for example, theorises agency in terms of flexibility and accountability, on the one hand, and knowledge and power, on the other. His theory seeks to allow one to study the distribution of agency in and across real-time social, semiotic and material processes.

Laura Ahearn (2001), alternatively, provisionally defines agency as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act.” She comments that this means that two concepts, ‘free will’ and ‘resistance’, often assumed to be synonyms for agency, can no longer be taken to be so. Ahearn is particularly concerned to understand language use as a form of social action.

In addition to, or instead of, ‘agency’, some sociologists prefer to use the term ‘practice’ or ‘praxis’, the latter drawing on and redefining the Marxist term, perhaps restoring some of the senses attached to the term in Ancient Greek distinctions among praxis (doing), poiesis (making) and theoria (reflection on universals). Two influential theorists within sociologically-oriented practice theory are Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens.

Shaun Gallagher discusses the phenomenological ambiguity involved in having a sense of agency. The phenomenological distinction that needs to be considered, he suggests, is between pre-reflective, or non-reflective, and reflective aspects of self-consciousness, a distinction that applies to our actions and to the sense of agency.

Gallagher further notes that reflective self-consciousness can be further distinguished into ‘introspective reflection’ and ‘situated reflection’. Introspective reflection can be a reflective consideration of whether I should engage in one or another action, prospective deliberation; or a retrospective evaluation of what I have done already, retrospective attribution or evaluation). Such considerations may involve a metacognitive stance in which the subject might reflect on whether she is taking the right strategy to accomplish her goal; or she might ask whether what she intends to do, or has done, is consistent with her beliefs, desires, and her other activities. This kind of reflection may be relatively detached from current action.

Situated reflection, in contrast, is embedded in an ongoing contextualized action. It involves the type of activity that I engage in when someone asks me what I am doing, or when I am deciding what is the next step in my ongoing course of action. In situated reflection, I do not necessarily frame my answers to such questions in terms of beliefs, desires, or strategies. Rather, I may reference the immediate environment and what needs to be accomplished.

Agency in Actor Network Theory

In actor-network theory (ANT), all entities, whether they are living or inorganic, human or non-human, are capable of contributing to the performance or fulfilment of actions, at different scales. They are therefore said to have ‘actantiality’, a denomination that does does exclude human ‘agency’, nevertheless an agency that is de-centred and situated.

To illustrate his conception of an actor-network, John Law (2007) cites the example of Thomas Edison’s electricity supply network for New York City, as discussed by Thomas Hughes (1983). Edison’s network system was “an artful combination of transmission lines, generators, coal supplies, voltages, incandescent filaments, legal manoeuvres, laboratory calculations, political muscle, financial instruments, technicians, laboratory assistants and salesmen” (Law, 2007).

This system worked because Edison engineered the bits and pieces together. As Hughes emphasises, the architecture of the system was the key. “Its individual elements, people or objects, were subordinate to the logic of that architecture, created or reshaped in that system” (Law, 2007).

In order to emphasise this shift in how we perceive agency, ANT scholars use the term actant, borrowed from the narrative semiotics of A. J Greimas. An actant essentially is that which has agency, which should be seen as the ability to change a situation, perhaps profoundly. An actant can be anything at all, for example, a human being, a scallop, a certain know-how, a given technology or a bacteria.

In this context, agency is not limited humans or non-humans. Rather agency arises from whatever groups or networks these entities constitute and partake in. The network, then, is where heterogeneous corporeal entities, such as things, objects and people, and incorporeal entities, such as fictional characters, concepts, theories, methods or know-how, come together to form a seemingly coherent whole, allowing for each participatory member to act and be acted upon.

An important point here is that these networks organise and bundle together heterogeneous entities in order to sustain themselves. They ‘interiorise’ them or, rather, they bring them into the network operation. They could not exist without this process of bringing into the network of what was initially exterior to them. This is a characteristic of open systems or networks.

Agency in Architecture

A good place to begin to consider the notion of agency in architecture is the Spring 2009 issue, number 4, of the Footprint online periodical. Its theme is ‘Agency in Architecture: Reframing Criticality in Theory and Practice’.

The issue’s framing editorial text argues that current debates in architecture cannot avoid the notion of agency. It crops up in several contexts: critiques of the architect’s societal position; the role of people in the design’s material realisation over time; conceptualisation of the performative dimension of the architectural object; and considerations of the effects of theory for architecture at large.

Even though it is fundamental to architecture as practice and material culture, the notion of agency is often taken for granted. The contributors to this issue of Footprint propose to rethink contemporary criticality in architecture, by explicating the notion of agency in three major directions:

questions of multiplicity and relationality;
questions relating to location, mode and vehicle; and
questions of effect, raising the relation of intentionality to consequentiality.

The notion of agency is crucial for discussions of the architect’s societal position, whether understood as autonomous creator; self-interested professional; victim of market forces; resistive agent; or enabler and urban catalyst. It is also crucial for discussionsof the role of the ‘user’, whether this figure is understood as empowered citizen, producer of urban space, self-organizing entity or everyday bricoleur.

In addition, recent preoccupations with its material and performative dimensions have led to new ways of understanding agency in architecture.

Non-Human Agency

Since the innovations in thinking about agency derived from science and technology studies and actor-network theory, research has continued into the senses in which non-human entities have agency. One example is the research of Jones and Cloke (2002). Their discussion of varying types of agency confirms that trees act upon as well as being acted upon. As part of their research into the interconnections between trees and places, they propose four ways in which trees and, by extension, other non-humans, might be regarded as having ‘agency’. In identifying these four strands, they are not arguing that trees possess the particular and extraordinary capabilities of humans in these respects. However, they suggest, trees do possess very significant forms of active agency, which have usually been assumed to exist only in the human realm.

These four aspects of agency, that is, routine action, transformative action, purposive action and non-reflexive action, are particularly important for understanding the prolonged actions of designs as part of material culture.

First, agency may be taken as routine action. In Jones and Cloke’s example, trees are associated with a series of ongoing processes of existence which enable them to grow, reproduce, bear fruit, spread, colonise and so on. While such processes may be associated with human interventions, for example, planting, pruning and cutting down, the tree nevertheless transcends the passive role often allocated to nature’s subjects.

Second, agency may be taken as transformative action. For example, trees can be seen to make new directions and formations. “They are active in the creation and folding fields of relations, which in turn is often bound up with the transformation of places. Trees can act autonomously in seeding themselves and growing in unexpected places and in unexpected forms and when remixed with the social aspect, these actions can have creative transformative effects” (Jones and Cloke, 2002: 81).

Third, agency may be taken as purposive action. As Jones and Cloke (2002: 81) state, “intentionality is a key threshold by which agency is often limited to the social realm. Indeed, ascribing intentionality to non-human agents can lead to dangerous forms of reductionist essentialism. However, non-humans do exercise a kind of purposive agency, for example, in the way that trees are able to influence future courses of action; their DNA clearly entertains a plan which purposes particular forms of being and becoming – an implicit blueprint with instructions for its construction and physiological functioning (Gordon, 1997). The skill of trees is, then, to have a means of executing embedded purposeful agency, which is capable of exploiting myriad circumstances and thereby influencing place production.”

Fourth, agency may be taken as non-reflexive action. “[T]he socio-ecological world exhibits significant creativity and creative potentials and non-agents such as trees participate fully in creative being and becoming. In particular, trees have a capacity to engender affective and emotional responses from the humans who dwell amongst them – to contribute to the haunting of place via exchanges between the visible present and the starkly absent in the multiple and incomplete becoming of agency” (Jones and Cloke, 2002: 81).

References

Ahearn, L.M. (2001). Agency and language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 28–48.

Ahearn, L. M. (2007) Comment on Kockelman, P., Agency: the relation between meaning, power, and knowledge. Current Anthropology, 48 (3), 375–401. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/512998 [Accessed 9 December 2016].

Ainsworth, T. (2016). “Form vs. Matter”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/form-matter/ [Accessed 5 February 2019].

Colapietro, V. (2007) Comment on Kockelman, P., Agency: the relation between meaning, power, and knowledge. Current Anthropology, 48 (3), 375–401. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/512998 [Accessed 9 December 2016].

Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. (1998). What Is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103 (4), 962–1023. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2782934 [Accessed 16 October 2015].

Gallagher, S. (2012). Multiple aspects in the sense of agency. New Ideas in Psychology, 30 (1), 15–31. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2010.03.003 [Accessed 10 October 2015].

Hughes, T. P. (1983) Networks of power: electrification on Western society, 1880-1930. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Jones, O. and Cloke, P. (2008) Non-Human Agencies: Trees in Place and Time, in Knappett, C. and Malafouris, L. (eds) Material agency: towards a non-anthropocentric approach. New York, NY: Springer, pp. 79–96.

Kockelman, P. (2007). Agency: the relation between meaning, power, and knowledge. Current Anthropology, 48 (3), 375–401. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/512998 [Accessed 9 December 2016].

Latour, B. (1996). The trouble with actor-network theory. Available at: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-67%20ACTOR-NETWORK.pdf. Accessed 9 May 2009.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Latour, B. (2008). A Cautious Prometheus? a few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to Peter Sloterdijk). Available at http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL.pdf. Accessed 27 January 2009.

Law, J. (2007). Actor network theory and material semiotics. version of 25 April 2007. Available at http://heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2007ANTandMaterialSemiotics.pdf . Accessed 27 November 2008.

Law, J. and Urry, J. (2003). Enacting the social. Lancaster: Department of Sociology and the Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University. Available at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/law-urry-enacting-the-social.pdf. Accessed 9 March 2007.

Actor

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Actantiality; Actor-Network Theory;

Actors are to be distinguished from actants.

Actors are the concrete characters of a story or the dramatis personae of a play. The notion of actant, on the other hand, offers an inventory of classes of entities in a narrative, which are defined by their relations to one another.

Thus, A. J. Greimas distinguishes between actants, which belong to narrative syntax, and actors, which are recognisable in the particular discourse in which they are manifested (Greimas 1987: 106). In simple terms, actors are the things in a narrative that have names, such as the King, Tom, Excalibur, while actants are the narrative units they manifest and which have a functional role in the narrative, such as helper, opponent, sender and receiver.

Symbiocene

Glenn Albrecht (2021) argues that we must rapidly exit the Anthropocene, an era marked by its non-sustainability, its perverse resilience, its authoritarianism and its corrupt and destructive political economy. There can be no ‘good’ Anthropocene, he insists.

To break with the Anthropocene, Albrecht suggests that a new foundation, built around a new meme, is needed. He proposes the term Symbiocene for the next era in human history, derived from the Greek sumbioun, to live together. It also invokes the notion of ‘symbiosis’, that is, living together for mutual benefit. As a core element of ecological thinking, symbiosis affirms the interconnectedness, or we might say entanglement, of all living things.

Characteristic of this new era, Albrecht argues, will be human intelligence that replicates the symbiotic and mutually reinforcing life-reproducing forms and processes found in living systems. Human development will arise through creative actions using the best of biomimicry and symbiomimicry alongside other eco-industrial, eco-technological, eco-agricultural and eco-cultural innovations.

As the Symbiocene is built, a new political system, which Albrecht calls sumbiocracy will emerge. Albrecht defines sumbiocracy as political rule or governance committed to the types and totality of mutually beneficial or benign relationships in a given socio-[techno-]biological system at all scales.

Reference

Albrecht, G. (2021) Enter the symbiocene, Next Nature. Available at: https://nextnature.net/magazine/visual/2021/symbiocene (Accessed: 24 November 2022).

Narrative Environments – Environmental Psychology in Architecture

RELATED TERMS: Design of Narrative Environments; Narrative Environments

Jan Golembiewski is an architect and neuroscientist working at Psychological Design, an architecture practice based in Sydney, Australia. His research investigates the psychodynamic significance of environmental action. He suggests that design, at all scales, from cities to buildings to interiors, down to the objects in them, prompt, motivate and ground human behaviour. In other words, design provides ‘affordances’ for human behaviour, human interaction and human community. Design, in this sense, is not the sole remit of ‘the designer’. We all practice design decision making in our homes whenever we make aesthetic choices.

Human-environmental interaction has been explored by cognitive science and environmental psychology. The work of John Bargh and James Gibson, for example, explores the insight that perception and action are completely intertwined. Perception is not a passive or reactive reception of data. Rather, it is an active, projective scanning of, and engagement with objects, people and environments. We attend to our surroundings selectively, acting on some aspects while ignoring others. We also adapt to our environments and use conditionally what is on offer. Design, by changing the features and arrangements of the environment, is capable of altering that attention and use.

Lack, Loss and User-Centred Design Practices

What is at stake in this post is whether it is valuable to explore a re-articulation of user-centred design and the notion of affordance through certain concepts borrowed from psychoanalysis. This may enable a conception of how designs intervene in the psycho-drama of the subject in its social operation and the formation or individuation of the self as person and persona. Through these means, the notions of ‘use’, ‘the user’ and utility can be transformed through a re-contextualisation in terms of actantiality.

One way of expressing this is to say that the ‘I-the-user’, the assumed identity of the pragmatic-utilitarian subject, has to be seen alongside other aspects of the contemporary 20th and 21st century Western subject which, according to Ragland-Sullivan (1987: 10), continues to be, “a mixture of the medieval ‘I’ believe; the Cartesian ‘I’ think; the Romantic ‘I’ feel; as well as the existential ‘I’ choose; the Freudian ‘I’ dream and so forth.” To these aspects, Luepnitz (2009) suggests we might add the Winnicottian ‘I’ relate and the Lacanian ‘I’/it speak(s).

It is especially the differences between the Winnicottian and the Lacanian approaches understanding the subject that are taken here to be most important for this re-articulation of the utilitarian ‘I’ use. Let us begin with Deborah Luepnitz’s portrayal of a major difference between the thought of Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. Luepnitz (2009: 964) states that,

“For Winnicott, the central drama will turn around the infant’s loss or feared loss of maternal connection. For Lacan, while loss is obviously important, something even more profound is at stake – the lack built into subjectivity by the mere existence of the unconscious.”

The unconscious for Lacan is ‘the discourse of the Other’, the radical otherness through which the subject comes into existence.

One way of understanding the difference between lack and loss may be to conjecture that the Winnicottian approach emphasises the constitution of the subject through the formation of the body, the gradual assumption of a separate and distinct body that is one’s own, while Lacan’s focus is on the constitution of the subject in language, the gradual assumption of an ‘I’ who speaks.

Both the body and language, however, as Agamben (2016: 80-94) argues, are ‘inappropriable’: that which one assumes to be one’s own, ‘my body’ and ‘my speech’, is only accessed through the externality and commonality of ‘the (m)other’s body’ and the ‘(m)other tongue’. The relation to one’s body, for example in the case of need, as discussed by Levinas, cited by Agamben (2016: 85), reveals that the body,

“is a field of polar tensions whose extremes are defined by a ‘being consigned to’ and a ‘not being able to assume.’ My body is given to me originarily as the most proper thing, only to the extent to which it reveals itself to be absolutely inappropriable.”
(Agamben, 2016: 85)

Loss and lack, then, are important concepts for conceiving what it is that designs, whether as artefacts, services or systems, do for the subject and the self in being ‘used’. Through that interaction, they may, for example, be said to replace the ‘lost object’ of the self and/or to ‘fill’ the ‘hole’ at the centre of the subject. That may define the character of their ‘promise’, what they seek to provide as ‘gift’, that is, a supposedly restored but in fact inaugural and imaginary, ‘wholeness’. Designs, in being appropriated, seem to offer a way to resolve the inappropriability of the self-subject.

Both loss and lack, in different ways, highlight the self and subject, firstly, as processes and, secondly, as processes of exosomatisation: the bodily dependence of the self and the subject on the world with its other bodies, that into which the self and the subject have been thrown, from which they emerge, in which they seek to attain a degree of self-suffiency and agency. However, to be an agent, to have self-motivation and self-control, is, simultaneously, to be a subject in a symbolic-political order, to be subjected to that order, to be limited by the laws of that culture (Luepnitz, 2009: 963). This is to highlight both the impossibility of total self-sufficency and yet its persistence as an object of desire. This tension is one aspect of what marks and articulates actantiality as conditioned and conditional agency.

References

Luepnitz, D.A. (2009). Thinking in the space between Winnicott and Lacan. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90 (5), 957–981. DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00156.x.

Ragland-Sullivan, E. (1987) Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

User

In the understanding of design action and interaction being developed here, the term ‘user’ is situated in the context of the theory of actantiality. Actantiality is a theory of the situated and situational condition of any action. Actions are provisional: conditioned and conditional. The utilitarian ‘I’, the ‘I-as-user’, is therefore considered as part of the dynamic processes whereby the personal formation of the self and the socio-cultural operation of the subject take place and then take their place, that is, become part of ongoing situated conditional interaction.

In this way, while utilitarian actions may be seen as responses to affordances, they may also become part of the creation of opportunities, an inaugurative or inventive action. In this context, utilitarian actions may be part of a transcendence of their place or part of a transgression of their place in a complex dance of placing, displacing, orienting and disorienting.

The term ‘user’ may be valuable for acknowledging, perhaps unintentionally, the repetitive and/or ‘addictive’ qualities of some forms of interactivity within the consumer economy and the more recent attention economy.

One question that arises in the context of online environments is: What is the status of the ‘multi-user realm’? Is it a realm in which individual users come together as an aggregate, remaining separate; or do they come together to form a community? Or, does this distinction depend on the design of the environment itself? This discussion mirrors and extends that within the realm of the public and the creation of publics.

For a longer consideration of the relationships among user, self and subject, the entry for Lack, Loss and User-Centred Design Practice is a useful place to start.

Afro-Pessimism

RELATED TERMS: Afrofuturism; Black Studies; Critical Race Theory; Intersectionality; Identity Politics;

Glenn Ligon, *Prisoner of Love #1 (Second Version)*, 1992. In his 1986 memoir, *Prisoner of Love*, Jean Genet writes, “In white America, the Blacks are the characters in which history is written. They are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.”

David Marriott (2021: viii) proposes that the work of Afro-pessimism has an extreme, audacious place in the history of Black Studies. The value for Marriott is that Afro-pessimism allowed him to rediscover what is for him the most exacting question: what is blackness? Furthermore, Annie Olaloku-Teriba (2018) suggests that it is crucial to engage with Afro-pessimist literature because it has both shaped and been shaped by the organisational impulses of Afro-American and Black British activists in particular.

What accounts, then, for the particular critical purchase and affective resonance of what Jarod Sexton (2016) at one time called, “a highly technical dispute in a small corner of the American academy”?

Rather than a fixed ideology, Afro-pessimism may be better thought of as a theoretical lens for situating relations of power at the level both of the political economy and the libidinal economy (Wilderson et al 2017: 7, n.1). Libidinal economy is defined as the distribution and arrangement, the condensation and displacement of desire and identification, of energies, concerns, foci of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias. In short, the libidinal economy affects the whole structure of psychic and emotional life, including the complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious. Although unconscious and invisible, such processes have a palpable effect on the world, including the monetary, political economy.

Afro-Pessimism, Critical Race Theory and Racial Realism

Afro-pessimism, in many ways, picks up the critiques started by Black revolutionaries in the 1960s and 1970s. In this sense, it may be seen to have a relationship to critical race theory and the legacy of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. For example, Derrick Bell, whose ideas proved foundational to critical race theory, came to recognise over time that decisions in landmark civil-rights cases were of limited practical impact in the longer term. He drew the unsettling conclusion that racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it.

This developed and strengthened a theme in Bell’s earlier work, that black rights have been held hostage to white self-interest. He began to argue that racism is permanent. Blacks can no longer afford to educate themselves and live their lives on the proleptic delusion of an integrated and non-racist white America, when they know that their reality is fundamentally determined by white racism (Cobb, 2021). Hopes of the gradual elimination of racism can no longer serve as the base from which Blacks are taught to interact with the world.

However, this position has its critics. Stanley Crouch (1995), for example, wrote that Bell’s theory of interest convergence undermined the importance of Black achievements in transforming American society. Crouch regarded Bell’s view as pessimism. To Bell, it was hard-won realism (Cobb, 2021). By overstating the case, Crouch argued, “the issue is smudged beyond recognition”. Crouch perceived Bell as fundamentally defeatist, someone who accepted high positions of success then told others below him that they don’t have a chance. Crouch (1995: 76), in addition, suggests that it is possible for black females, for example, to identify with achievements across colour lines. They do not necessarily need to see someone who looks like them to believe it is possible to succeed in the world. If that were the case, Crouch argues, no black achievement of any kind would have taken place unless it was based on replicating some practice held over from Africa.

In as far as Afro-pessimism holds that Black Americans are still viewed as they were viewed in days of the slavery, that is, as different, inferior, and as outsiders, as does Orlando Patterson (1982), there are clear parallels between the thought of Bell and Afro-pessimism. Patterson theorises slavery as a relational dynamic between “social death”, the slave, and “social life”, the human.

A central argument of Afro-pessimists is that Black people are constitutively excluded from the category of the self-possessing, rights-bearing human being of modernity. Afro-pessimism is marked by its ontological nihilism and its attempt to think blackness in terms other than property, alienation, and re-appropriation (Marriott, 2021). Violence, as structure or paradigm, and sexual violence, as an ensemble of practices within that paradigm, is at the heart of Afro-pessimist meditations (Wilderson, 2020: 167).

Jared Sexton (2016) suggests that, “if Afro-Pessimism is defined by anything … then it may be the motive force of a singular wish inherited in no small part from black women’s traditions of analysis, interpretation, invention, and survival”. That ‘wish factor’ is born of a confrontational style that assumes a general antagonism. This style contrasts sharply with what might be called the ‘hope creed’ that characterises those engaging in the politics of everyday life through the assumption of a general consensus disrupted by conflict.

Afro-pessimism and Identity Politics

Afro-pessimism is often misunderstood as a discourse about identity politics. When Afro-pessimists talk about blackness, Wilderson insists, they are talking about a kind of vector of violence and rituals. They are talking about blackness as a position. When others talk about blackness and identity, they are talking about it as a culture. The first step for those trying to understand Afro-pessimism is that one has to think about blackness as a kind of site (Wilderson and Park, 2020).

In an issue of the journal Historical Materialism whose theme is identity politics, Annie Olaloku-Teriba (2018) discusses the value and limitations of Afro-pessimism, focussing on the conceptual confusions around the notion of blackness and the implications this has for theories of anti-blackness.

Design and Afro-pessimism

In as far as design practices work across material, political, libidinal and symbolic economies, understanding their deployment is crucial for recognising how flows of energies are articulated through the materiality of design interventions, which partake in the societal processes of sexuation and racialisation and the constructs which emerge from them. In particular, design practices operate between the political economy and the libidinal economy: by shaping material practices, including processes of commodification they, in turn, shape desire. Design practices thus serve as part of the formation as well as deformation of desire, which is, as argued by Stiegler (2013: 123), technologically conditioned through and through. In short, a libidinal economy is crucially sustained by a mnemotechnical milieu, that is, a technical ‘milieu of the mind’ (Lemmens, 2017). This takes into account Stiegler’s (2013: 123) argument that, “what is generally ignored by the theory of the libidinal economy, including by Freudians, is the role of technics, which also means, in our epoch, the role of industry – which Valery was almost alone, in his time, in trying to think.”

In terms of the design of the theoretical discourse around blackness and anti-blackness, William Hart (2018) outlines what he calls a ‘genealogy’, but which might easily be characterised as a ‘montage’ or ‘bricolage’, of concepts derived from debates about slavery and capitalism with which both Afro-pessimists and black optimists might find some agreement. Hart cites:

Frantz Fanon’s (1988, 1952) phenomenology of blackness, particularly his concept of ‘negro phobogenesis’ or the “lived experience of the black person”;
Orlando Patterson’s (1982) notion of slavery as social death;
Cedric Robinson’s (2020, 1983) concept of ‘racial capitalism’;
Hortense Spillers’s (1987) ontological distinction between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’, rooted in the experience of the Middle Passage and slavery;
Saidiya Hartman’s (1997; 2007) meditations on ‘world’ destruction within the hold of the slave ship, the afterlife of slavery and naïve celebrations of agency; and
Nahum Chandler’s (2008) concept of blackness as a ‘double movement,’ both ontic and ontological, that is, blackness as ‘paraontological’.

Afro-Pessimism, African Americans, Afropessimism and Africa

William Hart (2018: 19) suggests that Frank Wilderson appropriated the term Afro-pessimism from development theory, while Aaron Robertson (Wilderson and Robertson, 2020) points out that a conversation in 2003 between Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson (Hartman and Wilderson, 2003) is generally cited as the start of a second wave of Afro-pessimist thought.¹

During the 1980s, the term Afropessimism expressed the view of many Africanists in economics, area studies and elsewhere concerning the prospects for the African continent. Black Africa was seen as politically corrupt and poorly equipped for economic development. This was because black Africa, in contrast to their more prosperous Asian counterparts, had failed to adopt the political reforms and follow the market-centric strategies promoted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other institutions of global capitalist management. Under Wilderson’s re-signification, Afro-pessimism becomes an ontological account of white supremacy and the tenacity, perdurance and radicality of anti-blackness.

Ochieng Okoth (2020) avers that, for decades, Afropessimism had referred to the unrelentingly negative coverage of Africa in Western news media. Such Afropessimist discourses imposed a Eurocentric developmental model on the continent, assessing its progress in relation to a set of arbitrary criteria that takes Western liberal democracies to be the final stage in the progress of world history. Greg Thomas (2018), Ochieng Okoth notes, has given the name Afro-pessimism 2.0 to Wilderson’s, Sexton’s and others’ appropriation of the term.

Afro-pessimism – added notes from Wilderson et al. 2017

In the ‘Introduction’ to Afro-Pessimism: an introduction, the editors point out that one of the central tenets of Afro-pessimism, developed from the work of Orlando Patterson, is a re-definition of slavery: rather than being a relation of forced labor, it is more accurately a relation of property. The slave is objectified and legally made a commodity to be used and exchanged. It is not just the slave’s labour-power that is commodified, as is the case with the worker, but their whole being. For this reason, they are precluded from the category of the ‘human’: inclusion in humanity is predicated on social recognition, volition, subjecthood and the valuation of life, but slaves are not recognised as social subjects.

Furthermore, Afro-pessimism argues that the slave, because a commodity, is socially dead. This means that slaves are open to gratuitous violence, as opposed to violence contingent upon some transgression or crime; natally alienated, their ties of birth not recognised and familial structures intentionally broken apart; and generally dishonoured, or disgraced prior to any thought or action is considered.

This social death means, according to Afro-pessimism, that slaves experience their ‘slaveness’ ontologically: being-a-slave means ‘being for the captor’. Slaves, therefore, are not oppressed subjects, who experience exploitation and alienation, but are objects of accumulation and fungibility or exchangeability.

This distinction problematises any positive affirmation of identity: non-Black categories are defined against the Blackness they are not, a relation of race that directly and indirectly sustains anti-Blackness by producing and sustaining racialised categories.

From this understanding Afro-pessimism defines what it sees as the limits and failures of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, including their reformist ideologies of progress and their integration with bureaucratic machinery, which is seen as disastrous from an Afro-pessimistic perspective. Afro-pessimism argues that it is not possible to affirm Blackness itself without at the same time affirming anti-Black violence. As a result, attempts at recognition and inclusion in society will only ever result in further social and real death. Because Blackness is negated by the relations and structures of society, Afro-pessimism posits that the only way out is to negate that negation.

The challenges Afro-pessimism poses to the affirmation of Blackness extend to other identities, in the process problematising identity-based politics.

Afro-pessimism is critical of the rhetoric often used that takes an assumed, historically oppressed subject at its centre, for example, workers or women, arguing that this rhetoric conflates experience with existence while failing to acknowledge the incommensurate ontologies between, for example, white women and Black women.

To speak in generalities, of workers or women, for example, is to speak from a position of anti-Blackness. This is because the non-racialised subject is the white, or at least non-Black, subject.

This means that the movements against capitalism, patriarchy or gender mean little if, firstly, they do not elucidate ontological disparities within a given site of oppression; and, secondly, they do not seek to abolish the totality of race and anti-Blackness in an unqualified way. This is not to privilege anti-Black racism in a hierarchy of oppression, but to insist upon the un-livability of life for Blacks over centuries of social death and physical murder, perpetuated, at different times, by all non-Black subjects in society.

Notes

1. The phrase ‘Afro-pessimists’ appears in the conversation between Hartman and Wilderson (2003) in the context of a discussion of the supposed differences in dispositions between Africans and African-Americans. Hartman states,

“In In My Father’s House, Anthony Appiah says that African-Americans are angrier at white people than Africans because colonialism didn’t exact the same psychic damage. I don’t believe that, I think that’s an untrue statement. I think that there’s definitely a difference between we who are of the West and people elsewhere, but I really challenge that supposition because the psychic damage of apartheid is tremendous. When you look at certain African writers, say Achille Mbembe and the other so-called “Afro-Pessimists” who are diagnosticians of their society, you see the consequences of the colonial project. The trauma may not be as extreme or radical as in our case because we’re literally living inside this order, but I would still greatly qualify these positive assessments of African subjectivity.”
(Hartman and Wilderson, 2003: 197)

Podcasts

Always Already Podcast- Interview: Frank B. Wilderson III on Afropessimism – Epistemic Unruliness 28

A transcript of this interview can be found at https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/wilderson-interfere.pdf

Video Resources

For a critical discussion of Afro-pessimism from a Lacanian perspective, listen to Sheldon George’s talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1W5cFmT2C0

Websites

Frank B Wilderson’s website: https://www.frankbwildersoniii.com/

References

Chandler, N. D. (2008) Of exorbitance: the problem of the negro as a problem for thought, Criticism, 50(3), pp. 345–410. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23130886 (Accessed: 7 February 2023).

Crouch, S. (1995) ‘Dumb Bell blues’, in The All-American Skin Game or, The Decoy of Race. The Long and the Short of it, 1990-1994. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, pp. 75–76.

Fanon, F. (1988, 1952) Black skin, white masks. London, UK: Pluto Press.

Grant, C. A., Woodson, A. N. and Dumas, M. J. (eds) (2021) The Future is black: Afropessimism, fugitivity, and radical hope in education. New York, NY: Routledge.

Hart, W. D. (2018) Constellations: Capitalism, Antiblackness, Afro-Pessimism, and Black Optimism, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, 39(1), pp. 5–33. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/amerjtheophil.39.1.0005 (Accessed: 2 September 2022).

Hartman, S. V (1997) Scenes of subjection: terror, slavery and self-making in nineteenth-century America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Hartman, S. V (2007) Lose your mother: a journey along the Atlantic slave route. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Hartman, S. V. and Wilderson, F. B. (2003) The Position of the unthought, Qui Parle, 13(2), pp. 183–201. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20686156 (Accessed: 1 December 2022).

Lemmens, P. (2017) The conditions of the common: a Stieglerian critique of Hardt and Negri’s thesis on cognitive capitalism as a prefiguration of communism, in Ruivenkamp, G. and Hilton, A. (eds) Perspectives on Commoning. London, UK: Zed, pp. 169–212.

Marriott, D. S. (2021) Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-Pessimism. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ochieng Okoth, K. (2020) The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the erasure of anti-colonial thought, Salvage. Available at: https://salvage.zone/issue-seven/the-flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/ (Accessed: 12 November 2022).

Olaloku-Teriba, A. (2018) ‘Afro-pessimism and the (un) logic of anti- blackness’, Historical Materialism. Available at: https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/articles/afro-pessimism-and-unlogic-anti-blackness (Accessed: 6 October 2022).

Patterson, O. (1982) Slavery and social death: a comparative study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Robinson, C. J. (2020, 1983) Black Marxism, 3rd edn. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Sexton, J. (2016) ‘Afro-pessimism: the unclear world’, Rhizomes, 29. doi: 10.20415/rhiz/029.e02.

Spillers, H. J. (1987) Mama’s baby, Papa’s maybe: An American grammar book, Diacritics, 17(2), pp. 64–81.

Stiegler, B. (2013). Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals: Disbelief and Discredit. Volume 2. London-New York: Polity.

Thomas, G. (2018) Afro-Blue Notes: the death of Afro-pessimism (2 . 0)?, Theory and Event, 21(1), pp. 282–317. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/685979 (Accessed: 12 November 2022).

Wilderson, F. B. (2010) Red, White and Black: Cinema and the structure of U.S. antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wilderson, F. B. et al. (2017) Afro-Pessimism: an introduction. Minneapolis, MN: Racked & Dispatched.

Wilderson, F. B. (2020) Afropessimism. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing.

Wilderson, F. B. and Park, L. (2020) ‘Afropessimism and Futures of … : A Conversation with Frank Wilderson’, Black Scholar, 50(3), pp. 29–41. doi: 10.1080/00064246.2020.1780863.

Wilderson, F. B. and Robertson, A. (2020) The Year Afropessimism hit the streets?: A Conversation at the edge of the world, Literary Hub, (27 August). Available at: https://lithub.com/the-year-afropessimism-hit-the-streets-a-conversation-at-the-edge-of-the-world/ (Accessed: 1 December 2022).

Winters, J. (2019) Afro-pessimism, in Paul, H. (ed.) Critical terms in futures studies. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 5–12.