Abjection as Revolutionary Critique

Leo Deng

5/4/23

Professor Cash (Melissa) Ragona

Critical Studies: The Precarious Body Research Paper

Why has repulsion been overshadowed by attraction as a theoretical concern even as we can see that in the late capitalist lifeworld there are at least as many things to turn away from, the strong pull of consumer culture notwithstanding, as to be drawn toward?

—Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, Afterword[1]

Introduction

Grappling with Julia Kristeva’s idea of abjection for the first time is no easy feat, especially because interactions with, and reactions to, abject entities are usually relegated to the realm of instinct—immediate disgust, deterrence, repulsion. Thus, productive thought and analysis towards abjection is often repressed, the subject being more than okay with that being its place. Fortunately or not, the likes of Kristeva, along with Sianne Ngai and Cash (Melissa) Ragona, ardently deny abjection’s immediate result of evaporating after the subject is repulsed—that abjection has more to offer than just a mere signal for the subject to stay away or avoid the abject. In “SUPERCLEAN: The Violence of Theory in Contemporary Art,” Ragona conceptualizes the Superclean as a transitionary moment in art history struggling and attempting to represent the abject, which is in direct dialogue with Ngai on making sense of the lack of analysis of repulsion or things that repulse in late capitalism. In the realm of psychoanalysis, it is especially worthy to note that there can never be homogeneity or universal attributes of all types of people when analyzing the unconscious or the abject, especially between classes and cross-culturally—it is always in flux. By drawing on the idea of the Superclean and my own experience confronting the abject as an American University student more than well-acquainted with our petit-bourgeois cultural logic, with Kristeva’s abjection as a foundation, I will argue for abjection’s value in revolutionary critique of the psyches that illustrate an ideology of repulsion that oppresses the subaltern but can also awaken the petit bourgeois from it.

Symptomatic Production and the Abject

The abject is not universal—it is dependent on one’s symptomatic production. This term is inspired by Althusser’s method of symptomatic reading, which “analyses the textual mechanism which produces the sightings and oversights rather than merely recording it.”[2] Symptomatic reading is constructing the unconsciousness of the text, rejecting both Hegelian (finding the dialectical kernel) and empiricist (directly communicated logos) readings as wrong or mythical, by treating an author’s words as if they are symptoms of unconscious, material determinants that can be understood separately and thus, the author more wholly (Althusser cites the symptomatic to Freud).[3] Not only did Althusser apply this reading to Marx in his famous seminars Reading Capital, he argued it as a new reading method that should be used on all theorists and revolutionaries—no one theorized, wrote, or even thought outside the bounds of their economic mode of production. So, by broadening this idea to any subject, I will link the determining factors of a subject’s positionality (their symptomatic production) to their perception of the abject. These determining factors are the same as the construction of the unconscious for Althusser, so it is perfect for a Kristevan psychoanalytic idea of the abject. When thinking about everyday instances of the abject within a 21st-century capitalist country, there is clearly a fickleness, dare I say, individualism that dictates the degree of repulsion to abjection and the idiosyncratic selection of things one finds abject. Why is the froth of milk, accumulated dirt or stains on clothing, or wiped-off paste more abject to some and not to others? This is precisely the question that needs to be answered by the analysis of symptomatic production, including but not limited to the gender, race, class, household, and parenting of a subject and the interactions of these different determinants with the Big Others (Lacanian) of one’s society (like Christianity, American neoliberalism, etc. that mediates a shared language between interlocutors).

Kristeva herself introduces the foundation for the symptomatic reading of persons and its potential clash and coinciding with individualism with her own experience with it on the terrain of nationality—on “foreign-ness.”

[…] with the particularistic, demanding individualism of contemporary man. But it is perhaps on the basis of that contemporary individualism’s subversion, beginning with the moment when the citizen-individual ceases to consider himself as unitary and glorious but discovers his incoherences and abysses, in short his “strangeness”—that the question arises again: no longer that of welcoming the foreigner within a system that obliterates him but of promoting the togetherness of those foreigners we all recognize ourselves to be.[4]

For Kristeva, there is clearly a contradictory existence of being a foreigner that is simultaneously individuating against the backdrop of one’s new environment but also diluting of one’s personhood as a mere, perhaps temporary, addition. “Whether perturbed or joyful, the foreigner’s appearance signals that he is ‘an addition.’”[5] Tying this with Ngai’s idea of repulsion-analysis for late capitalism, Kristeva’s further commentary on immigrants fits perfectly: “The foreigner is the one who works. While natives of the civilized world, of developed countries, think that work is vulgar and display the aristocratic manners of offhandedness and whim (when they can…), you will recognize the foreigner in that he still considers work as a value.”[6] Thus, this existence of the “cheap paradox […] of ‘immigrant workers’”[7] creates at least one demarcating line between the symptomatic production of foreigners from natives, of workers from managers/bourgeoisie and thus, different attitudes towards the dirt and grime of physical labor—the potency[8] of the abject. However, as we move forward with this analysis, the infinite demarcating lines of what one finds abject are never parallel (with different strata inhabiting the spaces in between), rather the demarcating lines run diagonally (intersecting at different points) as we will see especially in the realm of societal abjection. So, we must start with a foundation that acknowledges that the unconscious and abject necessarily operate differently across different classes and cultures.

The Superclean and Societal Abjection

            Ngai, through the voice of Ragona, lays the groundwork for the exponential increase of what repulses people in late capitalism, and what that says about class—repulsion, a response to the abject—towards a critique of capital. By analyzing the relationship between the art world, theory (mediator), and the real world, the Superclean is a fitting concept for the 21st-century West’s attitude towards abjection. In the art world, the Superclean was a response to the 70s performance art of “blood, chocolate, mother’s milk, and other abject materials,” “scrubbing away” that excess and taking “the aesthetics of disgust as its object, but washes it thoroughly through the use of new technologies.”[9] This explication is already in the realm of theory, mediating the art world characters of Tom Friedman, Kara Walker, Sue de Beer, Jason Salavon, etc. to the real world—a world making sense of the abject, “reimagining the shape and form of what was once called >desire<.”[10] This is quite literally reflected by the sublation in the real world that occurs between the transition from the excess-creating self-made coffee to the stylized Starbucks© cold brew,[11] from the dusty pencil graphite (especially on the left-handed writer) to the stylized—but importantly personal, by retaining unique handwriting—apple pencil and iPad, and infinitely more examples. This process of infinite particularity and fickleness of the Western subject runs parallel to the acceleration into, and beyond(?), late capitalism that makes our attractions more anal and our repulsions ever-more increasing (as what once used-to-be acceptable becomes repulsive; the self-made coffee, the pencil writing, etc.). This phenomenon must be held accountable within the contradictory context of the disparity between the “common” American (petit-bourgeois) and the margins of society (like Kristeva said, the immigrant worker—the subaltern).

            So, by transitioning to the societal abject, which is quite simply the dejection, ejection, and rejection of members of society depending on class, we directly crash into the possibility of an analysis of abjection towards capital. The existence of the societally abject is most clearly exhibited in the most prominent phrase that uses the word: “abject poverty.” Upon a closer look, the very imagery between the societal abject and those discussed in the realm of art and theory of abjection converge, becoming very disturbing. What is associated with the societally abject? The images and appearances of abjection include dirtiness, colorism, deterioration, dysfunctionality—approaching the corpse (at least from the perspective of the (petit) bourgeois). We see the unclean clothing and lack of hygiene of poor people, the racist attitudes but also policy towards the homeless, their ripped-up clothes and half-functioning tools (phones, vehicles, etc.), and the intersection of ableism that is inevitable since the societally abject are most prone to both mental and physical health issues.[12] What happens when the societal abject coincides with the Superclean? Kara Walker is a great example of an artist who stylizes societal abjection, focused on race, to a Superclean aesthetic to not only better make sense out of the abjection of black people[13] but be a subversive method to ardently confront the unaware white person.

Figure 1 – The Keys to the Coop (1997)

Figure 2 – Untitled

Walker’s signature Superclean style is to accentuate, emphasize, and hyperbolize the “unattractive” or repulsive features and actions of the black body as seen in The Keys to the Coop. Her art’s ultimate effect is the stylization itself that creates the direct dialogue and confrontation of all spectators, but specifically that of the unconsciously racist white person as if to aggressively confront them in this subversive effect: the art saying, “do you find me abject?, what features?, what has made your immediate instinct be this way?” The confrontation is evident in the shock factor that is commonly rendered when looking at her work in full—grandiose murals that are a true orgy of American-slavery aesthetics and psychosexual interactions.[14] It is worth noting that Walker has faced backlash by “prominent black female [artists] — rejected her work as racist, offensive, even a willing “weapon against the Black community,” said artist Howardena Pindell.”[15] However, I think works like Untitled (figure 2) should evoke a sense of absurd outrage in most spectators in order to struggle with the latent white supremacy implied by the sexual control of the colonial silhouette on the slave woman while being physically lifted by the slave man.

Self-Criticism and Critique

The societal abject, hence, mirrors much of Gramsci and Spivak’s conception of the subaltern—a group not just simply oppressed by an exploiting class, rather they are structurally excluded and oppressed by a cultural hegemony and imperialism that they cannot take part in.[16] What then lies on the other side of this cultural hegemony that deems groups societally abject? We must then move from those who are used to the abject (or are literally deemed so by ruling ideology) to those who are repulsed by it, tying it to the operations of the economy. Talking about the “1%’s” ruling ideology is worthless without addressing the real danger—when those not a part of the tiny minority of exploiters identifies with their ideology. That has been the never-ending debate of the petit bourgeois (using to lossely in a more contemporary sense with accents of 'Professional Managerial Class') class’s positionality since the advent of capitalism and thus also, revolutionary Marxist discourse.[17] This class of small property owners, at times owning some means of production, or just handsomely paid by their employers (doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, etc.) are the actual perpetuators of predominant ideology because there are enough of them and they reap enough of the benefits of capitalist-imperialism. Thus, they will reflect the dominant view of what is abject or not, which includes me. Even though there are arguments for college students to be members of the working class, it would be bad faith to not admit the particularities of ideology in PWCs (predominantly white campus) and elite colleges like Carnegie Mellon that make the acquisition of banal economic security in finance, consulting, or investment banking the end-all-be-all of an academic degree—literally still imperialism’s “brib[ing] its lower classes into acquiescence” to its core.[18] So, as someone who operates amongst this acquiescence, self-criticism is necessary to unfold operations and potential consciousness of the manners towards abjection.

 My positionality in an elite institution and petit bourgeois lifestyle leading up to it reflects and encompasses the predominant mode of symptomatic production, which is the result of manners, norms, and—ultimately—what we find repulsive and attractive that is imposed by society on the masses. Most recently, during a painting-class demonstration of how to prime a canvas, my professor wiped off the excess Gesso of the canvas onto his pants—like the way a child nonchalantly wipes a booger onto their clothes. That momentary noticing of abjection, while wondering if the idiosyncratic symptomatic productions of my peers felt the same way, obliterated my perception as mere instinct; it was a symptomatically produced reaction. Grappling with the jargony ideas of abjection in Kristeva—‘not subject or object, perhaps in between or outside, but more like the other’[19]—precisely made me question the symptomatic production that dictated my perception of abjection. Especially with Ngai’s and Ragona’s ties of abjection to the inescapable economic landscape, the moment of repulsion becomes a spontaneous juncture of consciousness. In this way, abjection becomes a dynamic, in-flux diagnostic of class consciousness (or positionality) because abjection’s deep ties to ever-increasing politics and society of difference make it inherently so. Just like how Marxist class consciousness signals to the working-class person the reality of their oppression, the abject consciousness signals in the opposite direction—for the petit bourgeois person to realize their passivity and complacency to the system of oppression. Ngai describes it best in terms of intersectional oppression of abjection: “the latter’s [disgust’s] more spectacular appropriation by the political right throughout history, as a means of reinforcing the boundaries between self and “contaminating” others that has perpetuated racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and misogyny.”[20] An example of an artist who has been combining the Superclean with this idea of the appropriation of disgust (and abjection generally) for the purpose of ideological oppression is Stephanie Styjuco. Afterimages crumples up the “objective” photos from the ethnological display of Filipinos at the St. Louis World’s Fair 2014 in a stylized manner within a stylized frame—the photos claimed to be edited, “washed with new technologies” to show the otherized Filipino natives as ‘abjectly tribal’ latent in the field of early 20th-century ethnography. It is like an ‘abjectified’ Superclean transition from something like Maya Goded’s photos in Tierra Negra and Good Girls that present the societal abject.

Figure 3 – Afterimages (2021)

            Ultimately, abjection becomes a signal of a reverse class consciousness of the petit bourgeois to understand their idiosyncratic fickleness of repulsion. As an interpretation of the Marxist critique of the concept, that is, of political economy, the societally abject also collides with working-class people being invisible commodities of labor power themselves: “One must see, at first sight, what does not let itself be seen. And this is invisibility itself. For what first sight misses is the invisible. The flaw, the error of first sight is to see, and not to notice the invisible.”[21] Here, Derrida is describing the ‘invisibility’ of the commodity—an overused rejected table here—that signals the veneer of ideology that only allows you to see what it wants you to. Thus, if the commodity in question becomes that of the human worker—who is necessarily treated inhumanely by the capitalist system as a mere bundle of consumable labor power—abjection is one of the powerful tools that imposes that invisibility. Those on the margins of western societies are abject because they are the closest to being exhausted of their labor power, which will render their complete rejection by the economy because they will have no use-value—completely abject. So, abjection can be a realm where the petit bourgeois swaps sides for the movement against capital.

[1] Cash (Melissa) Ragona, “SUPERCLEAN: The Violence of Theory in Contemporary Art,” The Beauty of Theory: Zur Äesthetik Und Affektökonomie von Theorien. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Press, 2013, 217. Quoting from Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, Cambridge (Mass.) 2005, p. 333.

[2] Ben Brewster, “Glossary,” in Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, by Louis Althusser et al., Abridged edition (London ; New York: Verso, 2016), 542.

[3] Brewster, “Glossary,” 542.

[4] Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez, Revised ed. edition, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 2-3. My bolding of words. –L.D.

[5] Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 4.

[6] Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 17-18. The heading for this subchapter is titled: “Immigrants, Hence Workers.”

[7] Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 18.

[8] I use potency to clearly state that there’s a different potential for abjection to be experienced between different people. In a sense, there is no absolute abject.

[9] Ragona, “SUPERCLEAN: The Violence of Theory in Contemporary Art,” 215.

[10] Ragona, “SUPERCLEAN: The Violence of Theory in Contemporary Art,” 215.

[11] Which will funnily, ironically create the latter original, abject self-made coffee into a hipster trend of its own Superclean version. I am thinking of the online kits and subscriptions that will give you all the ingredients and pre-made instructions for anything from food to desserts to drinks—the utmost Superclean, yet sublated.

[12] Simultaneously people in poverty are twice as likely to be disabled and an increased likelihood for disabled people to become poor. Black people are also 2.5 times more likely to be disabled than white Americans. Rebecca Vallas, Kimberly Knackstedt, and Vilissa Thompson, “7 Facts About the Economic Crisis Facing People with Disabilities in the United States,” The Century Foundation, April 21, 2022, https://tcf.org/content/commentary/7-facts-about-the-economic-crisis-facing-people-with-disabilities-in-the-united-states/. Nicole Bateman and Martha Ross, “Disability Rates among Working-Age Adults Are Shaped by Race, Place, and Education,” Brookings (blog), May 15, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/05/15/disability-rates-among-working-age-adults-are-shaped-by-race-place-and-education/.

[13] The abjection of black people was created precisely by the oppression of American cattle-slavery’s end in emancipation, which really just meant the ejection and rejection of black people to the margins of ‘free’ society.

[14] Kerry, “Kara Walker,” Fiction (blog), November 28, 2013, https://fictionartblog.wordpress.com/2013/11/28/kara-walker/.

[15] Lucy McKeon, “The Controversies of Kara Walker,” Hyperallergic, March 19, 2013, http://hyperallergic.com/67125/the-controversies-of-kara-walker/.

[16] “Everybody thinks the subaltern is just a classy word for oppressed, for [the] Other” when in fact “everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference. Now who would say that’s just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It’s not subaltern.” This is precisely the difference between the subaltern immigrant worker with no access to language (even less the cultural know-how) to navigate the American cultural logic compared to the white proletariat that does not occupy this “space of difference. Leon De Kock and Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Interview With Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa,” 1992, 45–46. For further reading see “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Spivak.

[17] The debate is whether the petit bourgeois or middle class can be class traitors or not for a revolutionary purpose. I also use “revolutionary Marxist” to differentiate from the Western, cultural (post-)Marxism popularized in the 20th-21st century and thus, revolutionary Marxists are mostly non-white theorists and activists concerned with praxis like Walter Rodney, Jose Maria Sison, Anuradha Ghandy, Thomas Sankara, the Black Panther Party, and many more that are often structurally overshadowed in the West.

[18] Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” in Imperialism in the 21st Century: Updating Lenin’s Theory a Century Later (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2015). Lenin’s theory still stands a century later, that the outsourcing for cheap labor and extraction of raw material in the colonized countries is an “economic parasitism” that keeps the masses in imperialist countries passive. That passivity is reflected in ideology, which will reflect the perception of abjection of dominant ideology.

[19] Me parodying some ideas from Powers of Horror.

[20] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass. London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 338-339.

[21] Jacques Derrida, “What Is Ideology?,” in Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International (Routledge, 1994), https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida2.htm.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Jacques Ranciere, and Pierre Macherey. Reading Capital: The Complete Edition. Abridged edition. London ; New York: Verso, 2016.

Bateman, Nicole, and Martha Ross. “Disability Rates among Working-Age Adults Are Shaped by Race, Place, and Education.” Brookings (blog), May 15, 2018. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/05/15/disability-rates-among-working-age-adults-are-shaped-by-race-place-and-education/.

Brewster, Ben. “Glossary.” In Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, by Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Jacques Ranciere, and Pierre Macherey, Abridged edition. London ; New York: Verso, 2016.

Derrida, Jacques. “What Is Ideology?” In Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Routledge, 1994. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida2.htm.

Kerry. “Kara Walker.” Fiction (blog), November 28, 2013. https://fictionartblog.wordpress.com/2013/11/28/kara-walker/.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez. Reprint edition. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon Roudiez. Revised ed. edition. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.” In Imperialism in the 21st Century: Updating Lenin’s Theory a Century Later. San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2015.

McKeon, Lucy. “The Controversies of Kara Walker.” Hyperallergic, March 19, 2013. http://hyperallergic.com/67125/the-controversies-of-kara-walker/.

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Ragona, Cash (Melissa). “SUPERCLEAN: The Violence of Theory in Contemporary Art.” The Beauty of Theory: Zur Äesthetik Und Affektökonomie von Theorien. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Press, 2013.

Spivak, Gyatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, Revised Edition., 21–78. Columbia University Press, 2010. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/morr14384.

De Kock, Leon, and Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Interview With Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa,” 1992, 45–46.

Syjuco, Stephanie. “Afterimages.” Stephanie Syjuco, 2021. https://www.stephaniesyjuco.com/projects/afterimages.

Tate. “‘The Keys to the Coop‘, Kara Walker, 1997.” Tate. Accessed May 4, 2023. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/walker-the-keys-to-the-coop-p78211.

Vallas, Rebecca, Kimberly Knackstedt, and Vilissa Thompson. “7 Facts About the Economic Crisis Facing People with Disabilities in the United States.” The Century Foundation, April 21, 2022. https://tcf.org/content/commentary/7-facts-about-the-economic-crisis-facing-people-with-disabilities-in-the-united-states/.