Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture

Armond R. Towns

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780520976016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Who is the human in media philosophy? Although media philosophers have argued since the twentieth century that media are fundamental to being human, this question has not been explicitly asked and answered in the field. Armond R. Towns demonstrates that humanity in media philosophy has implicitly referred to a social Darwinian understanding of the human as a Western, white, male, capitalist figure. Building on concepts from Black studies and cultural studies, Towns develops an insightful critique of this dominant conception of the human in media philosophy and introduces a foundation for Black media philosophy. Delving into the narratives of the Underground Railroad, the politics of the Black Panther Party, and the digitization of Michael Brown's killing, On Black Media Philosophy deftly illustrates that media are not only important for Western Humanity but central to alternative Black epistemologies and other ways of being human.

CHAPTER 1

Technological Darwinism

I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Fuegians on board the H.M.S. “Beagle,” with the many little traits of character, shewing [sic] how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate.

—Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin had sexual intercourse with someone during his nineteenth-century voyage on the Her Majesty’s Ship Beagle (the H.M.S. Beagle). Led by Captain Robert FitzRoy, the H.M.S. Beagle left from England in 1831 on a surveying mission of the Americas. What was supposed to be only a two-year trip turned into five. On the recommendation of J. S. Henslow, the British botanist and priest, the young Darwin was employed as the H.M.S. Beagle’s naturalist, using his Red Notebook to document geological structures and animal species during his travels.¹ Henson wrote a personal letter in August of 1831 to Darwin, stating that although Darwin was not yet “a finished Naturalist,” the twenty-two-year-old Darwin “was amply qualified for collecting, observing & noting any thing [sic] worthy to be noted in Natural History.”² Darwin noted that this voyage to the Americas would be important for developing his later theories in On the Origin of Species, arguably his most famous work.³

But there were far more violent relations on and around the H.M.S. Beagle that went underexamined in On the Origin of Species, the Red Notebook, or any of Darwin’s personal correspondences.⁴ The Fuegians mentioned in the chapter epigraph were on board the H.M.S. Beagle because FitzRoy sought to return three captives that he had kidnapped from Tierra del Fuego on the first mission between 1826 and 1830. Indeed, the Fuegians also provide one of the more important entry points into many discussions of Darwin’s complex and contradictory positions on race.⁵ However, there is another, even less examined entry point into Darwin’s position on race in the same quote. You could read the epigraph as a representation of Darwin’s belief that there were few racial differences between white and Black people, particularly as Darwin was clearly willing to be intimate with a Black person. But, as Black studies has long taught us, we should not confuse intimacy with abolition.

The end of the epigraph is worth repeating. As Darwin was noting the similarities between himself and the Fuegians, as all human, he likewise wants to note they all share the same human commonalities “with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate.” It is almost a throwaway line, and it is not clear if the intimate act happened while in Tierra del Fuego or elsewhere. But the line also reveals much about Darwin’s context: he lived in a world that situated him as a figure with racialized/sexual power over the non-Western, colonized, and enslaved people in the Americas. To assume that his intimate report was representative of a critique of racial differences requires not asking an equally central question: What to the full-blooded Negro, forced into this intimate act, did Darwin’s criticisms of racial differences mean? Nothing, as the Negro was an object of sexual desire by and for Darwin. Under the captivity of the Americas that Darwin admittedly hated, a full-blooded Negro’s choice about a sexual encounter with a white person was always determined by the violence of slavery that made that encounter with the Negro in the Americas possible in the first place. It was such forms of sexuality that were part of multiple colonial ventures of Western Europeans, situating non-Western people who were violently colonized and enslaved as hypersexual in relation to the civilized, rational colonizer (i.e., white men), who could partake in the fabricated hypersexuality of colonized and enslaved women.⁶ Intimacy for Darwin was rape for the full-blooded Negro.

It is with the full-blooded Negro that we can reexamine Darwin’s own abolitionist position, one of the most consistent positions he took on slavery, such as in his book Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle.⁷ This is not too surprising, as Darwin came from an abolitionist family. His grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, was a “master potter, designer and manufacturer,” but Wedgewood was also a part of the middle-classed abolitionist group, the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, or simply the London Committee.⁸ Thus when Darwin ended Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle by expressing his joy that he was finally leaving Brazil, vowing that “I shall never again visit a slave-country,” it was not out of character.⁹ This abolitionist position also informed Darwin’s later concept of variation, where he argued that species (of all kinds, humans included) were not as distinct from one another as popularly thought. Instead, all species differed from one another by degrees, not kind: “From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety [of a species] will tend to propagate its new and modified form.”¹⁰ It would be the propagation of selected varieties, which could only occur over long periods, that would lead to changes in a species’s skin, hair, eyes, teeth, nails, and more. Put into explicitly racial terms, Darwin’s theory of evolution shuns popular, nineteenth-century polygenetic arguments, which held that different races are the product of very different species. Alternatively, Darwin argued that the nineteenth-century conflation of the Negro with monkeys was “almost ludicrous” and that the human “races agree in so many unimportant details of structure and in so many mental peculiarities, that these can be accounted for only through inheritance from a common progenitor.”¹¹ In other words, Darwin was in favor of monogenism, meaning that Black people and white people were different varieties of the same species.

Despite Darwin’s monogenetic argument, later social Darwinists used his work to make racist arguments against Black and brown people; in the United States these critiques would extend to white immigrants as well.¹² This has led many to argue that social Darwinists misread Darwin, applying his work in racialized and gendered discussions of human groups that survive better than others. The assumption that lies between these two areas is a distinction between “real” science (Darwin) and “pseudoscience” (social Darwinism), ultimately obscuring “the political nature of much of the biological and human sciences.”¹³ But such distinctions between social Darwinism and Darwin himself breakdown when we pay attention not to Darwin’s abolitionist position, not to Darwin’s disgust at the act of capturing the Fuegians, but when we give our full attention to the overlooked full-blooded Negro who haunts Darwin’s notes.

The only way to give the chapter epigraph the full violent weight that it deserves is to acknowledge that Darwin’s intimacy was attached to what Saidiya Hartman once referred to as the “simulation of consent in the context of extreme domination.”¹⁴ Darwin’s intimacy was inseparable from a racial/gendered relation of power that he held over that Negro with whom he was intimate. As Candice Jenkins argues, intimacy means different things depending on the races of those involved in the intimate act. For her, the dominant, Western discursive production of the Negro is often a history not of Black people per se but of white desires and imaginations of Black people. For example, the systematic rape of Black women, both during and after slavery, was justified via reference to the “promiscuity” of all Black women, itself a white fabrication based on Western conflations of Black people with nature and emotion.¹⁵ As per the dominant, nineteenth-century racist arguments, people of African descent were wild, highly emotional, and sexually licentious, thus “dooming the larger black population to depravity and disease,” particularly under nineteenth-century “republican family ideals.”¹⁶ To rape a Negro, at Darwin’s time in the Americas, often made little sense, as the Negro was not deemed human (at least in legalistic terms) but property.

When we fully break down Darwin’s intimate act, we cannot even see this as intimacy in any consensual way.¹⁷ We can say that Darwin had a sexual encounter with what we can guess was a Black woman (although this is just an assumption, as he does not state whether he was intimate with a woman or a man); but we cannot say this encounter existed outside a context in which the full-blooded Negro, as a construct of the white imagination, served a media function for Darwin’s sexual urges, no matter his criticisms of racial slavery. As per Brian Hochman, the media function in the West was anything that continued (Darwin’s) colonial, civilized power.¹⁸ For Hochman, the phonetic alphabet, the printing press, and the gramophone could each stand as measures (or media) of how far the presumed former tribal Western man had come out of nature to reach his civilized, colonial, rational (de/retribal) state in the present. The full-blooded Negro was likewise one measure of where civilized people like Darwin used to be: highly sexual, wild, and natural. Darwin was not returning to a previous state through his intimate act with a Negro, but he was reaffirming his civilized ability to take advantage of (or select) those who remained emotional, sexual, sensual, and close to nature. For Hortense Spillers, the captive Black body has historically existed to function not by or for itself, but by and for others, meaning, for me, that the Negro can be thought about as a medium that does work for what we now call white people. Indeed, the Negro is one central route (mediator) for some to become white in the first place.

Although nothing more than a short line in Darwin’s notes, what would it mean to reposition this intimate act with a Negro as representative of a larger project of Western media functions? It would mean that Darwin’s antislavery positioning would not undo the racialized and gendered context through which Negroes were deemed useful, not for themselves, but by and for another (Darwin). Following scholars like Banu Subramaniam, but also Darwin’s own words on intimacy, I want to take a different position from those who critique social Darwinism as a misread of Darwin. Instead of considering Darwin’s intimate act as representative of his belief that humans only differed slightly, I argue that his theories suggested that the full-blooded Negro could be artificially selected, fundamental for Darwin’s continued self-conception as civilized and evolved Western man—a metaphor for whiteness, capitalism, and maleness.¹⁹

Darwin argued that artificial selection was how man, like other animals, selected objects from nature and turned them into items that could be used for his own survival. Despite Darwin’s presumably neutral theory, it cannot be ignored that it was assembled in the same conjuncture where the Negro was one of those items, what Sylvia Wynter once called one “primary empirical referent category” for Darwinian, Western man’s self-concept.²⁰ The Negro was that which Darwin could be intimate with before going on about his life. While Darwin may have despised racial slavery in the Americas, he also nevertheless considered the Negro as fully capable of serving a function by and for himself. This function was always already in excess of sexual acts but nevertheless intimate, as intimacy, for Lisa Lowe, was “the property of the possessive individual.”²¹

Darwin’s intimacy with the full-blooded Negro did not require naming or even gendering the Negro, but a full ungendering, as per Hortense Spillers, in order to justify Darwin’s self-concept. What was required was Darwin’s capacity to select for himself the media function that that same Negro must serve. Darwin lived in a world in which the Negro was a medium toward extending his presumed monopolization of civilized humanness, and his overall bioevolutionary theory reflected such a view. In ways that mirror Richard Cavell’s argument of media philosophy as the study of our knowing and being, the Negro was a medium, or in McLuhan’s terms, an extension, of Darwin’s self-being and knowing. Indeed, I argue Darwin’s artificial selection is a media philosophy itself, well before a thing called media philosophy ever existed. And this nascent media philosophy lay the foundation for McLuhan’s later, mature twentieth-century media philosophy. No matter who the nameless, full-blooded Negro was, they were a medium by and for Darwin during that intimate act. It is for these reasons that I believe that the medium or Negro long ignored in Darwin’s story and studies of Darwin deserves a reckoning.

HOW (SOCIAL) DARWINIAN THOUGHT INFLUENCED MEDIA PHILOSOPHY

Although Darwin publicly voiced abolitionist leanings, his own intimate act suggested that he would not be fully against some elements of the later social Darwinian theoretical project. But social Darwinism and Darwin cannot be conflated because the conjuncture is far from static. Although social Darwinism existed during Darwin’s lifetime, a burst of social Darwinian theory proliferated in the twentieth century in a context that Darwin would have likely found unfamiliar: both the increasingly tense debates about the legitimacy of Western colonial rule in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and Black and brown people’s growing calls for self-governance during the early and mid-twentieth century. For example, Black and brown people all over the world would be alarmed by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini invading Abyssinia on October 3, 1935. The violent Italian invasion was a part of the country’s wider expansionist strategy in the wake of World War I and the League of Nations inaction, despite the organization being formed to prevent exactly what Italy was doing. The invasion would come to serve as “a flashpoint for anti-imperialist and anticolonial agitation and organization” for Black and brown people throughout the world.²²

With the embarrassing, hands-off approach to Mussolini from the West—around the same time the West also took a noninterventionist approach to the rise of other fascist regimes led by Francisco ...

Table of contents

• Imprint
• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. The Medium Is the Message, Revisited: Media and Black Epistemologies
• 1.   Technological Darwinism
• 2.   Black Escapism on the Underground (Black) Anthropocene
• 3.   Toward a Theory of Intercommunal Media
• 4.   Black “Matter” Lives: Michael Brown and Digital Afterlives
• Conclusion. The Reparations of the Earth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index