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Theory, Culture and Society
Fanon's Lacan, and the traumatogenic child:
psychoanalytic reflections on the dynamics of colonialism and racism
Erica Burman
Manchester Institute of Education
University of Manchester
Ellen Wilkinson Building
Manchester M13 9PL
UK
Abstract
This paper revisits Fanon’s relationship with psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian psychoanalysis, via a close reading of his rhetorics of childhood – primarily as mobilised by the ‘Look, a Negro!’ scenario from Black Skin, White Masks, the traumatogenic scene which installs the black man's sense of alienation from his own body and inferiority. While this scene has been much discussed, the role accorded the child in this has attracted little attention. This paper focuses on the role and positioning of the child to reconsider Fanon’s ideas, in relation to his contribution to the social constitution of subjectivity, arguing that reading Fanon alongside both his citations of Lacan, and some aspects of Lacanian theory, opens up further interpretive possibilities in teasing out tensions in Fanon’s writing around models of subjectivity. Finally, it is argued that it is where Fanon retains an indeterminacy surrounding the child that he is most politically fruitful.
This paper explores the depiction of the child with which Fanon is primarily associated, reviewing its various interpretations, focusing in particular on the surprising lack of analysis of his model of childhood. Areas of ambiguity are shown to qualify not only the processes of racialization experienced by Fanon as a prototypical (but specific kind of) black subject, but also the ontological claims accorded the child in this scenario. After reviewing the reception of Fanon in relation to this specific focus, I discuss Fanon’s use of and citation of Lacan in Black Skin, White Masks(1952/1970), juxtaposing this with Lacan’s own account of the constitution of individual subjectivities via the social field (in his ‘Logical time’ sophism). This is then applied to the implied spatio-temporal field of Fanon’s ‘Look, a Negro!’ scene to highlight some instabilities, or vacillations. Other examples from Fanon’s texts are considered, both to evaluate the adequacy of their account and the assumptions about sex/gender and age set in play. These are used to reconsider how Fanon’s child(ren) figure in his model, ending by suggesting that the ambiguities and underdeterminations may in fact be political strengths.
Given the vast literature on Fanon, yet another discussion of his account of colonial dynamics may seem redundant. However, the specific focus of this article on Fanon’s construction of the child renews critical engagement with his work, alongside prompting further interrogation of Fanon’s relationship with Lacan. This focus on Fanon and the child, via Lacan, can be viewed as a further resource to reinvigorate readings of his work, alongside other recentpolitical and theoretical debates on the body, affect, and the psychosocial.
The figure of the child works potently within current colonial and imperial wars[1], as well as – not coincidentally – personifying (as Steedman, 1995, puts it) the Western-generated but now globalized models of subjectivity and interiority that this installs. In this sense, childhood as a field can itself be understood as colonized (Cannella and Viruru, 2004) as well as performing a key role within colonial strategy and discourse (see e.g. Balagopalan, 2002; 2014; Stoler, 2002). Where once colonized people were explicitly positioned as child-like, now alongside ‘saving brown women from brown men’ as Spivak(1988) put it, it is in the name of the child – especially the girlchild, as the signifier of both deserving victimhood and site for the penetration of transnational capital (Koffman and Gill, 2013) – that imperialism is waged.
Another paper could develop this theme in relation to a Fanonian analysis of terrorism, building on Oliver’s (2005) discussion of the attractions to fundamentalism for the colonized as a sublimated outlet for frustrated desires and ideals and the sexualized/phobic colonizer subjectivity installed. This could focus specifically on the significance of the terrorized subject in Fanon’s scenario being a child, and while Oliver reflects on torture and rape in Guantanamo Bay, a decade later equivalent reflections attend what appears to be a third Gulf War. Here the volunteering of young men (and some women), minoritised in their country of citizenship, travelling to fight in Syria and in some cases to join Islamic State, could relevantly be explored through such analyses. While elsewhere I evaluate the range of depictions of childhood mobilised by Fanon across his texts that might indeed exemplify aspects of Oliver’s (2005) analysis (as in the child murderers discussed in Wretched of the Earth, Burman, submitted, a, b) here I want to work more closely with Fanon’s account in Black Skin White Masks, written at the dawn of what has been called the ‘international child rights regime’ (Pupavac, 2001).
Across his writing, Fanon maintains - even when reversing these - many conventional features of childhood discourse, including notions of vulnerability, relatedness, dependency on others. Yet the child, in its liminality of everyday adultcentric life, its bodily permeability, alongside its obviously constructed character, remains an enduringly fruitful site for the interrogation, as well as installation, of nationalisms, racializations and other ideological practices.
Fanon and the traumatogenicchild
Discussion of Fanon and the child begins with 'The Fact of Blackness', which is better translated – in line with Fanon’s phenomenological approach – as ‘The lived experience of being black’ (see Desai, 2014). This is chapter 5 ofBlack Skin, White Masks(hereafter BSWM), where Fanon depicts an encounter with a white woman and her child. There are competing translations,[2] but the text addresses his responses to a child taking fright at the sight ofFanon, as a black man, which precipitates a traumatic installation of a racialised identity.[3]
"Look, a Negro!" It was an external impetus that flicked me in passing. I smiled slightly.
"Look, a Negro!" It was true. I laughed.
"Look, a Negro!" The circle was gradually getting smaller. I laughed openly.
"Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!" Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be frightened of me. I wanted to laugh till I burst, but that had become impossible.'
...
Having come under attack at several points, the corporeal scheme collapsed giving way to an epidermal racial schema.[4]
Whether or not this event really happened, it is what various commentators call a mise en scéne(e.g. Lebeau, 2005)[5]or,in an attempt to frame Fanon as a psychoanalytic theorist, a 'primal scene' (Bhabha, 1993); a logical or epistemological moment in the violent imposition and constitution of a racialized subjectivity, a psychodramatic prototype. It conveys the emotional impact and consequences of such treatment, combining '..an analysis of a given social-psychological situation and an affective articulation of that same situation' (Hage, 2010: 113).
Central to this account is the way the skin and the body become signifiers of alienation from self, via Fanon'snotion of 'epidermalization'. In this he develops a Freudian notion of neurosis but shows how a socially produced event instigates a narcissistic trauma and the interiorization of inferiority. The prioritisation of the visual register is also important for discussion, taken up later in this paper, of Fanon's use of Lacan's notion of the 'mirror phase'. Indeed Hooks (2012: 114-5) claims '… an intersection of key factors make ‘epidermalization’virtually a ‘proto-Lacanian’ concept: the strong emphasis on visuality (the role of the visual field in imposing an ‘identity’); the facet of bodily experience, of physicality being held together (or not, indeed, being disrupted) by modes of symbolic interaction and inter-subjectivity; the attention to the (imaginary) aspect of identification-from-without; an awareness of the basic structure of (mis)recognition in others (or the systematic denial of this recognition).
The lack of clarity over its status is also suggested by shifts of setting,as narrated byits commentators. Macey sets the scene in a park, while Hage's(2010) and Hooks’ (2012) discussionsmark the sceneas in a train. (Fanon's text mentions both.) It is likely that it is a composite of many insulting scenarios, although the specificity of arenas cited should be noted in terms of the classing of public space:these are not privileged, but ordinary, spaces; ordinary encounters with ordinary people in modern urban contexts.(As will be discussed later, this sense of specific context or embeddedness is what leadsMacherey,2012,to suggest that Fanon could be a better resource for theories of interpellation than Althusser.)Other significantblack figures were also 'caught up in the "Look, a negro" scenario' (Macey 2012, p.165),[6]the effects of whichare portrayed as cataclysmic. Fanon writes of dislocation, depersonalisation and alienation: 'I took myself off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object' (1952: 79). It is an experience of '...amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood' (ibid.). It was also a confrontation with an image of himself that fundamentally distorts the relationship with his physical and psychological being, and his collective as well as individual identifications. It is an account that has resonated ever since(Oliver, 2004, 2005; Macey, 2010; Hooks, 2012) across cultural and geographical arenas to describe the psychological impacts of racism.
The ‘Look, a Negro!’ scene invites analysis on the various forms and stages of racial (mis)identification at play, including for Fanon the complex 'both-and' of being subjected to the universalized and transhistorical black experience, and also divorced from it - as the particularised, exoticised and discretionary exception to the racist rule: 'When people like me they tell me it is in spite of my colour. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour. Either way I am locked into the infernal circle' (BSWM, p.82-3).
This is where Althusser’s (1971) theory of interpellation becomes relevant. This concerns how the subject is hailed or called into being through institutional interactions, by which identifications are forged and sedimented. This account of the ideological production and structuring of subjectivity, which draws on Lacan’stheory of constitutive misrecognition, is taken up in commentaries on Fanon. So, Hage (2010) critiques Hardt and Negri’s (2009) recruitment of Fanon for their project of alter-modernity, arguing that Fanon retains an ambivalence between universalism and particularity that compromises the radical openness some have claimed to find in his work. Hage (2010) names the outcome of this vacillation ‘mis-interpellation’, which he regards as particular to elite racialised subjects, that is people ‘with high cosmopolitan people with high capital who seem to be far more exclusively haunted by the desire for universality at the expense of particularity’ (Hage: 2010: 118). Hagediscusses wider political consequences of this (as he points out, classed as well as racialised) particularity that appeals to the universal, which of course sits alongside wider evaluations of Fanon’s radical humanism (Hallward, 2011; Gilroy, 2010). He argues that 'Fanon 'exhibits not just a willingness to locate himself in the universal but a psychological fixation with that universal. Such an affective state cannot be understood simply in terms of class aspirations... it is also the product of a particular subjectivity grounded in a specific form of racialization that comes with this cosmopolitan fixation with the universal. It makes one paradoxically both fixated on, and fixated on transcending, the racializing force one is subjected to' (2010: 119).My focus here, however, is on how the question of vacillation, ‘muddled perspectivism’ (Hage: 2010: 119), or indeterminacy qualifies the child in Fanon’s writings, as much as Fanon himself.
Child ambiguities
Despite the role accorded the child, little has been written about this aspect. Indeed the word 'child' fails to appear in the Index ofBlack Skin, White Masks, or in Macey's (2012) biography, or Silverman's (2005) collection. (The translations of Fanon's Wretched of the Earth and A Dying Colonialism do not have an Index.) Nor does the word ‘child’ appear in the index of many collections that reprint and discuss this iconic encounter (e.g. Evans and Hall, 1999). The extensive literature discusses the whiteness of the woman and the child, and the gendered, and certainly sexed, relationship between the mother and the hypersexualised black man.As a prototypical example:
For Fanon, a psychoanalytic understanding of racism hinges on a close analysis of the realm of sexuality. This is particularly true of black-white relations since blacks are persistently attributed with a hypersexuality. Why is it sexuality which forms a major arena for the articulation of racism? From a psychoanalytic point of view, sexuality is the realm where fear and desire find their most intimate connection, where notions of otherness and the exotic/erotic are often conflated. Whether heterosexual or homosexual, sexuality is generally thought to be indissociable from the effects of polarization and differentiation, often linking them to structures of power and domination. (Doane, 1999p.451)
Typically, as Lebeau (2005 p.133) comments, analysis has focused on 'Negrophobia as a symptom of sexualised anxiety, as sign of the hallucinatory sexual presence of black men in a phobic imaginary'. Indeed various accounts take this up to discuss Fanon's sexism, heterosexism and homophobia (Vergès, 1996), including (as he goes on to argue in BSWM) that white women fantasise about being raped by a black man, and that black women desire to sleep with white men (see also Bergner, 1995; Chow, 1999[7]). Much of this includes important analyses of the specific impacts of his background and experience (Vergès, 1997). But what of portraying all this as instigated or precipitated by a child?
For all its interpretive problems, Fanon's account clearly offers an unconventional set of resources to interpret the figure of the child and its role in models of both development and decolonization. Through reversing the now globalised model of childhood as innocent and authentic (Boyden, 1990; Steedman, 1995), through its cultural recapitulations of the exclusions and oppressions of the history of western modernity (Levander, 2005; Taylor, 2013), the extent and complicity of European culture with racism is emphasised. Fanon’s child in this scene is not the ideal-typical subject of narrative identification but rather the index or representative of preconstituted racist/colonizing culture that instigates psychic ‘amputation’, i.e. the agent of colonising violence. To mobilise a Lacanian trope, it is the story of 'The Emperor's new clothes' in reverse: the child (figured by Freud, 1914, as 'His Majesty the Baby', to characterise primary narcissism) confirms the ideological order on which imperialism is built. According to Lebeau's (2005) object relations reading, a psychoanalytic approach focusing on infantile experience and relationships (White, 2006),the child is seen to deal with its existential fears through subscription to a racist symbolic order: 'Slavery, lynching, segregation: with a child's looking and pointing' (Lebeau, 2005: 131). But in Fanon's account, as the repetition of his racialised attribution and its associations intensifies with the escalating fear of the child, so too does the child become increasingly qualified: firstly, as a ‘boy’, then as 'the little boy', then as 'the handsome little boy', and finally as 'the little white boy' who 'throws himself into his mother's arms' out of fear of being eaten (Fanon, 1952/1970BSWM p.81). I return to this sequence of attributions, qualifications, or (mis)recognitions later.
With respect to the question of interpellation, Pierre Macherey (2012) usefully reads Fanon against Althusser in terms of their relationship with psychoanalysis, and more indirectly also both in relation to Foucault. While of course Foucault was suspicious of the notion of ideology, Machereylinks Fanon’s concern with the collective (or what – after, for example, group analytic perspectives (Hopper, 2002)-might be described as socially) unconscious with Foucault’s preoccupation with the constitutive powers of the norm. While both theorists address the question of what happens when the subject is hailed, Macherey argues the ‘hey you there!’ of Althusser’s (1971) formulation, and Fanon’s ‘Look, a negro!’ are alike, but also differ in significant ways. What is interesting about their convergence is that in both cases there is a level of determination, that is, that the turning around to assume a subject position, to be subjectivised: ‘subjects are people who have turned around in response to the call to become what has been projected at them; the constitution of the subject is a matter of turning around’ (Macherey, 2012: 13).But while Althusser’s paradigm comes from a religious context (of God calling Moses) that invites a spurious abstraction and universalisation (presuming that all subjects are hailed in the same way), Machereyproposes that Fanon’s, coming from the field of colonisation, highlights the ‘there’; the field of spatio-historical material and interpersonal relations which structures what kind of subject is identified, and identified with: ‘one is never only hailed/recognised as only a subject, but as a subject in a situation, in a colonial or imperial situation’ (Macherey, 2012:18).
‘"Look, a Negro!"’ is said by a child to his mother, where the subject is spoken about, rather than to, but thereby qualified and so implicated. From this a subject is created as black via a process that is outside and beyond the intersubjective; that is, beyond a place of relationship. This is what, marks Fanon’s departure from a phenomenological frame into more psychoanalytic and politicised arenas. Macherey portrays the child as ventriloquized by her or his parents, or even the more generalised voice of a hostile society or culture: ‘It is an anonymous voice, which uses the body it possesses as a resonator, rendering in vain the attempt to assign responsibility to anyone in particular: one may be tempted to say, in a language that differs from Fanon’s, that it is the voice of ideology itself that conveys the thoughts and words to be expressed….’ (Macherey: 2012: 17). [8]
Here we have the key features set in play by Fanon – the body (corporeal scheme), the abjection/phobia produced by the installation of raced subjectivity, the necessity of attending to the material co-ordinates of a particular social field, alongside the correlative fantasies with which the body is invested – or in Oliver’s (2005) suggestive analysis, secreted. Yet the fact that this is all generated by the encounter with a child is not sufficiently considered.
A closer reading of the text supports this, in the sense that the child - although pivotal in both the plot of this story and its affective force - remains elusive - its gender amenable to confusion (as discussed further later),[9] and its understanding of the significance of its apparently spontaneous response far from clear. Indeed, although it is the child who claims to be 'frightened' and fears that the black man will 'eat me up' (p.80) (which is what sets in motion many of the sexualised interpretations, forging the links between orality and sexuality and bolstering the many other elaborations of the links between racism and sexuality), Fanon's accusation of attributions of responsibility are more generalised: 'Now they were beginning to be frightened of me' (p.79). The child is amalgamated into the mother, the 'they'. Child and mother combine, and the subjects of this scene of misrecognition destabilise or are distributed, with uncertain ownership. Notwithstanding Fanon’s psychoanalytic engagements, but corresponding to his psychopolitical project, these are here addressed to the field of cultural, not specifically individual,meaning (although there is evidence within his 'case history presentations' in Wretched of the Earth of working with metonymy to unravel and ease individual symptoms generated by torture and violence). The question of what it is within the white child that prompts such terror is not Fanon's main interest, for two clear reasons. First, racism cannot be 'explained'; and, second, ultimately he is concerned with sociogenesisrather than psychogenesis in order to elaborate his theory of conscious resistance (Hallward, 2011).