‘Language is over’: on racism’s epistemic closures

The acclaimed author and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi narrates an interaction between a prisoner and a Nazi guard in the camp. In this interaction, a prisoner idly sucks an icicle to alleviate a thirst. He is ordered to cease this harmless and mundane act by a passing guard. ‘Why?’ is the understandably baffled response from the offending prisoner, met with an answer that pierces both in its simplicity and finality: ‘there is no why’ (Goldstein, 2015). In reflecting on this retelling, the novelist and race scholar Toni Morrison highlights not only the banality of the prison guard’s original demand but also his corresponding answer to the prisoner’s question. This banality, she argues, is one of the distinguishing features of evil – the shutting down of language’s possibilities not only to communicate but also to ask questions about our world and who we are within it in relation to others. ‘There is no why’: just like that, language is over (Morrison, 2015). In considering the practice of language’s abrupt conclusion, my interrogative contribution to the South African Journal of Psychology commentary series on Racism is focused on a set of questions about how racist practice and ideology come to be so entrenched not only in material and structural fields but also in the hearts and minds of persons. This feature of racism has come to characterize much of my explorations and questioning about relations of power more generally. In engaging this feature of racism, I deliberately put aside matters specifically related to discursive, affective, and material dimensions of racism to instead attend to what, to my mind, may be the interwoven thread that brings these three dimensions together: epistemic closure.

The term epistemic closure that I draw on comes from the critical race scholar Lewis Gordon’s exposition of Fanon’s writings on racialization and racism’s materialization within psychic and social domains. Epistemic closure, for Gordon (2015), is ‘a moment of presumably complete knowledge of a phenomenon’ that ‘closes off efforts at further inquiry’ (p. 49). Epistemic closure tells us all we can know about a phenomenon, a group of people, and histories of relating. In this continuous and urgent project of decolonization why should we concern ourselves with the function of epistemic closure in accounting for racism in society? The simple answer is that at the heart of the material, discursive and affective entanglements of dehumanization and denigration lie practices of epistemic closures that function to justify these entanglements. Epistemic closure not only tells me all I need to know about you, it also tells me all I need to know in order not to engage you, to recognize you as other than human, to erase you in both a literal and figurative way. One need only reflect on the work of epistemic closure in the histories of genocide (in Rwanda, radio stations incited mass killings of Tutsi minority in the 1994 genocide, referring to them as ‘inyenzi’ or cockroaches) and in Apartheid State’s legitimation of state-sponsored violence against a Black majority in South Africa. Epistemic closure allows for a translation into the marginalized and dehumanized other becoming what Fanon (1986) describes as the ‘phobogenic object’ (34), that is, an object that induces fear and anxiety. The Black body thus takes on fear-inducing markers of signification that come to be part of the racial stereotype and discursive constructs that denigrate and dehumanize. The phobogenic object is part of an articulation of racialized and ethnic violence formations in society.

Epistemic closure does not only do the work of erasing, it may also enable a hyper-visibilizing of the other so that I may speak about the other or represent the other in ways that deny agency to self-represent and speak. Racism’s epistemic closures is evident in racist stereotype and media representations of some social groups as lesser than. It is present in much disciplinary practice and theorizing framed as objective social science. It is present in social policy that determines the well-being of a group of people. It is present in institutional practices of service in its myriad forms and in teaching and learning pedagogies. Understanding the material, discursive and affective registers of racialization and racism means therefore that we must get to the heart of the work and function of epistemic closure.

Thinking with this logic in mind, I am interested in exploring what challenges to our theorization of racialization and racism become possible outside of the realm of the discursive contours of racism. In so doing, I take up Ratele and Malherbe’s (2020) invitation to reflect on the possibilities for an antiracist Psychology. As a first point of call, an antiracist Psychology must attend to its own epistemic closures in its theorization, analysis, and work on race and racism. This is a call for a more reflexive practice of Psychology that is race specific to do nonracist work. This situating and foregrounding of race requires considered critical reflection of our own knowledge and professional practice as always already raced – whether this is in terms of our positionalities as practitioners and knowledge producers, a racialized history and its continued presence in our psychic and social lives and the positionalities and world-making of the communities and people we service.

In this vein, a question that we must ask of ourselves continually is ‘what does it mean to be well’? Phrased differently, what does well-being look like in a society marked by harsh racial, classed and gendered inequalities? It seems to me then that the very business of a Psychology in Africa, of an antiracist Psychology, is precisely this exploration of a practice of well-being that refuses the invitation to comforting epistemic closures concerning race. Of course, part of racism’s recalcitrance lies in its complicated and inevitable interweaving with other sites and practices of dominance – gendered and otherwise. We know that the culture of gender takes on particular meanings in the context of race and class. And so, another crucial cautionary note that Ratele and Malherbe (2020) highlight: the necessity of intersectional work in grappling with racism in society. And so, to resist the epistemic closure of absolutist language born of rage and frustration (‘Men are trash’) what work can be done that tackles the structural, material, and affective violence of Racist Capitalist and Patriarchal systems that reinforce each other?

Any endeavour to engage an antiracist Psychology, to address racism’s recalcitrance in the social realm and also in the hearts and minds of people, necessitates an engagement with the political, material, discursive, and psychic function of racism’s epistemic closures. This is part of the work we must do. How do we eliminate the potency of epistemic closures in racist ideology? The answer lies in the challenges: we must address and grapple with the multiple sites of racist ideology. What psychic energies – be they attachments, anxieties, desires and fears – are part of our epistemic closures? What affective logic animates racist practice and ideology? We need to provoke the political and social utility that reinforces the epistemic closures of race. When language is deployed in this way, when it effectively shuts down possibilities of knowing, seeing, and questioning our relationships with each other and in the world, when language is over, history tells us that a banality of evil is made possible.