On Racial Etiquette: Adrian Piper’s My Calling (Cards)

According to the OED, the word etiquette derives from the French étiquette, meaning ticket or label. Of course, etiquette also refers to the “manners and rules of polite society,” the learning of which is tied to sociability rather than to the moral virtues. At the heart of the semiology of manners is thus the question of whether a moral system can be produced from a merely conventional form of politeness. Or, conversely, can a code of etiquette be grounded in moral and aesthetic judgment (as opposed to a more instrumental notion of civitas)? Kant suggests not, when he  suggests that our moral conscience impels us to act purely for the sake of duty. In other words, fine manners and self-cultivation signify mere civility and should never be confused with the demands of virtue. Nor are philosophers the only ones to have expressed suspicion regarding the universal pretension of social norms à la mode; artists and writers too have recognized norms as the mere grammar of a culture in the name of a certain ethnological prejudice: the refusal of xenia, which is to say, the refusal of hospitality towards the other or stranger. As we know, the modern racial or class connotation of xenia has long been reputed antithetic to universal and/or cosmopolitan culture. Thus two sides consider etiquette to be weak with respect to universal ethics: there are those who (nevertheless) think that etiquette offers the only way out of incivility in comparison with a more cosmopolitan ideal, and those who think that civility cannot pretend to xenia without formal rules of inclusion-exclusion. Now even – and above all if – etiquette in a certain manner delegates public morals, it also permits the consideration of a veritable ontology of civility as a process of interaction. How does a rule of etiquette produce xenia rather than its mere label or semblance? Where does one locate courtesy in relation to sincerity or honesty? And if politeness is practiced sincerely, should an elegantly expressed xenophobia be judged solely as a form of politeness? Such are the questions I wish to raise by analyzing the racial messages that may or may not be conveyed in rules of etiquette. I start by considering the tie of ritualized racism to codes of decorum: I examine a contemporary black philosophical-artistic response to racist incivility, in the art and writing of Adrian Piper, before turning briefly to an eighteenth-century white philosophical-aesthetic response to blackness as a kind of faux pas. Why Piper? Because in advertising her allegiance to Kant and to etiquette, she undoubtedly addresses the question of interracial intimacy as a question of xenia and/or xenophobia; if our moral lives are formed a priori by certain categorical attitudes and these attitudes have to be transmitted via norms in order to be effective as customs or mores, these attitudes will take on a certain guise in an avowedly racist culture.[1] If these categories contain social mores, we can be sure that in representing racism’s social “virtues,” Piper’s art addresses their etiquette or grammar with a view to changing their normative power: the cultivation of racist incivility continues to define American attitudes towards blacks, or at least the language of polite sociability.

I. Faux Pas

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. (Du Bois 1-2)[2]

 
Here is a famous moment from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk: from shared etiquette to peremptory refusal, there is something about the racial dimensions of sociability (a visiting card, a childish exchange) that introduces a limit. We can distinguish three levels of meaning in the tall newcomer’s “glance”:
 

1. Her peremptoriness brings an end to a story of playful formality and leads to another story of revelation, exclusion, and displacement—a story of being shut out from the world’s social spaces “by a vast veil.” In reading a story about black experience that begins with its social exclusion, we, too, seem to have exchanged a story of innocence for that of fall and revelation, and to have exchanged polite society for a life lived “in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.”
2. On another level, the visiting card also has a certain referential symbolism: through its embassy one recognizes both one’s difference and its veiled meaning. There is also the suddenness of the card’s revelation of social law and the way that the latter turns merriment into abjection and acceptance into antipathy and reversal. This symbolic exchange, which seems irrevocable, brings an end to childish playing, and its scenography of refusal can be located both psychoanalytically and allegorically. The story of the card’s refusal, that is, presents a primal scene as political as it is personal.
3. Then again, what is Du Bois’s story about if not what it means to learn the difference between innocent entitlement and an entitlement that is innocently hateful? This lesson in status and manners is also at the heart of the African-American artist Adrian Piper’s notorious series My Calling (Cards) #1 and #2 (1986-90), a series of cards that read: “I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me” (Series #1) (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Adrian Piper, My Calling (Card) #1 (for Dinners and Cocktail Parties), 1986-1990. Performance prop: business card with printed text on cardboard. 3,5″ x 2″ (9,0 cm x 5,1 cm). Collection Davis Museum of Wellesley College. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. Used by permission.

I regret what you will also regret and (probably even first and foremost) what these cards signify: acts of negation and denial, the incipient hypocrisy when white people – innocently or not, unwittingly or not – imagining themselves unobserved by blacks, give vent to barely repressed forms of conscious and unconscious hatred. These calling cards all too literally signify missed encounters, the accidental nature of which seems to call forth hatred, regret, discomfort, peremptoriness, and an all too familiar contempt. I am not sure if this reading is entirely justified, but already it seems to me that if Du Bois’s calling card tells of an innocence disenchanted by unspoken racism, a scene as painful as it is fundamental, then Piper’s cards attempt to bring the affect of those veiled scenes to social consciousness, and to show how racism in American social life can itself be exchanged again and again, and especially when the targets of such violence are denied any symbolic equivalence as presences. On the one hand, as allegorical motifs these calling cards clearly have everything to do with the limits of sociable exchange; they compel recognition through regret and discomfort. On the other hand, the dramatic meaning of the two episodes in My Calling (Cards) and Souls refers to the largest possible questions by way of small printed bits of paper, whose interrogative reading already encodes a politics of racial impropriety. These encounters, that is, evoke exchange, etiquette, inclusion, and social law without, however, responding to blackness as anything more than a faux pas. In contrast to Du Bois, Piper wants to pursue the significance of having the card refused or accepted, and this is why she introduces a written message, hoping to cause those who receive them to “reflect on their own deep impulses and responses to racism and xenophobia,” the latter defined as the “fear of the other’s singularity through the imposition of inadequate, stereotyped categories of classification” (Out of Order I 234, 248). My concern here is not with whether there is any inherent connection between the acceptance/refusal of the cards and questions of equality and difference, but with their affective significance for both giver and receiver. I am interested in their mode of interrogation, in contrast to their communication or signification, via the path opened up by the various faux pas committed in the presence of black persons.
 
As a way of approaching this problem, I begin by discussing the trope that has come to seem almost synonymous with Piper (and also with Souls): the figure of veiled sight, or cognitive blindness. In an essay in Reimaging America (1990), Piper refers to a way of seeing (racial-sexual others) that is itself blind and blinding, one that takes the form of self-serving “defensive rationalizations,” emblematizes procedures usually repressed or hidden in social interaction, remains closed to difference, and is mired in its own precarious rationality (Piper, Out of Order I 234). She calls this seeing xenophobic rationality. Such rationality involves the direct negation of others by fear, mistrust, error, antipathy, etc. “The fear I target,” she writes in “Ways of Averting One’s Gaze,”
 

is the more pervasive fear of the dissolution of the boundaries of the self in intimacy with an Other, through the seduction that coaxes your deep, unsubdued drives into the open…. My lifeline to integrity is the willingness to name and represent these forces, both in others and in myself. (Out of Order II 132)

 
Xenophobia here means both defense and aggression: turning aside and fleeing intimacy, the xenophobe refers to people who are different in a delusory, fictionalized, abstract, self-serving way. X-rationality cannot succeed in knowing the world, for it is at once a form of disavowal and negation, stereotype and fixation, and all too literally instantiates the unseeing, intransitive glance we saw in Du Bois’s Souls. For this intransitive vision, racial difference stands for a disturbing limit to the symbolic delegations of desire, a boundary beyond which “polite” white society does not normally go. This sort of limit, which stands for antipathy or refusal, seems based on the belief that blackness already has the inherent meaning of a faux pas that is by definition unwelcome. Indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories (of good manners, refinement, or breeding), such intransitive vision is by definition always on the side of refusal.

II. The Infirm Ground of Prejudice

“To feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating, but brings its revenges” (Austin 61).

Piper’s 1989 essay, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present I: Essay,” addresses her political-artistic response to racism and sexism in the following terms:
 

My work springs from a belief that we are transformed—and occasionally reformed—by immediate experience, independently of our abstract evaluations of it and despite our attempts to resist it. Because my creative commitment is inherently political, I am primarily motivated to do the work I do by a desire to effect concrete, positive, internal political change in the viewer, independently of—or in spite of—the viewer’s abstract aesthetic evaluation of my work…. Artwork that draws one into a relationship with the other in the indexical present [a self-critical standpoint encouraging reflection on one’s responses to the work] trades easy classification—and hence xenophobia—for a direct and immediate experience of the complexity of the other, and of one’s own responses to her. Experiencing the other in the indexical present teaches one how to see. (Out of Order I 247-48)

 
Artwork that teaches one to see does not limit itself to anger or accusation. It does not suffice to be didactic or confrontational; such work also must transform: “My purpose is to transform the viewer psychologically, by presenting him or her with an unavoidable concrete reality that cuts through the defensive rationalizations by which we insulate ourselves against the facts of our political responsibility” (Piper, Out of Order I 234). This transformation in the name of political responsibility and social politeness, it should be noted, begins (always violently, moreover, as the word cutting suggests) with immediate experience. As the phrase “indexical present” implies, Piper’s political art wants to be constitutive for the viewer in the here and now: it is hoped that in performing-viewing this art, we can sidestep the power of convention so as to experience the uniqueness of others, and thereby undergo a process toward some other telos or possibility. Curiously enough, we find that the possibility of transformation in the here and now itself relies on convention, but these “norms of etiquette” are irreducible to individual purposes and intentions (Piper, Out of Order 1 246). Etiquette, the way we interact with each other, is for Piper a political question, or rather, it is already the question of the political in the form of our acceptance of cultural or ethnic others. “I am interested,” she writes, “in acceptance of cultural and ethnic others as a social norm of etiquette, not just a moral or political norm” (Out of Order I 246).
 
At this point in the reading suggested by Piper, the political meaning of My Calling (Cards) becomes clear enough: the cards (1) stand for our submission to racist conventions or, what amounts to the same thing, our conformity to racist concepts in social situations, and (2) they also reveal the meaning of norms whose function is to produce effects beyond racist convention when what is communicated cannot be explained fully by conscious intentions or purposes. Or, rather, the cards unveil the meaning of a refusal of xenia that cannot be reduced to individual impropriety, a refusal that, as we know from Souls, is the very condition of a life veiled by racism. Precisely because we fear the shame and embarrassment caused by such norms of conduct, we “might conceivably work to discourage future racist and sexist gaffes,” thus making etiquette (and honor, respect, humility, and courtesy) the ideal for art, self, and society. Central to Piper’s ethics and aesthetics, etiquette, insofar as it is a norm above and beyond any singular utterance, is meaningful only if it can exceed the context of racist convention. The possibility of etiquette – and what allows us to recognize the difference between good behavior and social gaffes – makes the immediate present of our racialized experience transformable and thus reformable. If etiquette works through shared contexts, then its meaning is already other to any individual utterance or act and is therefore beyond any supposedly original or governing context. Etiquette may have unintended or passive political effects precisely because it cannot be contained within individual (or parochial) acts of intention or decision. This is why My Calling (Cards) makes use of the calling card as another form of delegated or non-enunciated communication. Only when freed from intent, when the subject can no longer determine or decide itself, does speech manifest another politics. Interestingly enough, Piper herself both invites this reading and subverts the very terms of its consistency when she invokes the indexical present as the defining context of her art. Because etiquette governs what we say and do, and not what we mean or think, she argues that it can produce a situation where selfhood, defined as a set of ideological practices, becomes critically aware of itself. Indeed, Piper locates the pedagogical function of her art in the effects of such self-transformation. By establishing a distance from racism, her art further serves a critical function by making the defensive rationalizations of racism visible. The idea of a secure or simple presence is thus shown to be an effect of ideology. The presentation of xenophobic rationality, then, essentially estranges that rationality from itself by establishing a distance to the ideology presented, and this estrangement, in turn, produces knowledge of the ideological illusion of race. In other words, precisely by making the effect of racial ideology visible at the level of identification and performance, Piper’s art produces knowledge that the viewer can then use to transform the ways in which racist ideology “insulates” us from the experience of “concrete reality.” This transformation arises from xenia itself, or, more precisely, from a notion of universal politeness directly expressed and experienced. The attempt to present political “facts” to the viewer, directly and immediately, nonetheless implies that the “aesthetic” is itself merely a veil or ornament that hinders access to the unique experience of those facts. More pertinently, the attempt implicitly denies, through various media, that experience is always transforming and so has no uniquely immanent meaning. At those moments of encounter, Piper ostensibly asks for a form of critical reflection and judgment that will in turn reveal gaps in imagination and understanding in interpersonal situations. But as Piper herself describes perfectly, the cards also reveal precisely that gap between private cognition and public performance whose avoidance enables the hateful innocence of racist speech to be maintained in the absence of any moral or civic responsibility toward others.
 
To put it another way: as signifiers rather than indexes, the cards are devoid of meaning and function until put into circulation, when they act as delegates for a meaning they manifest only in the act of their exchange. In circulation, moreover, their proxy meaning vanishes as soon as they are received, leaving only their decorative or referential symbolism. In brief, these cards should be understood as supplements rather than as visitations attendant upon “direct and immediate experience”: they offer no guarantee of intentionality or authenticity, for they are not in themselves about truth or experience. If the logic of rectification and correction itself presupposes an immediacy that puts immediacy into question, that is because, in contrast to the obvious meaning, it does not have an immediate effect – how do you have an experience “independently of an abstract experience of it”? The immediate rendering of experience is impossible here, with the consequence that if, when confronted with these cards, we remain, “you” and “I,” at the level of immediacy – at the level, that is, of immanence – the immediate meaning will not succeed in entering the other’s experience. This means that, when presented with the articulate language of My Calling (Cards), the meaning of blackness (to the “you” or “I”) remains outside the encounter while nevertheless within the situation. This supplementarity – at least in Piper’s worded message – thus blurs the line between politeness and recognition, regret and discomfort, while allowing that oscillation succinct demonstration – a visitation, if one can put it like that, that is both abstract and anonymous. A question then arises: what kind of aesthetic is implied by Piper’s statement that her “main conscious interest is in truth rather than beauty” (Out of Order I 249)? How does one distinguish truth from beauty, without, as Piper herself seems to imply here, regarding the latter as somehow falsely immediate, and so something to be resisted as lesser than truth? Piper’s aesthetic clearly has a pedagogical function: the emphatic truth of immediacy is inscribed in an indexical truth and in the way we supposedly experience transformation; but if one examines what etiquette implies about the politicization of her calling cards, then things are not so obvious or immediate.
 
But even if we don’t follow Piper regarding the status of immediacy, her argument regarding racism and etiquette radically extends the relation between art and responsibility. If racism works through shared interpersonal contexts, it would seem that to question the meaning of those exchanges as ever contractually given is to open up racism to further questions regarding institutional precarity and politics. My Calling (Cards) makes explicit the relation between direct address and a future desire for a nonracial ethical-political formality. “In the society I want to live in,” Piper writes, “no one needs to be warned about my racial affiliation at dinners or cocktail parties because no one is inclined to insult it” (Out of Order I 246). But something strange soon happens to the face-to-face humanness of this longing. Being publicly – and psychologically – responsible for what we say is supposed to be the condicio sine qua non of an acceptance that has something to do with democratic openness: “To accept something is to be receptive and vulnerable to its effects on us, to discern its value for us, and indeed to rejoice in its intrinsic character and extrinsic ramifications for us” (Piper “Xenophobia” 286). To accept others is to overcome the fear of being invaded in the name of “new experiences” in which values of hatred and fear are superseded by values of “personal catalysis and growth.” One implication is that “an eye widened in terror, unable to blink for fear of being blinded by the ineffable” can no longer see primarily because they are “corrupted by deep-seated angers against blacks and women” (Out of Order I 246). By seeing people as they are, in their uniqueness, vision is supposedly restored and redemption can start in the “flexible adaptation” of a psyche that does not barricade itself against difference (Piper, “Xenophobia” 286).
 
If this state of affairs sounds all too liberal (and Piper repeatedly refers to herself as a Kantian), if one examines what etiquette implies about the politics of Piper’s aesthetics, then things become less rather than more clear cut. (The aesthetic-political status of Kant in Piper’s work is examined later in this study, but first let us pursue this notion of etiquette.) Even within those works “target[ing] interpersonal manifestations of racism,” Piper cannot limit herself to good manners, because she is driven to name and represent those hatreds whose intolerance we are never supposed to suspect (Out of Order I 246). If “blacks learn from whites that they are unwelcome,” this also happens, it should be noted, because racial hatred is conventionally acceptable, and, in terms of personal catalysis and growth, can in fact seem more respectful of otherness than the merely tolerant (Out of Order I 246). Since acceptance is meant to have more value in social life than hatred does, how are we to know when we are dealing with a true hatred rather than a merely conventional one? Moreover, if the cards are not in themselves a reparation in either a moral or political sense but exist only negatively, so to speak, as an invitation (to critical reflection), how are we to know that acceptance of the cards indicates a true commitment? The recognition of a racist faux pas, after all, implies its exoneration in the name of the same transcendental principle of etiquette that allowed for the certitude of having committed a faux pas in the first place. The etiquette in whose name the faux pas has to be denounced, even in Piper’s assumed continuity of acceptance and transformation, is not governed by the same integrity that governs the handing out of the cards as art or critical reflection. Interestingly, in Piper’s case, the indexical present leads to an artwork that is neither hateful nor seductive, but a set of self-critical practices different in kind from that of formalist aesthetics. This is why she states: “my main conscious interest is in truth rather than beauty” (Out of Order I 249). But the etiquette in whose name truth has to be stated, even at the “most elemental, personal level,” must remain impersonal, or merely conventional. Etiquette may well be the opposite of the racist peremptoriness that obscures difference but performs conventionalized forms of racist authority, but it can no more distinguish inner sincerity from outward conformity than it can distinguish insincere but polite tolerance from deep-seated racist conviction. Piper is not always clear on this point. In accordance with her Kantianism, she argues that etiquette provides a moral limit for all of us, but also that it cannot guarantee what we say or the way that we say it. This is a major premise of her understanding racism as a kind of illocutionary force, rather than a referential belief to be verified by subjective truthfulness or sincerity. But if it is a force, how can racism be reined in by etiquette or convention? This will be our question.
 
To return to My Calling (Cards): devoid of moralism and prescription, the cards can circulate between giver and receiver, who are both called upon to attend to racism’s effects independently of the “easy trades” (or conventions) of abstraction, aesthetic evaluation, and xenophobia. To hand out a card is not, then, a demand for further clarification or exoneration, for the cards themselves are not about psychological expression or content. We would therefore expect that My Calling (Cards) itself would somehow escape the simple dichotomy that it evokes between (black) acceptance and (white) refusal. Piper in fact implies this, when she speaks of regret and a certain discomfort that is somehow (and exactly how remains unclear) connected with “forces, both in others and in [her]self.” Even the work’s title poses questions of artistic labor or vocation – my calling – as somehow separable from the actual product—the “cards” left in brackets: Piper’s resuscitation here of the artwork as an act of drawing attention to the incivility of racism prefigures the cards’ attempt to produce self-critical reflection in the person who receives/understands them. The language of reflection is, in fact, far from simple here and seems traversed by several stand-ins and delegates. For if the cards stand in for the despair of being made to feel different, and Piper herself only introduces them at dinner parties in response to racist remarks, then the cards not only stand in for her as an exposé of racism, they also are supposed to cause people to reflect on the feelings they themselves provoke, with no hope of escape from regret or discomfort; that is, by assuming that both the racism the cards seek to correct and the self-critical capacity are somehow equivalent, Piper implies that the cards can be politically formative only if they have been unequivocally, unambiguously understood.
 
But this type of belief cannot account for the possibility that the recipient, rather than using the cards to transgress illusion, may well end up using them to confirm the delusion of a new self-critical racial lucidity—the possibility that the cards only have a meaning for a racist reader and/or reader of racism. No such possibility of verification exists for sincerely held racist belief, which is seen as defense or unconscious phantasy, nor can we be sure that the meaning of racist faux pas can ever be an example of simple acceptance or refusal by white unseeing, itself an allegory of intolerance to which only a life lived behind the veil can bear witness. Piper acknowledges this when she writes that black and white viewers often “deflect recognition of the meaning of their response to” her work (“Xenophobia” 293), and when she explains: “I try and promote viewer self-reflection in my work, but I don’t always succeed” (“Xenophobia” 293). But what if the cards were precisely what put the political reading into question? What if, as in the case of etiquette, these calling cards can only refer to black veiled life through the conventionalizing fictions of race?  Or, more particularly, what if handing them out does not constitute, in Piper’s words, “[e]xperiencing the other in the indexical present,” but instead designates a necessary complicity between victim and abuser, bearer and addressee? (Out of Order I 248) If so, handing out a card declares its own artifice the moment it simultaneously realizes itself as civility and self-insight, since it must fissure (falsehood) and suture (transformation) and thus rejoin what is disjointed, rather than what is immediate or present.
 
In this way Piper’s art might seem to be just another conventional way of coming to terms with the conventions of racism.  Her notion of “a direct relationship to the work,” however, challenges such a reading. She has said that handing out the cards “ruin[s]” her evening (Out of Order I 271). (In another essay, from 1990, she writes that “the only evenings that are ruined are mine and the offender’s” [Out of Order I 220].) The word “ruin” recalls Du Bois, and at such moments the cards stand in for the awareness of a gap or veil between blackness and a community of feeling, or at least the promise of it. This crisis in understanding is precisely what Piper asks us to understand. To consider such ruination, however, one must recognize that the experience of hurt is also meant to inspire transformation (in the reader-recipient-offender). By substituting etiquette for racist speech, Piper’s calling card dramatizes precisely their radical incompatibility – she is ruined by both racist language and the need to perform the act. But ruined, too, in so far as the exchange of cards reveals her to be black, a revelation that means that Piper too, as a light-skinned person, now stands in for something indeterminable, or that her inner race feeling is also a kind of rebus or riddle for perception (unseen, it is true; she is a spectator to her own absence). Clearly people aren’t what they seem: a person who appears white can really be black, and an avowed liberal can be a closet racist. The norms of etiquette confirm the duplicity of identity and, in the process, reveal the racial viciousness at the heart of civility and the exclusionary, rule-governed performance that is the very origin of integrity and self-insight. “The general character of the statement and the rule-governed policy that governs its presentation,” Piper writes, commenting on the cards’ meaning, “convey the message that the offending individual is behaving in typical and predictably racist ways. It fights a stereotype by giving the offender a concrete experience of what it is like to be the object of one” (Out of Order I 220). The acceptance of the card can thus readily be seen as an acceptance of racist hypocrisy.
 
When she hands out the cards, then, it is no longer possible to undo our complicity with racist faux pas, for the cards themselves perform the ruination that such language triggers in its glaring infelicity. Unable to communicate directly with her offenders, her cards take the place of voice and word at once. Indeed, Piper is at least as ruined by these semantic as by these rhetorical improprieties. In such infelicitous speech, the violation of etiquette introduces a foreign element that disrupts the sense of self, disturbs the readability of polite discourse, and reopens what propriety seems to have closed off. The cards refer to both obliquity and falsity, and yet they also testify, paradoxically enough, to Piper’s ruination as a Kantian artist whose purpose is to confirm the ruination (of herself as a victim of racism). Neither does their exchange allow for a recuperation of this catastrophe, despite Piper’s plea that they should convince rather than indict, because their appeal to “concrete experience” is itself an inner ruination of delusory rationalization. Piper recognizes, as Du Bois did in 1903, a certain double bind: the norms of etiquette erase all traces and referents of oneself as uniquely singular, because etiquette sees only convention and never presence. Indeed, etiquette can appear as arbitrary and unmotivated as the peremptory “glance” for which black being remains mere appearance. Piper can convey her hurt only if we take, as we say, her word for it, whereas the evidence for the receiver’s shame or insensitivity is, at least in theory, literally normative. Whether we believe her or not is not the point: the formal nature of the exchange makes the difference, not the sincerity of the receiver or the sensitivity of the giver.
 
The process that necessarily includes a moment of self-understanding cannot be equated with mere fear of social embarrassment, and the social duty (etiquette) that governs this moment of self-insight is not the same as that which governs regret or discomfort. The racism that makes the cards meaningful is itself normative, given from elsewhere and imbricated in a historicity that is irreducible to meaning or intention. To return to Du Bois’s formulation: racism speaks to us from elsewhere and is given to us veiled, just as much as it veils its given emergence as a form of natural “innocence” rather than arbitrary authority. When Du Bois insists on racism as a veiling of the world, he means that it be considered under a double epistemological perspective: it functions as a verifiable index of social incivility, but also as a norm whose applicability cannot be reduced to moral or political pathologies. The convergence of the two modes is not a priori given, and their discrepancy makes the racist faux pas possible. The faux pas articulates the discrepancy between the already given conventions of etiquette and racist lived experience and, in so doing, asserts racism as norm (when it is only ideology). It indicates the belief or pretense that giving voice to racism is both norm as social fact and a certain inner feeling peculiar to the arrogant presumptiveness of whiteness. Moreover, the faux pas indicates the belief that the norm and the feeling are the same. To complicate whiteness as a norm is thus to complicate it as a feeling: of being entitled, or always entitled to being. The difference between the verbal faux pas and the norms of etiquette is not a simple opposition between feeling and being, or truth and falsehood. A faux pas is a discursive error, but one governed by norms or principles of verification that include nonracial forms of being: even if we believe that certain races lack modesty, humility, respect, tact, sensitivity, etcetera, the verification of such improprieties, the decision about their truth or falsehood, is not racial but formal, informed by the knowledge that these norms apply to everyone irrespective of their difference. No such verification exists for the racist, who is impolite in his effect and his authority: his purpose is not to be polite, itself neither an inner process nor simply a social performance, but to abuse.
 
The interest of Piper’s calling cards is that they explicitly function as both politesse and politically, and thus indicate why racism is so offensive to those it offends. But in the actual worded message of My Calling (Cards) #1, the reference is neither straightforwardly polite, nor straightforwardly political, for it describes a chiasmus, a kind of mutual inclusion-exclusion: “I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.” And in fact, the more one works with Piper’s notion of the indexical, the more convinced one becomes that although the critique of what she calls “pseudorationality” is entirely justified, it does not quite apply to what the cards may or may not be saying or doing as politics. Though it is epistemologically inadequate to say that the cards enable the white subject to see blindly, or blindly see, the repercussions in themselves are significant: whatever the meaning of the girl’s glance may have been, the card presented in Souls could not prevent the force of the very separation of blackness from the world of companionship. Is it inevitable that the same split that divides blacks from a community of feeling should divide whites from life lived behind the veil in the same way? And can the addressee of the card, understood as everyone and no one, refer to anything other than that very split? If Piper’s unstated question is “What are we doing when we speak racially?” it becomes clear that, whatever else we may be doing, we are not seeing beyond the veil but testifying to its further extension. And it is precisely the unknowable extent to which we differ from its phantasy that veils us in our denials and antipathies. Returning to the present indicative presence of the other and substituting etiquette for phantasy is not as simple as it sounds. For what is indicated, say, by a glance, is not necessarily what is being performed; and what the veil signifies, by way of metaphor, does not correspond to the experience (of difference) that it exposes-obscures. The exchange of cards may signify a desire (for changed experience) that can be performed, but that performance does not necessarily indicate social civility or unveil a desire for greater self-examination and scrutiny.
 
More important than any of these substitutions is Du Bois’s metaphor of the veil, which is itself allegorically veiled, and which exposes both desire and dispossession, exposure and revelation, and the belated recognition, in this narrative of a fall (into racist incivility), of the inability to unveil the burden of being a black person. The very diachrony that substitutes a tall white girl’s refusal for childishexchange is itself a metonym: quite apart from the various veiled scenes of seduction, rejection, and trauma implied in the veil metaphor, so to speak, the illocutionary force of racism has power precisely because of its conventional substitution of racism for who one is, for one’s social being, a substitution much harder to accept than the refusal of one’s card. Du Bois’s notion of a veiled world names the performative burden of this substitutability: the substitution of one’s ruination for one’s unwantedness, the substitution of a veiled life that must simultaneously hover and be irreducible to brute givenness or evasive transcendence for a life lived before any full awareness of, or any responsibility for, being shut out of the world.
 

III. Regretfully Yours

The question of the cards’ nature brings us back to the complexities of their exchange. We know they are meant to effect change by addressing racist incivility as a problem of social performance—change effected, moreover, not by grace but by a new insight into the objectified, fetishized life of racism. Further, both the giver and the receiver enter into a kind of symbolic exchange or contract, as the initial donation of offense turns into a reflection on xenia, its role and absence. The full text of Card #1 makes this clearer:
 

Dear friend,
 
I am black.
 
I am sure that you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe that there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do. I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.
 
Sincerely yours,
 
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper

 
The questions raised by this text are multiple. What (if anything) is exposed by this desire for exposure and in what way does it relate to art? What is the relation between exposure and regret, on the one hand, and between faux pas and discomfiture, on the other? If racism permits the gift of the card, as it does in this text, is regret merely a ruse that permits discomfort in the name of its unveiling? In other words, when, according to this text, is it socially appropriate to expose racism?
 
The calling card makes explicit the relation between discomfort and the desire for exposure: the card’s meaning is located not in the regret for having caused social discomfort, but in the context by which racist speech can be both expressible and repeatable, legible and meant. Since this speech, at the moment of its utterance, reveals a kind of systemic complicity, Piper goes out of her way to assume that not all white people are inherently racist. The gift of the card (just like the offense) must itself be returned to the subject for whom racist language is a conventionally appropriate way of speaking, in a given situation, about blacks. As the card changes hands it traces a circuit leading to the exposure of a hidden, barely censored racism that (she argues) is as conventional as it is deep-seated: “My work,” Piper writes, “intentionally holds up for scrutiny deep-seated racist attitudes that no individual socialized into a racist society can escape, no matter how politically correct or seasoned such an individual may be” (“Xenophobia” 293). If it thus becomes impossible to determine who is and is not racist (or even whether such knowledge is possible), it is also impossible, it seems, to know whether racism is the outward expression of deep-seated conventions, or whether the outer convention creates deep-seated racist attitudes. Perhaps racism is not hidden away and then expressed, outed, but is the expression itself. Then again, against conventionalism, perhaps it is more accurate to say that we receive racism like a law. We relate to it through subjection rather than contractual agreement, which is presumably why it is inescapable, and why we follow its rules blindly. How do we explain, then, why the law never seems absolutely binding, its enunciation having something to do with a kind of furtive bad faith staked on the absolute refusal of xenia, a refusal that is nevertheless never absolute nor conscious? The answer clearly has something to do with borders: the unease and perhaps sadism produced by the excessive proximity of a certain touching or presence within civil society, the envy and eroticism indicated by the other’s difference that is a matter neither of consent nor indifference but of deep-seated and unconscious implications. But if racism is conventionally given both in the sense of being socially received and in the sense of being bestowed, but given neither from without nor by the subject, then is the meaning of the cards not, paradoxically enough, already given in the sense that these deep-seated racist attitudes already precede any subjective decision? This oscillation between racism and convention takes the form of an irresistible but wholly inescapable sense of force or obligation, which is why Piper bases her appeal on the impersonal norms of etiquette rather than on moral intent or responsibility. This notion of etiquette as a social duty, however, culminates strangely in a purely formal image of anti-racism. Piper shows, inadvertently, that the mere identification of oneself as racist or non-racist cannot ensure either since, from the moment one becomes aware of one’s racism, one cannot dissociate it from the otherness that is the true limit of either position. How do we know when inner transformation amounts to interpersonal respect? Can one return racist speech to its utterer by merely pointing out its faux pas? This last question – and its implication that racism and race are both faux pas – perfectly describes ideology itself: a trope that, by means of not revealing itself, has become efficacious in both speech acts and other signs. In other words, the cards do not simply show that we are as blinded in our apperception of people as we are in our perception of social laws or norms; instead, they ask whether we can attain any direct and certain knowledge of either when we gaze as through a veil out onto a world of “great wandering shadows” that we can never penetrate, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, and with respect to which we form countless beliefs – a veil behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there shines a world of courtesy, respect, and love, and aworld that is essentially one of derision, hatred, and contempt.  The final question then becomes, not can etiquette alone rend this veil or unveil the other, but against what does this veil defend us?
 
A work about mutual interdependency and getting away from defensive rationality, My Calling (Cards) interestingly enough acts out a return to rather than a departure from its starting point, repeating a primal scene of refusal. The work’s structure contradicts its theme. For the aim of the cards is not to excuse but to perform inappropriateness—to make socially inappropriate such “interpersonal manifestations of racism” as “the off-color remark, the anxiety at the mere presence of an ethnic or cultural other, the failure of empathy with an other that causes insensitivity,” and “the failure of imagination and self-awareness that elicits the imposition of inappropriate stereotypes” (Piper,Out of Order I 246). If, according to J.L. Austin, “it is always necessary that the circumstances in which” the uttering of performatives “should be in some way, or ways, appropriate,” then whenever a card is handed out, it must trouble racist utterance as an appropriate speech act (Austin 8). The card’s structure of address substitutes, too, most explicitly for the social gaffe that causes it. To adopt Piper’s lexicon, My Calling (Cards) asks the receiver to take responsibility for racist utterance in the immediate present. The “you,” too, must directly address the “I,” in the grammar of the sentence “I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.” The card seems to empty itself of all other reference aside from these two pronouns, acting out a concretization that is in fact its subject: the failure of empathy and imagination brought about by institutional abstractions that are existentially empty and methodologically false. The card thus enacts in its own writing the recognition of difference that it situates in the self’s intimacy with others. Simultaneously asserting both the necessity and undesirability of its existence, the card refers to its own referring, and indirectly to its referent. If performative utterances rely on convention, and thus find their support in the conventionalized forms of authority that compose racist society, the cards can only perform their own fictionalization as representatives of that authority.
 
But whatever may be said about My Calling (Cards) as politics, it is neither racism nor any of its deep-seated attitudes that finally cause discomfort or regret, but rather Piper’s desire to be excused for being pushy, manipulative, or inappropriate (her words), even though the truth in whose name the excuse has to be stated, and the cards justified, makes the conflict between the need to expose racism and her regret at having to do so into a kind of inescapable guilt. Racism, if it is indeed the subject of My Calling (Cards), becomes here not some referential faux pas. Instead it is a function of a specific interlocutionary situation, a way of speaking that exposes its own deep-seated conventionality, its own simultaneous act of concealing and exhibiting that, as we know from Souls, is the very condition of racism’s ideological effect: the substitutability of difference for stereotype and stereotype for experience. To interrupt this fantasy experienced as an interdict, Piper introduces the cards and, by so doing, has to be willing to be substituted – as an unwelcome agent of transgression – in performing this act. We have at least two levels of substitution (or displacement) taking place: the cards substituting for a regret that is itself a desire for substitution. Both are governed by the same desire for exposure, which makes the cards’ symbolic effect uncanny and ambivalent.
 
The doubling begins with Piper herself. By this, I do not mean that her outward appearance and inner feeling are simply opposed, but that any reading of My Calling (Cards) effectively reveals that all racial identity, insofar as its referential meaning has to be performed, ceases to have any simple cognitive meaning or index. For example, simultaneously asserting the inescapability of racist attitudes and their transformation, My Calling (Cards) presents race as a referential illusion, but one whose efficacy may be contested and undone only insofar as it is affirmed and prolonged as an illusion. But, it may be objected, isn’t this because all racial identity is an uneasy mix of fixation and denial, as Piper herself testifies? Perhaps. Piper excuses herself not, however, because her racial identity is denied, but because it cannot at first be realized. “I am black./ I am sure that you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark.” We can see her as the referent of these remarks only at the moment that her card is read retrospectively, as it were. The statement “I am black,” far from a referential or constative statement of fact, is a performative speech act that sounds almost ironic since the blackness to which it refers is only a text or signifier that cannot be easily read except as a figure of unveiling, following its disclosure as perceptually indeterminate. One suspects that, in the relation between its ambiguous reference, say, and signification, Piper’s confession is itself an infelicity or faux pas, or a faux pas of a faux pas insofar as it can only perform the blackness it names as an erroneous text, even to the point of serving as a metaphor for something totally unrelated to its own literal display (or lack of) self-presence.
 
But before pursuing this further let us examine the context of Piper’s remark. The racist is told that Piper is black. He or she has to be told this, it should be noted, in the name of truth and, at first sight, to verify the later expressions of discomfort and regret whose complicity the cards insist both racist and victim share. The text conveys this in a way that is direct, intimate, and formally impersonal. “Regret” and “discomfort” are Piper’s words for demonstrating her “policy” regarding white racism. Regret and discomfort are co-implicated in a sentence that is unable to separate them totally or fuse them completely. But it is difficult to determine where the discomfort begins and where it ends. It is as if Piper still had to regret the guilt that there is, and that remains, in having to feel regret. Or better yet, in saying she is regretful and expressing her discomfort in the very place where her suspicions of white people are confirmed, she shows that racism is inescapable. Piper regrets without having had the intention to regret; she becomes pushy, manipulative, and socially inappropriate without meaning to, and (this is another regret) without being able to confirm her identity before its exposure. The signifier “regret” can only represent that regret regretfully as if its meaning were already understood, or as if racism could always be excused because it is unavoidable, outside of all differential contexts, an “origin” where the norms of society, or the giving of cards, makes sense precisely because everyone knows the rightful racist place from which to read them. The more one regrets, the more one admits that one is regretful and the more one feels discomfort—the discomfort of regretting something that was not quite believable but that has now proven to be the case. But the regret has been displaced from the racist remark to the writing and gift (to the writing as gift) of the calling card, from the referent of the narrative – the failure to make people realize her identity – to the act of exchanging the card, from the spoken remark to the inscription of a confession that thus realizes that failure. The second time it is no longer what is heard or being pushy that causes discomfort; the discomfort is caused instead by giving the card, confessing to one’s difference, and setting it down on paper, in lieu of the ruination to come. The discomfort of this regret cannot be effaced because it has been reprinted and exchanged as text on a body of paper. As if that were not enough, the racism that excludes Piper is also the reason she cannot be comforted: the etiquette that causes her to act is the same reason the cards cannot be taken back, and the same reason why, in her discomfort, she is not in possession of her own guilt since, in white racist language, blackness remains the referent of shame and interruption, a literal faux pas within the norms of polite white society.
 
In rectifying racist speech in order to fit it into a process of transformation, Piper adds no content to this symbolic structure or to its repetition; instead she effects, regretfully, its denouement by locating the speaker in a shared act of interpretive infelicity. Her calling cards are not ciphers for this infelicity but a comparable act. Tear a card into pieces, and the message remains what it is; but how does one know when the message has arrived at its “proper,” non-racial destination? Holding the card in one’s hand is not the same as knowing its politics. Indeed, the card cannot be known in itself; it simply identifies a referential faux pas that cannot be bypassed, which is why, presumably, a white subject handing them out would introduce a different demand and desire. As such, Piper’s calling card may well end up preserving the discomfort in the very act of negating it. But if pseudorationality is a form of blindness, or a seeing that is unable to see itself as blind, and so can only blindly see (itself or others), it would seem that, by offering recognition of a shared discomfort, Piper loses the opportunity to read beyond or behind it, and thereby to coax those deep, unsubdued drives into the open, no matter how innocent or guilty they may be. So instead of conferring a dignity on the “you” as other, the peremptoriness of the message starts to undo that possibility. Then, too, why begin that conversation with a card? Because it is a signifier (of etiquette) whose effect is predicated on the receiver not expecting to receive it, and whose writing exposes an already open secret, namely, the ellipsis of blacks by the signifieds of racism. If the relation between regret and discomfort follows a general pattern of substitution, then the exchange of these signifiers is made possible by (or makes possible?) a proximity or analogy so close and intimate that it allows one to substitute for the other without revealing the difference necessarily introduced by the substitution. The relational link between the two sentiments is strong enough to be necessary: no regret without discomfort, and no discomfort without regret. Is this substitution really an exchange? Does the contingency of the exchange, based only on a chance encounter between two people at a dinner party, express anything more than physical contiguity? For if you look at Piper’s image, you can see how she might act as the figural referent of the literal representation of the blackness referred to (by the racist faux pas); but, because her identity is not stapled, as it were, to her image, it serves as a virtual reference of itself.
 
In short, the racist remark disturbs or reveals as discontinuous the gap between image and identity. This dissociation has an alienating effect regarding the offense to which the calling card refers. Piper’s message acknowledges this discontinuous gap, but also wants her interlocutor to be comprehended and discomforted by its statement: indeed, there is no place from which s/he can stand back and observe it abstractly and theoretically, outside of the interlocution. Finally, the dissociative meaning of the statement – the simultaneously emphatic and elliptic reference to Piper’s blackness – can only leave its mark if read literally, immediately, and without abstraction, exchange, or, dare I say it, politeness.
 
Piper’s theory of the indexical present, of course, contains no provision for this kind of ambiguity. The elimination of ambiguity, in fact, is one of the main motives behind the insistence on the indexical, since the vividness and uniqueness of the other (beyond the veil) are meant to rule out equivocation and disrupt racism’s “easy trades.” And yet, despite this accentuation, the implications of ambiguity for My Calling (Cards), and for Piper’s entire aesthetic, are significant. Piper scholars have been unable to study those who received the card, or to identify their catharsis, but they always presume a reaction to the cards and one that is politically legible. These readings take their cue from Piper’s own “metaperformances,” which engage with audience reactions to her work. In “Styles of Radical Will: Adrian Piper and the Indexical Present,” Maurice Berger describes white audiences’ initial response to My Calling (Cards) as defensive, agitated, nervous, offended, and angry: only in the final minutes of the performance, when Piper refers to the pain caused her by having to hand out the cards, does “the audience drop its guard.” “It is at this moment,” Berger argues, “that Piper has achieved a true and profound indexical present – an instant when each person in the room is caught off-guard, compelled to jettison preconceptions and ask difficult, even painful questions about themselves” (31). This indicates that it is neither concept nor representation, but the expression of Piper’s own ruination that permits communication and thereby allows the audience to situate with new awareness the historical, political, and theoretical task accomplished by My Calling (Cards). In other words, the moment it becomes possible to return the card symbolically to its bearer, the more the audience can read the constitutive negativity of its implication; or, again, the moment racist speech becomes emotionally locatable if not theoretically describable as black suffering, the more the meaning of the cards can be seen in the passage from offense to sensitivity and to the complexity of difference itself. Racial sensitivity (to black hurt) begins only where (white) aggression and defensiveness end. But this profound indexicality forgets that Piper’s ruination is not freely chosen: she does not invite her own abjection even when she knows that abjection (from racists) cannot be refused. Indeed therein lies the forced choice that is the source of the regret and discomfort of My Calling (Cards) and that is the work’s artistic vocation; the black can only recognize herself as always that referent or faux pas, as the anonymous interlocutor within that grammar of texts, and precisely in places where intimacy and respect are ordinarily in close affiliation. To say that in handing out the cards she freely assumes her ruination because she is already ruined as black, in other words, to identify with her freely choosing hurt or injury as a moment of indexical resolution is, in my view, a blind interpretation of the work and its meaning. It is not that she is free to be ruined only on the condition that she freely chooses to be identified as black that anchors the work; the work is anchored, rather, in its asking why blackness has become the political sign, in US culture, of an exclusion, an exclusion always precisely veiled as such. As for immediacy, there is no index of civility that isn’t always already constituted by the delimiting of certain kinds of difference as unacceptable, and whose faux pas is always retroactively posited as the reason they have to be excluded in the first place.
 
Everything that can be said of My Calling (Cards) can be said here, where strategies of displacement are no longer appropriate and where another language begins (one whose significance is not yet determinable or representable). Nor is it surprising that this moment can be located only after having – analytically – gone beyond the defensive rationalizations of whiteness: all those honorific stereotypes that merely devalue others and constitute black difference as socially valueless and read it as such. White lack of self-awareness is not the same as black pain, however; it is as far removed from a black conception of self as the tain is from the mirror (I can see myself in a mirror without ever seeing the tain). Even though one is unthinkable without the other, only one is the sustaining void of the gaze. In the following two sections I explore this ambiguity – in the form of a gaze that can never be part of any seen reality, and a void that masquerades as a sublimely black aesthetic. A key consideration here is the connection between racial etiquette and aesthetic judgment in terms of a scene of unveiling and a transformation in (white) seeing.
 

IV. Kant as Medium

Given that My Calling (Cards), or what I’m calling its exploration of racial etiquette, is meant to give an insight into black, objectified life, what of those other artworks in which Piper represents herself as a racially-sexually coded subject (by norms or media that she then attempts to translate into universal, nonracial-asexual terms)? These works modify the historical dialectic of racial incivility according to a more primal dialectic that consists of an escape from the raced-sexed body (its voice or rhythm) while simultaneously exploring, at least by propensity, the fantasmatic limits of that renunciation. The remainder of this essay takes up this reading, not so much in terms of etiquette, as in terms of xenia with respect to ethics and the (always cultural) limits of fantasy. A key preoccupation is the way that fantasy resists radical divestiture (of the subject) by the raced Other, and the cultural nature of those imaginary resistances. But I also ask about the way that an appeal to xenia and its openness to difference represents, for Piper, a politically revised notion of etiquette opposed to particularist class and social values.
 
A few words regarding Kant, even though he is not the object of this study. All of Piper’s papers on Kant are slightly delirious. Ever since Food for the Spirit (1971), a visual and textual record of Piper’s first exposure to Kantian critical philosophy, “Kant” serves as a metaphor for the radical annihilation of selfhood and of the will—or at least for the threat of such annihilation. In an essay from 1981, Piper writes:
 

The Critique is the most profound book I have ever read, and my involvement in it was so great that I thought I was losing my mind, in fact losing my sense of self completely. Often, the effects of Kant’s ideas were so strong that I couldn’t take it anymore. I would have to stop reading in the middle of a sentence, on the verge of hysterics, and go to my mirror to peer at myself to make sure I was still there. (Out of Order I 55)

 
A first question: what is it about the Critique that poses the threat of madness and nonexistence? Physically weak due to fasting, Piper convinces herself that it was neither her social isolation nor her lack of food (“I didn’t see other people at all”; “I was on a two-month juice-and-water diet”): such things belong to the everyday meaning of existence, to “the sight and sound of me, the physically embodied Adrian Piper,” to the “boundaries of my individual self” and “the material conditions of my mental state” (Piper, Out of Order I 55). By contrast, reading the Critique is “so intensely affecting” – disturbing her mental and physical states and boundaries – that Piper can no longer situate herself as real or embodied: feeling herself vanishing, and leaving behind a physical slough of herself at this “entrance into a transcendent reality of disembodied self-consciousness” (Piper, Out of Order I 55), she uses a mirror, a camera, and a tape recorder to anchor herself in the physical world, thereby imposing a “ritualized” contact with the “physical appearance of [her]self in the mirror” onto her reading of Kant.  From the withdrawal into the noumenal dimension of a transcendental quintessence, where the self’s disguises give way to an intense awareness of one’s own absence, or, as Piper puts it, where the self’s coherence is reduced to babbling incoherence, she resorts to the “reality check” of the mirror that records her appearance to an objectivized gaze. This gaze observes her as a series of partial objects left in a heap, metaphorically speaking, by the too intensive effects of a fear or anxiety that signals something both more intimate and more penetrating than the mere observation that the Critique was “a book with good ideas in it that I had chosen to study” (Piper, Out of Order I 55). All these traits suggest “Kant” is a metaphor for a disturbance whose vague reference is a noumenal collapse of reality, if one can put it that way, a dreadful and extremely intensive subtraction that Piper describes perfectly as a mirroring detached from any body, and in which one can see one’s own absence and/or threatened annihilation.
 
The photographs in Food for the Spirit do not alter the scenario: the fourteen black-and-white images are used essentially as orthopedic props and, as such, they reference a form of self-quotation. They neither embody the absence felt beneath experience, nor show the restoration of the vividness and contact that Piper desires: their vividness is instead a kind of inverse echo of the loss that is the source of the distance and inadequacy of any self-image (see Fig. 2).
 

Fig. 2 Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971 (photographic reprints 1997). 14 silver gelatin prints and original book pages of a paperback edition of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, torn out and annotated by Adrian Piper. 15” x 14,5”. Detail: photograph #6 of 14. Collection Thomas Erben. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. Used by permission.

In a sequence from the clearest to the darkest underexposed image, in which the unveiled body gradually disappears, the image comes to serve as a perishable signature and as the flickering eclipse of a desire in whose limits or remainder the subject finds herself almost unrepresentable, which is to say, as an ejected or dejected object, the effect of a blackout. What threatens the black autobiographical subject is not the loss of something that once was present and that it once possessed, but the radical estrangement between any representation and animaginary fullnessof being. If we look into Piper’s “glance” in these photographs, we realize it has nothing to do with the phenomenal form in which the photographs make her appear, but with the transcendental illusion that is the source of any noumenal self-image – a dialectic that Kant would have liked. On the back of Kant’s Kritizismus, as it were, these photographs reveal not the indexical proof of Piper’s existence as a black woman (a common misreading),[3] but rather the de-naturing, distancing effect of a certain formalization of her mirror image as the trace of a residual loss, a tracing that can be portrayed photographically only as a fall into gradual darkness. The mirror image, then, has something to do with the repossession of the lost self, but this is a self that is alienated, distracted, and already possessed by a deeply invasive presence that has no phenomenal existence. Food for the Spirit attempts to capture that which is always concealed from representation: the withdrawal or remainder produced by the desire for universalization itself, which is to say, the desire to coincide with oneself as a subject. The pictorial rendering of an objective correlate is impossible here, and Piper remains suspended in front of these images (neither present nor absent) because, in contrast to the audio cassettes, the photographs do not copy anything – how do you capture something that does not have a place in representation? The crux of Food for the Spirit is not an opposition between particularity (of black feminine experience) and universality (reductively read as a sign of Kant’s ethnocentrism),[4] but rather the vanishing that is their ghostly simulacrum. In this sense, the universal is not experienced as such until it singularizes itself in the lacking or fasting subject; when its excess is transferred inside the subject as a subtraction, as a minus sign of all that the subject is not, the subject disappears into this pure vanishing point of universality. Contrary to the prevalent cultural studies readings of Piper, then, the problem isn’t simply that black femininity is not theoretically or existentially locatable as a universal subject for Kant, but rather that blackness has no material or phenomenal meaning outside of its relation to racist representation; it is only a stock of signs through which the subject cannot digest itself (as a presence or signifier) without slipping away from itself in a glissando of aberrant remainders. (Does this mean that the desire to expose oneself as a disappearing object is more originary than the desire to possess oneself as [an image of] a self? If so, then in the guise of exposure the photos reveal an originary concealment, and the reading of Kant reveals the ruse by which the raced-sexed self makes self-desire and self-annihilation interchangeable.) For the photographs in question already allegorize a pre-originary disjointure without which there would be neither experience of the body nor its disappearance, neither loss nor its inscription. They refer to an equivocation, on the one hand, between the desire to be immediately, uniquely known, to be exposed and revealed as a subject—the truth that, according to Piper, concerns the uniqueness of transcendental personhood—and, on the other hand, the sense that there is something lacking or veiled, a no-thing at the core of the self that can only be illusorily eaten or represented, a “food” for spirit. By reason of this equivocation, which invades the mind as the source, we are always already in the process of disappearing ourselves, or even asking for annihilation, precisely in this exhibitionist and subtractive mode. This loss, paradoxically, allows the subject to conceive itself as a lack, causing the subject to lose itself as a subject.
 
This is why reading Kant, paradoxically, pertains to the illusory surplus of a lack that is not a néant or absence, but a surfeit upon which the self starves itself in its desire to be fed. As she starves herself, so Piper darkens her photographic exposure, forfeiting visibility in the name of an artistic hunger that can only secure voice, word, sexuality, and image through renunciation and disembodiment. In the same way, the attempt to feed the transcendental imagination as a recompense for the loss of objective reality can only lead to a withdrawal of the self from the world, to its vanishing; and in this surfeit of illusion, even if the self were able to see itself transcendentally (as black), it can only negate itself, for what constitutes the transcendental unity of apperception can never be seen in representation, and so can only be consumed as if it were an object in the realm of what is (which is furthermore the “illusory” effect of its racialsemblance). That said, one must avoid the tendency to view the torn out, mutilated pages of the Critique as separate from the photographs they accompany. It is not a question of seeing these membra disjecta as two halves of an imaginary whole: both are fragments of a split that appears to the subject in its semblance, which is itself split between the inner and outer intuition of itself as the desire for transcendence and/or the desire to see itself viewed transcendentally; or again, the Critique is experienced as a work of pure imagination, but this is the imagination at its most violent and inaccessible, already constitutively marked by a kind of madness or a withdrawal from the world that is equivalent to a slow starvation.
 
For a long time, I have been intrigued by the title of this work and even fascinated by this vision in which the black feminine self satiates itself on its own lack or emptiness, engorged by its inability to be ever adequately represented in the real, cast out from its own edible feast: at once force fed (by Kant) and starved almost to disappearance (by transcendental madness). This emphasis – the simultaneously emphatic and elliptic character of which has already been mentioned – is not directed toward the body (as in hysteria), does not achieve agency (according to which Piper “seeks the comfort of recognizing herself [as an object] in the index” [Bowles 214]), and does not even indicate an elsewhere of meaning (the transcendental location of the gaze). Food for the Spirit is a study of failed ingestion, of the space where racial-sexual fictions (of the self) are exposed, ghostly, and only semi-digested; it studies the way the act of eating literally no-thing makes black flesh disappear within a devouring self-image, but also brings to surfeit a transcendence that the famished flesh (in its darkening) is presumed to lack. This is why “Kant” remains a complex metaphor for the sacrifice of a desire to be seen or known irrevocably (in the excessive purity of an unnameable ascesis), a metaphor that Piper ritualistically reads as a narrative entailing both fantasy and theater. To put this in Kantian terms: Piper can only engorge herself, as a transcendental unity of apperception, by starving herself of the sensuous unity of experience, for both are destined to be eaten up by the noumenal hole that can never be satiated or nourished by the subject.
 
Piper’s long fascination – even obsession – with Kant’s first Critique is at once an illustration of this crisis (an anxiety about nonexistence) and a theorization of selfhood, since it shows the self’s delusion and its anchor: what can be seen in Food for the Spirit is the join between the two and thus the original disjointure opened up by Kantian critical philosophy. The key reference here is “the conception of the self that Kant develops in the first Critique,” which Piper, in an interview with Maurice Berger, defines as one in which “what is most important to us is a rationally consistent and conceptually coherent theory of the world that enables us to fit every kind of experience we have into a priori categories” (“Critique” 87). Hence the repeated emphasis, in her many readings of Kant, that “if we cannot fit things into those categories [which are a priori], we can’t experience them at all; they can’t be incorporated into the structure of the self” (“Critique” 87). “[I]nformation that violates our conceptual presuppositions threatens our belief system and thereby the rational integrity and unity of the self” (“Critique” 88). The whole of Piper’s Kantianism lies here: in the threat of dissolution that accompanies self-deception, and in the fissure of reason that follows our exposure to the other’s disruptive force. In order to preserve ourselves, it is perhaps not surprising that (despite our best intentions) “we are overridingly motivated to do and to believe what will preserve the coherence of our worldview” (“Critique” 87). This is why x-rationality causes others to disappear as a trace or semblance of the universal; and why Food for the Spirit can be seen as an inversion of x-rationality from the point of view of the disappeared object. From another point of view, Piper can be described as interested in the ways that pseudorational responses to those who are different from us, who don’t fit our conceptions of how people ought to be and look, are often mistaken for transcendental contents of who we are. Insofar as our reason remains dependent on phantasy, xenia cannot be received or known, and it is not surprising that these responses include dissociation, anxiety, denial, and the attempt to “impose our categories”—strategies by which human rationality, paradoxically, is “invariably inadequate and insensitive to the uniqueness of an individual” (“Critique” 88). Her art attempts to make people aware of these pseudorational responses, and consequently to become more sensitive to their cognitive failure or error – these words, illocutionary words if ever there were, with little that is revolutionary or radical about them, must nevertheless be assumed to be deeply political in their implications. Piper describes her aesthetics as enabling the viewer “simply [to] stand silently, perceiving and experiencing at the deepest level the singularity of the object or person, knowing in advance that any attempt at intellectualization is going to be invalid, and so allowing their concrete experience to quiet the intellect before it starts poisoning that experience” (“Critique” 90). Taking the word “poison” literally, we can describe transcendental illusion as a pharmakon: either it remedies the ways we falsely appear to ourselves as experiencing subjects, or it is the charm or drug that allows us to enjoy the illusion of experiencing otherness, when in fact what we experience is our own chimerical investiture and deferment, with our judgment remaining cognitively and morally blind.[5] In the important essay “Two Kinds of Discrimination,” first published in 1992, such poisoning is never purely intellectual; it is a moral-existential response that registers the threat to the self’s “internal coherence” (Piper, Out of Order II 220). Piper’s xenophobic self is constantly exposed to the fear of being “exceedingly fallible and regularly discomforted,” a fear that affirms its own vision of the world as a place where the self is “inhabited by enigmatic and unpredictable disruptions to its stability,” and so is forced to “conjure chimeras of perpetual unease and anxiety into social existence” in order to preserve its rationality (Out of Order II 227-28).
 
This is why, to a certain extent (namely that of our moral or epistemic insecurity), the “malevolent intentionality” we ascribe to others need not be based on firsthand experience or evidence, but only needs to be become habitual, or intimately familiar, “to seem necessary prerequisites of personhood” (Out of Order II 228). Doubtless these illusions are not merely subjective but are also transcendental; this is the case in Kant’s Critique, where the conceptual unity of the subject is the necessary anchor for any kind of experience (and without which the mind is “nothing but a blind play of representations, that is, less even than a dream” [Kant qtd. in Piper, Out of Order II 219]). But the pseudorational crises included in the list of defenses (or rather, the lack of any consistent, coherent sense of the self) are not purely transcendental, either: Piper believes that Kant’s “categories are mutable,” and “the more we learn to guide them consciously, with an eye to achieving certain goals like overcoming racism, … the more we can evolve cognitively” (“Critique” 90). The obscure meaning of such evolution, which includes a certain utopian gesture, implies not only an idea of art as exceeding the “divisive illusion of otherness, the illusion that each of us is defined not just by our individual uniqueness but by our racial uniqueness,” but also the idea that art falls outside pseudorationality and its limits – that is, a concept of art as more than a blind play of representations, and whose illocutionary force is more than a dream (“Critique” 77). “Art can highlight pseudorational failures of cognitive discrimination as themselves objects of aesthetic examination,” she writes in “Two Kinds of Discrimination,” “and it can heighten a viewer’s level of cognitive sensitivity to a wide range of complex situations, of which political discrimination is only one” (Out of Order II 253). How does it do this? By being an “antidote to provincial and conventional habits of thought,” which Piper seems to equate with the fact that the aesthetic interest of the art object lies in its being an “anomalous entity in its own right” relative to “the conceptual scheme in which it was conceptually embedded”; her art breaks through the illusion of x-rationality by showing the pseudorationalizations to be attenuated and irrational (Out of Order II 254, 255). If art is an antidote to the fear of going mad driven by the desire to inhabit the space of the rule, to be the form that forms (fanaticism in Kant’s sense, self-transcendence in Piper’s), that is because art bridges the gap between cognition and experience, ideas and reality. As we have already seen, the task of teaching the viewer to see his/her own racist-sexist blindness has always involved, for Piper, the task of seeing the unseen, the nonvisible frame or media that produces the seen. As a media that gives form to her politics, Kantian critical philosophy is not only a body of ideas but also a vehicle and object – literally a lens, frame, or window – capable of giving form to this strategy. For she goes on to say: “My philosophy work, in fact, provides the broad theoretical underpinnings of my art. There is a very deep connection” (“Critique” 85).[6]
 
Piper insists that our categories of experience are both necessary (a priori) and mutable (even evolving). Take away anomalies, and rational consistency and coherence still remain, are still necessary, still inherent to the integrity and unity of the self: without these categories, “we are struck with confusion and panic,” and the world pressing in on us would be “just too much,” “all too unfamiliar” (“Critique” 88). What happens, however, when the “complexity of the world has outstripped our conceptual resources for dealing with it” (“Critique” 88)? We may experience terror when confronted by anomalous objects, but anomaly is already more than a threat, more than an “unmanageable conceptual input,” with the threat being provisional (i.e., decided by whether we resort to pseudorationality or whether, via philosophy or art, we seek out new kinds of cognitive discrimination) (“Critique” 88). In fact, Food for the Spirit dramatizes this encounter intensely, while showing why rules of etiquette remain powerless in the face of the powerful immediacy of the real. And yet. If one part of the mind suffers anomaly as breakdown and terror, another seems to actively seek a fusion between categorial unease and the understanding, and to find a way out of the impasse: in a certain manner, then, art allows us to experience the anomalous without succumbing to its lethal affects. What must be resisted, in any case, is the temptation to reimpose our categories when they are “completely inadequate to the complexity and uniqueness of what one is experiencing” (“Critique” 90). It would seem then that xenophobia can be approached and experienced in reaction to the anomalous affect of art; or again, the art object is experienced as a negative, disruptive power within both the categories of the understanding and the conserving habits of mind. This point is underlined by her belief that “it is not possible to apprehend the singularity of that person through any simple act of categorization” (“Critique” 96). The aesthetic could be said to be privileged in Piper for the same reasons it is in Kant: because the problem of judgment is most radically articulated in terms of it, because it demands a form of judgment that judges without knowing or presuming to know its object and in the absence of determined customs or rules. It is a perspective on or a way back into the political that is not totally determined by history and politics, and that demands more than conformity to conventional laws or systems and categories of thought. For Piper (and for Kant), the aesthetic is not, however, a privileged domain or territory unto itself that has no relation to political or ethical questions, as it seems to be for many neo-Kantians; it is, rather, an uncharted, open horizon that demands a particular kind of critical judgment, given that beauty does not reside in the object itself and therefore cannot be determined. The aesthetic object is not an object of experience; its form is perceivable, but the beauty of its form is not. In fact, this necessity to judge in the absence of determinable laws could be considered to characterize the ethical and political realms as well, areas where one is called upon to judge, but where the authorization to judge is finally indeterminable.
 
Following Kant, Piper insists that the “more we examine our defensive rationalizations and acknowledge that our stereotypical categories don’t fit, the more we will be able to sensitively expand those categories in order to encompass the singular reality of the ‘other’” (“Critique” 90). And yet “such flexibility,” she adds, “was something that Kant didn’t envision – his idea was that we were just stuck with certain categories. I believe that these categories are constantly being redefined and that they are evolving in response to the complexity of information and experiences that confront and overwhelm us” (“Critique” 90). If, however, the way we experience the world lies not in predetermined categorical rules, but in the expanding gap or disjointure between the techno-scientific rationalization of the world and our ability to make sense of it, then the politics of art lies not in mimesis or representation. It lies instead in the world always being out of step with our intuitions and understanding, since all experience involves conventions that maintain hegemonic ways of viewing the world. In the same way, understanding and experience are not simply opposed: the encounter with the anomalous results in an experience of groundlessness, since the anomalous can never be contained from the position of societal reason, but always remains a kind of uncanny object. Epistemic security, then, is constituted by an ultimately contingent precariousness and, as such, is always under threat; it can always be undermined by a sudden encounter with anomaly, a subversive force in respect of the understanding. In the essay collection Out of Sight, Out of Order, conceptual art is defined furthermore as what allows more flexible insight into this techno-scientific crisis of experience. “First, I define conceptual art as art that subordinates medium to idea…. Second, the resulting flexibility in available media is strategically important, given the political targets of my work” (Out of Order I 248-49). In other words, whereas for Kant illusion or Blendwerk is inevitable and irrefutable and “does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed,” for Piper the question is not whether reason is deluded or not but how we respond to reason’s deceptiveness (Kant 209). This is why, in “Two Kinds of Discrimination,” Piper defines her aesthetic as one that tries “to enable the viewer to discriminate cognitively between what he sees and what he is” (Out of Order II 258). Moreover, she employs various strategies for situating this politics, notably, mimesis, confrontation, and naming. By echoing back to the spectator – ironically, mimetically – stereotypical phrases or habits of reasoning; or by naming, simply and plainly, what such euphemisms conceal; or by confronting the spectator with the harmful consequences of discrimination, Piper hopes to draw “the viewer’s attention to these realities” in ways that are “assaultive and disturbing,” so as to reflexively apprehend the more general assaults of social experience (Out of Order II 257). By making the viewer see what ordinarily remains suspended between pseudorationality and experience, she hopes that the unarticulated will not remain at that level, that is, as habit, but will enter self-conscious awareness free from predetermined conventions or rules. This means that the experience of being assaulted by the art object occurs outside pseudorational categories while nevertheless within their interlocution. For if you look at Piper’s artworks, you can see this mirroring, even when Piper performs herself as the anomalous object in social spaces. Thanks to these performances (assaultive, it is true, but also creative), or rather thanks to what, in the work, is violently unrepresentable (which is in fact very little), we are forced to encounter data that cannot be apprehended familiarly, and yet never ceases to question the role of x-rationality.
 
Here the problem of judgment and thus Kant’s notion of the sublime come to the fore in Piper’s analysis, even though she passes over the sublime in her philosophical readings of Kant and, consequently, has devoted least attention to the third Critique in her published writings. Still, it could be argued that Food for the Spirit is Piper’s most sublime performance insofar as it brings together, violently and dialectically, the affectivity of immediacy as the cure or antidote for what remains of reality once it has been deprived of its fantasmatic support in transcendental illusionism. The sublime should not, however, be overestimated here: it is more an unresolved tension between immediacy and the abyssal disintegration of any categorical framework (Piper’s version of encountering an absolute anomaly) that leads to Piper’s ongoing fascination with the way our everyday life is grounded on precarious cognitive decisions. Those decisions, as is frequently stressed, are seen to be impotent vis-à-vis the abyssal excess of the real. While for Kant the imagination tries but fails to furnish a direct, sensual presentation of an Idea of reason, thus experiencing its impotence, for Piper the understanding itself is put in crisis by the failure of reason to find an appropriate presentation for the anomalous. According to the traditional interpretation of the sublime, for long (and still) conceived as a tension between the experience of an object and a feeling for the Idea of “humanity in us” as subjects, this tension is overcome by reason’s ability to present an object equal to the Idea of that totality (Kant Metaphysics 187). Piper’s work, by contrast, suggests that the Idea of humanity is itself beset with self-deception and fantasy, a suggestion that cannot be made via the categories of the understanding, since they are what actively produce that Idea. The encounter in Food for the Spirit with the negative power of the imagination as a disappearing subtraction, so to speak, should be understood as the result of what happens when the world is wholly given over to a (disembodied, delusory) presentation of Ideas. To imagine means to imagine what we already know, an imaginary that can only feed itself by withdrawing until it disappears into the phantasms of its own creation. Madness would be a sign of this contraction of what can no longer be computed, this surfeit that is also a radical evacuation or emptying out – this withdrawal that underlies the photographic or techno-scientific attempts to stand in for the disintegration of thought and being. The sublime emerges in Food for the Spirit insofar as the work is a fragment, or series of fragments, occupying the place of a veil covering (our phantasies of) a noumenal beyond; but only in a representation can we perceive (and endure) this unimaginable, all-engulfing anomaly. The impasse may recall (without entirely reproducing) Piper’s distinction between the violence done to the imagination by reason and the violence that art, in turn, does to reason: likewise, her work can be seen (across a variety of media) as an attempt to cut through the regulative rules of racist-sexist social life.
 
Arguably more theoretically modest than this language of sublimity suggests, Piper evokes universality by using terms such as “etiquette,” “openness,” and “acceptance” (to name just a few) always in dialogue with terms of particularity such as “uniqueness,” “immediacy,” “singularity,” etc. This is not to say that the sublime has no relevance to her work, but that it accomplishes something very exact: her work does not so much bridge the gap (without denying it) between the aesthetic and the historico-political, as it opens up an irreducible abyss within reason itself. The sublime functions then not so much a bridge as a passage here; thus it answers not to an aesthetic, political, or even a universal idea of formlessness, but to a disruption or dissolution with neither closure nor center. The sublimity of the work depends, that is, not on a demand for universality and community, but on what might be called an ethics of anomaly (as what is owed to the different and the unfamiliar), as a way of bearing witness to the groundlessness of each decision vis-à-vis the Other. Etiquette is Piper’s figure for this decision, and the anomalous her trope for the abyssal nature of reason’s illusory rendering of xenia (a rendering woven entirely out of stereotypes, abstractions, fetishisms, cultural languages, hateful passions, and desires). If etiquette designates a demand that is universal and not determined by the form such a community (of difference) should take, etiquette and the rules determining it also reveal, paradoxically, the limitations of all rules or conventions, and thus the necessity to go beyond them and beyond experience, where the anomalous cannot be presented without reversion to fiction or stereotype.
 
In brief, the anomalous artwork teaches us to dissociate the formal constraint of the work from the direct and personal affect that is the indescribable meaning of each individual reaction. Perhaps it was the reading of these reactions (discovered in metaperformances) that Piper called for when she said that an art object is not simply to be seen and heard aesthetically but should be scrutinized and listened to for its truth. The contemporary challenge of art is not to destroy xenophobic thinking but to subvert it, and thus to dissociate subversion from destruction. It seems to me that My Calling (Cards) operates such a distinction, but the distinction becomes problematic in relation to racism. The work is trying to include what its own rhetoric excludes – the realization that blackness must be literally recognized apart from racist language. And yet the work makes another claim: it attempts the impossible task of humanizing offense while presenting the inadequacy of any identity to resolve racism without conventionalism. Blackness becomes, as it were, the anomaly to the false or distorted representation of the anomalous. It is no longer the faux pas that consists of something appearing in the wrong place, as it were, since being out of place is precisely its legacy and its guarantee. At the same time, the enunciation of anti-blackness does not involve insincerity or deception, for everyone authorizes it unwittingly via racist norms; there is a reversion to anti-blackness by the simple fact that it is. Blackness disturbs and offends at the very level of its being, and this is why it is both a pharmakon and an idol of sublimity.
 
The question asked by her work, then, is what happens when we are forced to see our own nothingness or vacuity – a nothing that captivates us and that arises out of and is addressed to the (black) object that is transcendentally lacking or empty? Now, in Piper’s Kantian aesthetics the art object is the occasion for conceptual negation and an anchor for a more universal, reflexive sentiment of self that is negatively affirmed. In My Calling (Cards), affectivity (of regret and discomfort) is both given and gives itself as the occasion for an immediate response that Piper insists is prereflexive, that is, prior to any kind of abstraction and without any standard of judgment, but one that simultaneously opens up the possibility of another kind of imagining, another kind of impersonal intimacy. In the absence of this transformation, we are left with failures of cognition, imagination, and communicability, and so can only repeat the violation of word and sense that is racist conventionality. As my earlier comments on etiquette suggested, for there to be etiquette already presupposes what Kant calls a Gemeinsinn or sensus communis, an ideal community of feeling. The relation between communicability and the sensus communis that abstracts from the content of a judgment attends only to its formal communicability. This is grounded upon, but also grounds, the relation of imagination and understanding “without the mediation of a concept” that is peculiar to the aesthetic judgment of taste (Kant 176). Kant also suggests that the interest in communicability may explain why a judgment of taste is felt “as if it were a duty”—one that is not, however, based on moral law (Kant 176). Etiquette does imply a sort of duty, a kind of transcendental pragmatics that comes down to acting in concert and in terms of a universal as-if (a form of judging and reflecting that takes into account everyone else’s feelings and sensitivities). Putting oneself in the position of everyone else: this could easily be read as Piper’s ultimate pragmatic response to xenophobic satisfactions. What prevents us from reading My Calling (Cards) and Piper’s work more generally in this way is the ambiguous pleasure she takes in unpleasure without ever articulating it as such, a pleasure that allows for the circulation of the cards in the first place. Whether conscious or not, the pleasure taken in white racist discomfort is not itself visible, and whites do not see it; but it lets me see, it constitutes me as a seeing subject within the field of the veil. Making white racists suffer allows me to see myself better, for it is through their discomfort that I discover that I am visible as black person only when I am able to see myself from elsewhere – from outside the mirror, as it were, from the side of the gaze. Black visibility already knows this, containing as it does a veil that is neither conceptual nor immanent, and that remains invisible as such to every viewpoint, despite persisting within it interminably. If for Piper (and Du Bois) “racism is a visual pathology,” it manifests itself as an invisible gaze, albeit one that is always veiled (Piper “Critique” 93-94).
 
The calling card leaves me with this question, among others: what is the feeling of being shut out from the world, from a community of feeling, and can that feeling ever be communicated? This question is linked to another concern that has been more or less implicit throughout this essay: namely, why should the pleasure in one’s ruination be bound to self-deception rather than coincide with the form of an unconditional “must”? One could dismiss such pleasure as perverse, but is it necessarily a cognitive failure of the understanding? Why should we be called upon to judge who we are via a proxy form of objection and cultivation (etiquette), if not for the sheer pleasure of cynical disenchantment?  For if one is to be equal to the task (or duty) of one’s speech, why can one not formally enjoy it in its endless imperfection? And who is to say such pleasure is merely the pleasure of unrefined hatefulness, rather than the essence of the very highest, most refined enunciation? Can I, as a black person, be anything more than passive – or resistant – to the hatefulness of such speech? I think it will be useful, in conclusion, even if it means a distinct change of tone, to turn to a text in which blackness acquires its authority over thought precisely because it is experienced as a form of ontological assault and, mutatis mutandis, an unerasable terror to the eye that beholds it. But this terror’s excess is hard to differentiate from a pleasurable breach.

V. Cognitive Terror

Mr. Cheselden has given us a very curious story of a boy, who had been born blind, and continued so until he was thirteen or fourteen years old; he was then couched for a cataract, by which operation he received his first sight. Among many remarkable particulars that attended his first perceptions, and judgements on visual objects, Cheselden tells us, that the first time the boy saw a black object, it gave him great uneasiness; and that some time after, upon accidentally seeing a negro woman, he was struck with great horror at the sight. (Burke 131)

I choose this example from Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) because it offers a look from inside an encounter with the racially anomalous, an envisioning in which the (white) subject finds itself suspended amid great uneasiness. This shock turns on a certain accentuation within the field of the visible, namely, a sight, not so much of blackness as color, as of a black object (a “negro woman”). And what disturbs is not the reminder of the eye’s former blindness, but rather what seems to accrue with the horrendous sight of a black person, a horror that limits the very act of seeing in the renewed experience of the visible (Burke 131). In this theater of the eye, then, we see a racial allegory of veiling/unveiling; in this spectacle of a first sight formerly lost, now restored, seeing and imagining find themselves in an anomalous relationship without it being possible to say that one takes precedence over the other or that one is extracted from the other. Finally, in this scenario of restored vision, it seems that blackness can only be reproduced as a faux pas, as a dispossession (because aggressing) of white sensibility and custom, insofar as it continues to form an obstacle to what might be called the birth of a certain epistemological, politico-aesthetic knowledge of the self (which is born theoretically, allegorically, out of darkness). This is why Burke begins the section of his Enquiry titled “On the effects of blackness” with various tropes of blindness: with the feeling that, in utter darkness “it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we stand; we are ignorant of the objects that surround us”; “we may fall down a precipice the first step we take”; and in such darkness “wisdom” cannot avail itself of any certainty, it “can only act by guess.” For in this phantasy of being seen while unseeing, of being struck unawares, of falling down while groping along, the terrible fear is that darkness sees me precisely where I can no longer see myself (130). Thus the great uneasiness is founded – despite sight’s restoration – on the threat that the world has lost its “belong to me aspect,” and that seeingness is no longer reachable as a first sovereign impression, but is vulnerable and bereft (Lacan 81).
 
In fact, such terror is neither merely conventional nor a result of the constitutive frailties of reason (as we saw in Piper). For Burke, “the ill effects” of blackness are felt as a physical assault on the eye. But even if the “natural operation” of that blow is painful, the scenario nonetheless shows a subject caught up or exposed in its own labyrinthine imagining (of the eye as a kind of sadomasochistic theater or boudoir) (Burke 145, 144). When darkness appears and conquers the field of vision (and consequently blinds us), Burke says the fibers of the iris are painfully contracted or “forcibly drawn back,” which produces “spasms” in the eye’s efforts to see the object. In this sensation there is a dual experience (whose ramification again touches on seeing as a question of mastery and immediacy before habit or representation): “the bodily organs suffer first, and the mind through these organs” (Burke 131, 133). Not only does Burke tell us that he himself has experienced such pain, but he also recounts: “I have heard some ladies remark, that after having worked a long time upon a ground of black, their eyes were so pained and weakened they could hardly see” (133). The threads of these various painful stories therefore link blackness not to a reproducible image, but to a natural immediacy whose effects are constitutive rather than habitual. Blackness is consequently painful to the eye because it signifies a vertiginous ground whose optical geometry is so “many vacant spaces dispersed among the objects we view” (Burke 133). Threaded through this example of pained needlework (since it arises from a process of muscular and visceral contraction, of the hand faltering because the eye is no longer a guide), is a notion of perception as itself a kind of labor in vacuity, and of the visible as composed of vacuities that thus weary the eye.
 
Despite Burke’s appeal to nature, it is difficult to locate the threat of the negro woman’s blackness because its effects concern neither the woman’s race nor her gender (though Burke’s interpretation implicitly relies on both). The threat derives instead from a kind of subtraction or vacuity that cannot, however, be grounded in cultural discourse, since it constitutes a kind of material absence within culture. According to Burke, black bodies
 

are but so many vacant spaces dispersed among the objective view. When the eye lights on one of these vacuities, after having been kept in some degree of tension by the play of the adjacent colours upon it, it suddenly falls into a relaxation; out of which it as suddenly recovers by a convulsive spring. (133)

 
To look on black bodies is thus to look on a disjunctive space within being and/or nature; it is, in other words, to witness a break or rupture within culture, a vacuity or subtraction that is at the same time compared to a dream or hallucination. More precisely, blackness terrifies because it has no ground in nature, and because it denotes the blind unrepresentability of our own natures, so that to see it is to know that we no longer see and are at risk of a fall. By choosing the word “vacant,” Burke renders it unclear whether blackness is the manifestation of an emptiness that grounds the image, or whether it is a vacuity that allows that emptiness to manifest itself within culture. It is clear, however, that this gap or dispersion results from a “relaxation” that is both mental and corporeal and from which the mind recovers and forms itself as by a “convulsive spring.” Furthermore, it is always white subjectivity that conceives of this vacuity cast by metaphysical blackness, and that conceives itself in the process. Once again, the terror of representation is not due to the eye being so weakened or fatigued by its own deceptions. For as Burke discovers when he tries to see himself through the eyes of the couched boy or by pursuing the same threads as the needlework ladies, the terror lies not so much in blackness as in the very vision of a vacuity that it discloses or makes seeable, as the mind falls victim to the sublime blindness of reason, and precisely when its (racial) staging cannot be pictured or conceived as a theater of representations: “and by no art, can we cause such a shock by the same means, when we expect and prepare for it” (Burke 133, my emphasis). Furthermore, Burke concludes, even though “custom reconciles us to everything,” including our night terrors, “the nature of the original impression [of blackness] still continues”; or, more problematically perhaps, the restitution of sight (via the sublime) is always in fact a repetition of a primal vacuity within the sighted subject (Burke 135). In these stories of restored sight and sight endangered, one thereby glimpses the way that the aestheticization of the natural sentiments of civil society is instituted and constituted on an account of a racial horror that overwhelms the mind absolutely, irrevocably, and regardless of custom, sentiment, or reason. For white custom or culture, in brief, blackness is indeed the Other, and to say that blackness is a faux pas is inherently tautological.
 
Thus is the body of a black woman introduced into the dream of a blind (and blinding) envisioning, but in this dream the body and mind are both hallucinated as under threat. Here the corporeal body and representation are both subjected and held in abeyance by a gaze that becomes the sublime substitute of both nature and meaning: this gaze blackens the world. (This picturing of blackness as an anomaly within the visible is permitted by nothing other than the conventional association of blackness with malevolent threat, one that renders it subservient to the drama of an exposed, ever fragile whiteness; nothing permits this classical racial optics more than the sense that whiteness needs protecting from the racial “convulsions” that its own relaxation solicits.)
 
Burke’s example thus poses this problem: how can the mind free itself from blackness, when it is not so much the mind that is deceived into relaxation (by blackness, or femininity) as it is the “relaxation” itself that causes the eye to fall (inside a dream that is, in truth, the blindness of its own envisioning), and when it is this “accident” of the gaze that “induces this [black, sublime] image in the mind” (Burke 134)? In the case of the sublime, the image of falling is derived immanently and essentially (that is to say, aesthetically) from the threat of a relaxation induced from without that is simultaneously the nightmare or fantasy of the reposing mind. This fear, as Piper argues in Out of Order, Out of Sight, is itself problematic, since by protecting civility, masculinity, and the gaze over the eye, this imagining of blackness also protects the injustices of patriarchal sexual-racial conventions from being connected to their delusional origins in the imaginings of whites.
 
When the issue is a black woman as a visual faux pas, or as the point at which the categorial framework collapses, some sort of boundary has already been invaded, in a sense. Since it is as a veil that blackness, allegorically, remains suspended between being and appearance, it is viewed by Burke simultaneously as both sublime and pharmakon, impressive and debased, moving the body to contract painfully, to open the eye wide, so as to induce the mind’s precipitous relaxation. In order for sensibility to avoid being reduced once again to blindness, sublimity, like judgment, needs to be rethought in terms of the kinds of sexual-racial politics on display here in the Enquiry. The distrust of the aesthetic in Piper, her critique of fetishistic pseudology are so many attempts at this rethinking; they are attempts to lay down (in the sense in which Lacan says the gaze is laid down as a kind of mimicry or camouflage) the visual and categorial limits of racist self-delusion. Yet even the attempt (in Piper) to re-encounter the anomalous is not simply political – one gets the impression that she is trying to imagine another kind of political aesthetics. As Piper convincingly demonstrates, that imagining challenges not only the claims of aesthetic sensibility, civility, or etiquette, but also the racial conventions of aesthetic taste and culture.
 
One often hears in artistic circles that to focus on sensibility is to be apolitical. Burke’s interest in the eyes of the blind as an untrained or innocent way of seeing, one not yet dulled or habituated by custom or reason, argues, on the contrary, for an absolute sovereignty of seeing. The innocent eye is a metaphor not only for a highly cultivated aesthetics of vision or Bildung, but also for a purity of political envisioning. There is politics precisely because the purest (most sovereign) vision is the most unseeing, i.e., free from the restrictions of convention and taste.
 
And there is also judgment. There are striking and suggestive parallels between the blind boy invoked in the Enquiry and the shifting address-structures of works like Piper’s My Calling (Cards). A glance at this and several other works suggests that there tends indeed to be a shared depiction in Burke and Piper of a law beyond sight, a vacuity at the very edge of the visible, a mind ever haunted by its own infirmity and disfiguration; both depict various tableaux of a kind of conventional seeing that produces blindness, and of a ruination that is the moment of first sight, a ruin whose political meaning is that of restored sight. Doubtless there are differences, but the various mises en scène of a mind groping in the darkness of its own delusion, the setting in movement of counter-pseudological tableaux, in short the holding in check of the politics of the sublime, all suggest a concern with the conventional limits of the seeable. At the level of the texts themselves, there is the sense that blackness is uniquely imperious to the mind because in seeing it we become like children, or the blind, unable to measure distances in space or time, unable to tell the difference between the dangerous over-proximity of objects from the very far, distant, or ungraspable. Part of the demonstrative power of blackness is to collapse geometric vision into psychological unseeing. The same is true of Burke’s reading of Cheselden. The original scientific interest of the case was the contiguity of sight and touch; the distance between the mental images we have of objects, their resemblance or likeness, and our actual experience of them; and whether a person born blind could recognize objects in space alone without learning how to associate names and things (the so-called “Molyneux problem”). For Burke, the case is more about the eye as a kind of cinémathèque or theater, where the conventions of judgment themselves become images (of blindness), and where things newly seen are like cutouts or hallucinations that possess insufficient reality and are mere shadows of a more overwhelming darkness. The primary force of race in the Enquiry is due to the direct relation between what we racially see and questions of invisibility; racial seeing is a question not of an illusory reality, but of a phantasy that is unconsciously lived as reality.
 
Naturally, Piper reconceives this delusional fear in transcendental terms. In order to tell the story of the black-woman-as-object (as in, say, Burke), her artwork strives to present her indexical presence as a unique moment or event prior to any defensive rationalization; this moment is one of great unease, since its meaning cannot be assured in advance and involves the suspension of conventional pleasures and associations. Thus, rather than realize a phantasy of innocence transformed into power, here the gaze signals a regression from power to childish innocence. The phantasy of penetrating the world of things is here rendered fallible and precarious when traversed by the gaze of the other in her difference. Necessarily unpredictable, this encounter is what Piper subsequently calls (in Out of Sight) a way of not averting one’s gaze. Burke’s theater of the eye registers a series of aversions, including negrophobia, but by doing so it simultaneously demonstrates the conventional limits of our notions of difference. As a consequence he shows the way that race has always been recruited to perform this pained weariness of the (white) eye, and the way that weariness has become “naturally” blind. The sight of a black woman accordingly denotes not so much an external shock that cannot be expunged from the objective view, as an ideological fantasy that grounds the gendered-raced terms of the Enquiry. It is Burke, then, who cannot look on her, who looks indirectly at her through the eyes of a frightened boy. In the Enquiry her presence is an allegorical vacuity in whose appearance the desire not to see becomes both intelligible and desirable as the phantasized limit of the mind.
 
Yet art needs to see her, finally, because the history of aesthetics does not. In Piper’s justly famous “Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features” (1981), the question of racism’s invisibility to art historical discourse is taken up and made explicit (see Fig. 3).
 

Fig. 3 Adrian Piper, Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features, 1981. Pencil on paper. 8″ x 10″ (20.3 x 25.4 cm). Collection of Eileen Harris Norton, USA. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. Used by permission.

One can’t help feeling that the black woman who appears here is the effect of a figure who disappears, and in whose invisibility the phenomenal form of blackness remains racially indeterminate. Once again, one is struck by the close entanglement of exposure and concealment in this pencil drawing on paper (in fact, one feels the uneasiness and strangeness of this concealment by appearance). This picture looks back at us from the heart of the visible, the record of what it means to be seen when we no longer know who is doing the seeing: we don’t know whether the artifice is one of exposure or concealment, disguise or complicity; whether the “exaggeration” is at once a falsification (pastiche or fetish); or whether it is the expression of an excess, a disruption, a negation pulling the face towards some other model that has no obvious meaning as parody, disguise, or derision, and yet remains embodied as a kind of obtuse referent without designation, neither anchored nor set adrift in the scene of the image. Take away the obvious meaning of “Negroid,” and a “racial” signification still remains, still circulates, still comes through: without it, there would be no exaggeration to be seen or read. But what makes that signification figurable and seeable is used here in opposition, not to the deliberately fictive disguise, but to the imbecility of all racial designation that confuses being with appearance. The question of what appears is thus raised in an interesting way as a kind of non-negating disappearance. But it is hard to know if the exaggeration is part of what appears or what fails to appear; hence the difficulty in locating it. Our vision remains suspended between the image and its designation, between representation and its subtraction. Like the figure of vacuity in the Enquiry, it is difficult to tell whether race is the ground that figures or the figure that grounds. On the one hand, the strokes that mark the surface of the paper are both the frame and what frames aesthetic judgment. Hence, all appearance, for Piper, could be called Negroid insofar as it designates an empty materiality, or a materiality prior to any aesthetic manifestation.
 
Piper has indicated clearly in several texts the burden that her race and sexuality have presented to gallery owners and collectors.[7] “Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features” takes up that burden as an allegory of the black female artist always caught between exaggeration and caricature, seemingly present yet disappearing before her own eyes into the abyss of that self-division, desperately trying to recapture herself as an image of referential explicitness, but already knowing that blackness is already, in its very iconicity, the medium that prevents such referentiality from taking shape, from acquiring a singular form or uniqueness. All of Piper’s self-portraits (since that is what we are concerned with) are allegories of an incarnation that subtracts, with blackness as the figure for what lets be seen without ever presenting, and in whose “representation” ruination supervenes on any self-image. In tracing the movement of that figuration, Piper’s self-portraits are powerful accounts of the ways black art has been looked at (that is to say, marked off, ruined, mutilated) by art theory and the white art establishment. One could say that the gaze here sets aside both the portrait and the features – the markers of selfhood – and reaches instead toward a black thing, a black object that belongs in the category of aesthetic formlessness. Piper’s drawing thus attempts the impossible task of addressing the limits of that figuration within a representation – the unrepresentable moment when, in viewing the work, the face first looked at is eclipsed by a memory or stereotype that cannot itself be seen in the portrait. Since any black self-portrait has to include what is by its own form excluded from it, it must present through its own ruination the traces of this limit, not as something known but as something uncomprehended by the aesthetic. Therefore, this portrait, too, in tracing the limit of certain conventions, inscribes an appearing that it itself reveals to be impossible – but necessary (as such, it recalls the photographs of Food for the Spirit). Accordingly, black art historically has been forced to demonstrate – by the unwanted supplement of racism –the fate of being, aesthetically, its own pharmakon; the black artist has to present, to bring out, to render visible, by the very excess that she brings to it, the expression of a disappearance that signifies the ruination of black art as both idea and medium. Piper also makes clear that this obligation is borne and sustained by historical conventions of art historical discourse and enquiry – which is why her conceptual art challenges its own referentiality and representation. Whence her insistence on the ruin of this version of ruination, and by the very anomalous terms that render it tangible as both an aesthetic idea and cultural value. And whence her insistence on the political necessity of etiquette as a moral or dialectical space where black art can form or suspend its own radical anomaly, and where the desire is for an art of xenia.
 
In each of her self-portraits, then, a kind of vacuity is implicitly instated between figure and stereotype. In a way, Piper’s art attempts to return seeing to a certain kind of naivety, to produce a spectator who sees before understanding what it is he or she is seeing. All this is a far cry from Burke. And yet, in the fourth part of the Enquiry, Burke describes a vacuity in visual judgment that has no other meaning than its contribution to a spectacle of excess and ruination (and whose witness is the restored sight of a formerly blind boy). Piper, in “Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features,” aims at the recovery of the gaze of the black object from such blindness; the point seems to be that black art cannot be representational without the risk of seeming vacuous, and the price paid is enormous – no less than a sight ruined by having to blindly contemplate itself through stereotypes. Perhaps it was the reading of this other blind text (here in Burke) that Piper called for when she said that an art object should not simply be seen or heard but also scrutinized and listened to attentively as a materially anomalous event. This scrutiny and this listening are obviously not the postulation of some simple need to apply the mind post-racially (that would be banal, a pious wish), but rather a veritable mutation of how we read the black object, text, or image – which remains a crucial problem of our time.

* * *

This still leaves us, and the racist offender, holding the card. If today’s prevailing fantasy is that we are all post-racial, then handing out the card becomes harder than ever. It is no wonder that My Calling (Cards) has been seen as so historically significant. It is also no wonder that its significance remains simply that of asking a subject to become a spectator to his or her own delusion. Whether one has ever received these calling cards or not, everyone participating in the debate has once committed a racist faux pas. Rhetorical, psychoanalytical, philosophical, aesthetic, and political structures are profoundly implicated in these solecistic apparitions. The difficulty in all these encounters would seem to reside in the attempt to achieve a full elaboration of any discursive position other than that of the card not needing to be taken, the receiving of which makes all of us into a terrified child groping blindly in self-deception. What could be more discomforting than that?