Saldanha and our week on Affect

In the book, Saldanha not only produces a materialist ethnography on racism in the rave scene of Goa in India, but he also makes an intervention in theories of race away from the field of signification and meaning and to a recentering on the body its concrete material qualities and capacities: ways of doing, and its dispositions in space what he terms as Viscocity which is a central concept in this work.

His guiding question also triggers a justification of why to look for non-constructivists, and non-representational takes on race, and is: How does racism emerge in a counter-cultural location where nobody mobilizes negative representations of "other" and yet there are processes of separation of "whites" (including European, American, but also Israelis and Japanese) from "Indians" and other others (including charter tourists). a

His study is an exploration of how whiteness reconstitutes even when is attempting to make a deep critique of western culture. In this hippie and more specifically psychedelic formation, there is a reconstitution, self-actualization that none the less excludes, pushes other bodies away. "Whites taking up the dance floor and pushing Indians away is not a question of representation" (p 8).  In contrast, he proposes to engage with race as an event.

He proposes a series of critiques to representation theory
1. In analyzing race as an effect of representation it does not engage with its materiality as an event: phenotype, behaviors, class location (as capacities). Race as event.  

2. In only focusing in the negative and contrastive meaning-making of race it does not engage in the variation, and race as positivity, as additions. Racism is not clear cut exclusion but shades of differentiation. Race as positive.

3. In considering a dialectics and relations as what constitutes of racial difference,  constructivists (ie Gilroy) suggest for a resolution of racism as a dialectical undoing and negation of race. In contrast, he suggests maintaining a positive perspective on race. More race instead of less.

Thus for him "race is a shifting amalgamation of human bodies and their appearance, genetic material, artifacts, landscapes, music, money, language, and states of mind." (p9)

Particularly relevant for me: He reengages with phenotype as mattering within the racial machinic assemblages.

He engages with a number of Spinoza - Deleuze set of concepts:

---Virtuality as the number of connections bodies are capable of establishing, thus is the capacities and possibilities of a specific body understood as an always compound body of multiple others entering in relation to others.

---Embodiment, as the specific forms of a body, for example through action, use of drugs,

---Location, as the relations of movement and stasis, understood not as opposites but rather stasis (and structure) as always emerging from movement and associations. 

---Viscosity as a central force constituting race, the stickiness of bodies coming together,

---Emergence racial difference emerges from a host of processes at different levels of organization, a series of material processes, of mutual interaction of biological, sociological processes. 

---Psychedelics, as a set of practices of transformation that white people engage in Goa that is related to engaging in a multiplicity of pleasures.



"Racial difference emerges when bodies with certain characteristics become viscous through the ways they connect to their physical and social environment. Race is a machinic assemblage, to use a concept of Deleuze’s collaborator Félix Guattari. (...) Basically, the concept presents constellations, especially biological and sociological constellations, as fully material, machinelike interlockings of multiple varied components, which do not cease to be different from each other while assembled. " (p 9)

"Instead of identity politics and a downright negation of whiteness, or a celebration of hybridity and anarchy, or a regime of multiculturalism and tolerance, the politics that follows from my ethnography acknowledges that an escape from whiteness can perversely reinforce it—as happens in Anjuna. But that is no reason to deny its emancipatory possibilities. Whiteness and race need to be understood and proliferated in new ways, not abolished or denied. In contrast to what is usually expected of bringing phenotype back into the human sciences, therefore, this study asserts that a materialist (or machinic) analysis of race cannot be appropriated by eugenics or biological essentialism (p 10)

in Chapter 1 he makes an overview on Spinoza's definition of the body as a set of capacities relative to its position in different social and material spaces. Thus psychedelic whiteness is highly critical and yet in its critique and variation it recreates white supremacy,

"I want to insist more strongly than Foucault and Bourdieu that a body’s capacities are always linked to its physical singularity, which, according to the space it finds itself in (patriarchy, racism, capitalism, ageism, the hospital, the gym, the school, the freak show, etc.), will circumscribe what is possible and what not." (p13)

He does not eject power, scale and is not married to an emphasis of a flat ontology (critique to Latour and De Landa) Racial difference is also a power difference: different capacities to self-actualizing.

He also does not eject race, sexuality, gender, nationalism. Elsewhere (Saldanha 2012) he is going to defend materialism in the Marxist tradition (against Thrift and other). If a notion of class that considers it as a default result of the process of production is reductionist, avoiding class is very limiting too. He suggests regarding class as a complex emergence of different levels and a concrete arrangement, that has very real effects in what a body can do, in the same way as sexuality and gender.  

I really appreciate how he is combining affect theory and capacities with some "structuralism" or what elsewhere he names as formalism or nominalism. So his distance is that he considers class and gender as a result and not a cause, and yet he considers then as active affective assemblages, ie linking type of bodies, type of phenotype.  With this, he makes a step that in some cases is missing in Thrift, Beasley Murray, although not nonexistent.  A key to how he is building his analytic machine is the entry through feminists Deleuzian as Grosz and Rich. 

In this sense, he is also creating analytic machinery that, just as Deleuze can consider meaning and representation as actions in the world. In the passage that I have been obsessed with, not what they mean, not how to decode them, but what do meanings do, how do they work, territorialize and deterritorialize.

This is only an engagement with the very first two chapters of the book. 

Saldanha, A., 2005. Psychedelic whiteness: Rave tourism and the materiality of race in Goa (India).

Saldanha, A., 2012. Assemblage, materiality, race, capital. Dialogues in Human Geography, 2(2), pp.194-197.