Pesky Remainders: Paying Attention to Life's Cruel and Comforting Absurdities
How to make sense of the conditions we currently face and what prevents us from embodying different desires and hopes for the future?
A 2024 Instagram post from the Regina Food Bank. A photo of a giant cheque for $350,000 is centered, large and proud. The cheque is a financial donation from BHP, a joint Anglo-Australian Mining company that owns and operates mines in Australia and the Americas. In exchange for this financial donation the Regina Food Bank has officially designated BHP the status of “reconciliation partner.” Part of this money, according to BHP, goes towards supporting “the food sovereignty program,” which includes supporting “initiatives such as buffalo harvests and Indigenous urban agriculture.”1
The opening line of the IG post reminds us that “We are all Treaty people walking together to create a better Saskatchewan.” It’s a feel good story of white optimism that deploys all the right buzzwords and signposts of a progressive, settler liberal state. DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives are front and centre with a mandate to “indigenize the Hub” and words such as food sovereignty and reconciliation are plunked here and there on BHP’s website. These are powerful words, laden with meaning. And when these words are strung together in a coherent and conquering syntax they lend support to the continuity of an overall national mood and narrative of social progress and forward momentum driven by the motor of economic growth.
But BHP is known for more than its proud declarations of a commitment to reconciliation, food sovereignty and indigenizing the food Hub of the Regina Food Bank; BHP, along with Vale Mining, are also responsible for the most devastating environmental disaster in Brazil. The company faces a 44 billion dollar lawsuit after the dam, managed by Brazilian company, Samarco, collapsed and released 50 million cubic meters of toxic sludge from an iron ore mine into the Doce River in 2015.2 The Doce River has been suffocated to death by the toxic tailings of the iron ore sludge - a noxious mixture of arsenic, mercury and lead. Thousands of Indigenous people have been displaced, the water has been poisoned and vast expanses of intricate ecosystems have been exterminated. The state has repeatedly encouraged the Krenak people to abandon their homes and communities along the river, but many refuse. We have an obligation to the Doce River, they explain. The River is family and we will not abandon our family.3 Ailton Krenak explains: “We know this place has been deeply affected, that it’s become an abyss, but we’re in it and we won’t leave. It’s disturbing, but it’s also necessary to be in this condition in order to respond with full awareness.”4
I stare at this cheque for $350,000 and I have no words. I only hear David Byrne of the Talking Heads crying out, “How did I get here?!” How did we, us moderns get here? BHP? A reconciliation partner committed to Indigenous food sovereignty? The BHP with their arsenal of lawyers hired to shield them from further payouts and who have been criticised for stalling court proceedings in the London lawsuit.5 How to make sense of this teeter-totter model of care on proud display whereby the devastating weight of social and ecological destruction in the global South subsidizes and elevates these light, airy and uplifting narratives of improvement and progress in the global North of Regina. This story doesn’t feel good. My stomach hurts. Is this really the world we want to preserve and celebrate? A world where large financial contributions function as an alibi for ecocide and mass displacement? Do we really want to reproduce a world where any chance of the meaningful practice of food sovereignty is stripped away from thousands of Indigenous people living along the Doce River in exchange for performative declarations of Indigenous food sovereignty in Saskatchewan?
To be fair, every organization that aims to address food insecurity, whether it is a non-profit, mutual aid or small community group must navigate stomach churning contradictions and compromises on an everyday level. While I have drawn attention to BHP and what Homi Babha would certainly describe as their “sly civility,” the reality is that the social and ecological brutality of liberal, colonial capitalism spans a mind-boggling, vast expanse of time and space. BHP is merely riding the wave of this constitutive violence that enables corporations and Nation states to outsource their pollution. And I draw attention to this scene of celebration not to identify the ethical shortcomings of individuals. Thousands of folks around the globe work endlessly to address chronic food insecurity and malnourishment. I stand by and support those who are doing the best they can to extend care under the most constrained of circumstances. The Regina Food Bank is no different. I fear I am no different.
I am active with the Cathedral Community Fridge, a mutual aid group that addresses food insecurity through direct action strategies. The Cathedral Community Fridge binds itself to principles of decentralized decision making practices and non-hierarchical organization. We are (so far) stalwart in our commitment to mutual aid and community driven activism and prefer the freedom to maneuver outside of the enclosure of institutions or official non-profit status. And yet the community fridge, not unlike the Food Bank, must also strategize and act under conditions not of our own making. This means that I too collect the scraps of capitalist modernity and dole them out. Every week, I deliver food to the growing number of folks who still have yet to cash in on liberal capitalism’s deferred promise of economic and social equality for all of humanity. When I sift through boxes of deli meat with expired due dates and I rummage through boxes of damaged yoghurt containers - the sickening sweet smell and thick cream spilling everywhere, I am well aware that I am delivering leftovers to the left over. My own attempts to address food insecurity rely on and reproduce the very same system that created the problem in the first place.
I am motivated to draw attention to this event in order to make sense of how such a contradiction of care is first and foremost thinkable in the first place. I am not interested in condemning so much as I am in tracking or tracing the conditions of possibility that activate such an event. What sort of moral, affective and sense making framework is necessary in order to ground this event as legible, coherent and agreeable? And inversely, what sort of normative framework is able to so swiftly label those who would refuse this gift as illegible or insane? What sort of stage, mood and atmosphere must be established in order for this transactional relationship between BHP and the Regina Food Bank to be experienced as a successful example of the global (always racialized) order of capital meeting the needs of those left behind? What compels us humans to keep investing in this world as we know it and why do we work so hard to ensure its continuity?
It is becoming harder and harder to stave off the deeply rooted suspicions that liberal capitalist democracy is never going to make good on its promise of the good life, no matter how many performances and declarations of diversity are made. No matter how many times we slap the label “food sovereignty” and “inclusivity” on an event and call it a day. And yet here we are - shielding ourselves from the humility needed to admit we are stuck. What will it take for us to stomach the paradox that improvement and eradication often go hand in hand and that progress and destitution are two sides of the same coin?
Because the truth of that matter is, the majority of the world is not enraptured by the cosmovision of modern EuroAmerican centrism. Most of the world knows from first hand experience that the nation state and corporations were never designed to generate healthy and robust communities. For so many around the globe, the anthropocene is a cruel misnomer; the climate catastrophes of today are not the fault of ‘the human,’ but are rooted/routed in the capitalocene or plantationocene - those odious architectural and logistical sites of enslavement that laid the groundwork for the amassing of obscene fortunes.6 And most of the world knows that food insecurity is an entirely manufactured problem that is neither inevitable nor a ‘neutral’ matter of logistics and policy.
I fear we will never destitute the institutions, edifices, infrastructures and psychic attachments to the world as we know it.7 It will be forced upon us. I have long suspected that what blocks the path of radical liberation is not the far right. It is not Trump. It is whiteness itself and more specifically, white optimism that ensures the continuity of this narrative of universal human liberation made possible by liberal capitalist democracy. It is the bourgeois respectability and morality of the left of centre progressives that keeps the status quo intact. These suspicions are certainly not mine alone. I only have the courage to speak them aloud because of Indigenous scholars such as Glen Coulthard, Kim Tall Bear, Aileen Moreton Robinson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and scholars of the Black Radical Tradition such as Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. These are scholars who refuse the dream that liberal capitalist democracy is the best and only world we can hope for. Scholars who have carefully mapped out how the category of the Human did not simply exclude Black, Queer or Indigenous peoples but rather that these exclusions were constitutive of the category of the Human itself. I am grateful for their cartographic mappings that chart the intertwining of humanity and violence and who have located and named liberalism and its defining feature - man as the autonomous, property owning individual - as historically situated, white enterprises.8
It is important to clarify that when I speak of whiteness I am not reducing it to an identity category that is reducible to white skinned people.9 Whiteness is more like a political and social arrangement that only makes sense through a historical process of racialization. Eileen Moreton Robinson refers to whiteness as a “possessive logic”.10 We can think of whiteness as a way of thinking and ordering the world that centers and values a human who owns property and is self-possessed. Just think of the endurance of the story of the self made man or the independent individual who defies the odds with a big comeback success story. Whiteness is so tightly sutured to freedom and possession that even modern day relations between white settler and Indigenous, Black and white, evoke its opposite: enslavement and dispossession. Whiteness is also a memetic performativity and we learn its choreography from a very early age. Repeated over and over again, whiteness congeals into a normative framework with its attributes functioning as a sort of yardstick that evaluates and shapes our everyday lives. To repeat, these attributes focus on ownership, not just of land and property, but property of the self, of resources, ethics, and of knowledge.
Whiteness endures and reproduces itself, not because of oppressive power structures or ideologies that force folks to tow the line, but rather because there is an optimistic attachment and collective psychic investment in its ideals. I think of white optimism as an ongoing collective investment and attachment to the promises of liberal, capitalist democracy.11 White optimism is an embodied feeling or affect that charges and activates the historical events of our lives with meaning but much like how tone operates in a novel, it does its work quietly without explicitly announcing itself. As an affect, white optimism is most often barely perceptible. It does not enforce itself through overt repression but rather presents itself as an aesthetic that includes manners, codes of conduct, and so called proper ways of encountering and being with others. It is a mode of perception that determines what is worth paying attention to. White optimism is atmospheric. It’s like an effective set design that stages and gets us in the mood for BHP’s feel good stories. And its yearning to attach itself to the idea of universal liberation made possible by economic growth never has to look far for a storyline. The celebration of this gift from BHP to the Regina Food Bank is just one example of a singular story that finds its way and gains traction through the larger genre of white optimism.
By naming white optimism as the affective dimension that helps to stabilize our current liberal order my hope is to make FELT the entanglement between BHP’s brutal practices of neocolonial capitalist extraction in Brazil with their simultaneous management of settler liberal dispossession here in Saskatchewan. It is my hope to make it much more apparent that the collective energy of white optimism goes a long way in entrenching a state rationality that evaluates every experience through the lens of liberal humanism and economic growth. Like a Saskatchewan grater clearing the roads after a winter storm, white optimism pushes the excesses of meaning to the side - those pesky remainders and leftovers that hold the potential to tell a different story but that must be cleared in order to produce an agreed upon narrative that is both familiar and comforting.
We must pay close attention to how the values and ideals we cherish and cling to so tightly are preventing us from imagining a different reality. Do we dare speculate a life after economic growth or do we keep reproducing what we already know, deep down, doesn’t work? Paying attention is never an innocent act. What we attune to and take in of the world, what moves us, is never a matter of a neutral observation but rather a question of what our everyday infrastructure attunes us towards on an affective, aesthetic and sense making level? I ask: Without this psychic attachment and investment in white optimism would BHP and countless other multinational corporations be able to enact such brittle notions of care through performative gestures while simultaneously cocooning themselves from critique? A case in point. BHP explains on its website that 23% of the people who use the Regina Food Bank self-identity as Indigenous. The perceived message is that addressing food insecurity is “in-line with the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action, particularly those aligned with youth programming, language, education and health.” BHP also boasts that its financial donation will help to support the Regina Food Bank’s vision to create “a welcoming environment for Indigenous community members.”12
This message of inclusion and cultural sensitivity seems so reasonable and innocent. And of course there is nothing wrong with working to create a welcoming environment. But what makes this message so reasonable and agreeable? My argument is that white optimism creates the affective conditions for BHP to boast on the one hand, that their financial gift and moral investment in reconciliation addresses the disproportionate number of Indigenous people who rely on the food bank, while on the other hand, never admitting that food insecurity and economic precarity is directly linked to the dispossession of land. There need not be any entanglement between the practices and strategies necessary for territorial expansion and capital accumulation and an analysis of the contemporary material circumstances of the dispossessed.
By all means, offer us your ideas on how to make the Food Bank culturally sensitive, but don’t ask any questions that must disturb the manner or logic that makes some questions plausible or thinkable. Under the modern liberal order and the white optimism that continues to fuel this order, we must ask: How twisted is it that the ravages brought to populations and communities through the obscene accumulation and hoarding of wealth and resources are now sold back to the same communities as the answer to their liberation? This gift is a form of capture that functions to manage our collective expectations of the kind of world we can best hope for. What we are left with is a narrative that emphasizes food insecurity, accessibility and the importance of creating a welcoming environment. And what is omitted from this genre of white optimism? The story of empire, territorial expansion, and capital accumulation. Certainly we can see that the disproportionate number of Indigenous people who use the Regina Food Bank is not a ‘mistake’ of liberal, colonial capitalism that can be corrected through cultural sensitivity. It is constitutive of it.
In her essay, “You, White People,” Algerian French scholar Houria Bouteldja writes: “[I]n addition to being innocent, you are humanists.”[...] Humanism is one of the centerpieces of your immune system.”13 Bouteldja courageously punctures the veneer of white, liberal bourgeois morality first and foremost by naming it. She thus gives form and substance to the visceral and affective, bodily attachment to the modern global order, in particular the ongoing attachment to the soothing lullabies of humanist rhetoric. We begin to see more clearly how these sophisticated techniques and performative gestures, when repeated consistently, congeal into a cohesive moral framework that makes sense. And it is precisely this innocence that is intertwined with white virtue that I find so hard to stomach - an innocence enabled by the affective composition of white optimism. Bouteldja writes:
Attacked on all sides, provoking hatred all over the world, cornered into justifying your conquests, weakened by the multi-faceted resistance movements and especially by the struggles for independence,[...] you have had to equip yourselves with an apparatus for global and structural defense that would ensure the continuation of the imperial project as well as the longevity of the survival of your social body. This political-ideological apparatus is the white immune system. Through it, many antibodies have been secreted. Among them, humanism and the monopoly of ethics. You are the greatest antiracists. Haven’t you time and time again, celebrated the struggle of Martin Luther King against segregation?[...] You are the greatest anticolonialists[...]Didn’t you pour tons of rice into that continent of misery, then advocate that the African people should be taught to fish rather than simply receive the gift of fish?[...]You are the greatest feminists. Didn’t you devote your attention to the fate of Afghan women and the promise to save them from the Taliban’s claws? You are the most anti-homophobic. Didn’t you rush to the defence of homosexuals in the Arab world? How could we possibly climb to your level? We are gnomes, you are giants (44).
Bouteldja’s words bite. They foreground just how cunning humanist and liberal discourse is in its ability to absorb political struggle and social justice into a framework of meaning that not only ignores grossly uneven structures of power but that also reduces the struggle to one of individual virtue. Do we need another line on our CV for certificates in anti-homophobia training or do we need a critique of the interconnections between heteronormativity, property and whiteness? Boutelda captures how the collective energy of white optimism functions to close down radical critiques of liberal capitalism. After all, it has already been determined, ahead of time that liberal capitalism is the solution, not the problem. And what must be omitted for this self-evident truth to flourish are the pesky remainders and the unsettling truth that there is no capitalism without racism.
Do we continue to distance ourselves from the misery of capital through the lofty ideals of humanism, progress, civilization? Can we detach from white optimism and stomach the fact that millions around the globe have never experienced anything but the aberrations that are constitutive of liberal capitalism? That for millions of people around the globe all they have ever experienced are the mistakes of liberal capitalism? Do not forget that even as the French Resistance of WWII were fighting to save the liberal democratic values of Western Europe, France was also busying themselves with the monstrosities of colonial capitalism in Algeria. Liberal sentiments of freedom co-exist with violent practices of enclosure.
At what point do we recognize and admit that the assumption of ease that is part of the texture of white optimism is heavily subsidized by the natural world and the someones of liberal capitalism?. Do we have the courage and love for this world to want to belong to it differently? Do we have the stamina to connect the dots between ecological and social struggles so that it becomes perfectly clear that soil regeneration has everything to do with justice and liberation? Do we have the stamina to refuse the daily onslaught of carefully crafted messages offered up by liberal, colonial capitalism that would have us identify with its perverse strategies of care? Might we even dare consider that there is immense joy in escaping capture from these feel good genres that so narrowly confine our collective historical consciousness to one of innocence and optimism?
I first heard about the joint mining venture of BHP-Samarco-Vale and its crimes of ecocide through the work of Indigenous writer, leader and activist, Ailton Krenak who lives along Watu, the Doce River. I highly recommend Krenak’s Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2020); Life Is Not Useful (2020); and Ancestral Future (2024). In each of these books, Krenak provokes the reader to reckon with the most cherished signposts of civilization: development, progress, improvement, and offers a perspective that unveils their violent underpinnings.
Krenak, Ailton, Life Is Not Useful, Cambridge: Polity, 2023, 56.
A BHP spokesperson states, in regards to the agreement reached with the Brazilian government: “The Renova Foundation, established in 2016 as part of our agreement with the Brazilian authorities, has spent more than $7.7bn on emergency financial assistance, compensation and repair and rebuilding of environment and infrastructure to approximately 430,000 individuals, local businesses and Indigenous communities.”
The anthropocene is a term that refers to our current geological epoch, the epoch of the Anthropos. It is a term used to stress that humanity and human activity have significantly altered planet earth and its atmosphere. The term is often criticized for obfuscating the historical roots of this new epoch, capitalism and its intertwining with the plantations of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade.
Here again I turn to Ailton Krenak’s critical analysis of Western modes of knowing and naming the world that reinforce and support the promise that progress and economic development is the lynchpin of human liberation. [F]or many people in Western epistemology, the idea of another world is just another fixed-up capital world; you take this world, send it to the garage, change the chassis, the windshield, fix the axle, and start running it again. A rotten old world dressed up like new. I’m definitely not willing to pay this bill. For me, it’s not worth fixing.” Life Is Not Useful, 2023, 35.
It is important to note that this ethos of refusal or fugitivity is not about creating a distinction between those who are “sell outs” and those who somehow engage in a more authentic, purity politics. Not at all. What foregrounds a fugitive aesthetics and sensibility is the impulse to experiment with modes of living and caring for one another in excess of the purview of liberal individualism. Fugitivity is about evading capture and refusing to be subjectivized to the dominant and normative sense making frameworks that comprise liberal capitalist democracy especially concerning freedom, belonging and a sociability that centres property and possession. Fred Moten writes: “Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed” Stolen Life, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2018, 131.
This of course, is not to dismiss that those with white skin are afforded an abundance of privilege. The strength of imagining whiteness as an energetic force, ethos, logic, and aesthetic, rather than as a racial category is that it enables an analysis of power that goes far beyond individual acts of racism. To understand whiteness as relationally produced rather than categorically determined is to open thought to how whiteness terraforms the world on a structural and affective-aesthetic level. When whiteness moves beyond being a static identity we can see how whiteness functions to organize how we perceive, make sense of and evaluate our world.
Moreton, Robinson, Eileen, The White Possessive, University of Minnesota Press, 2015
White optimism as a concept draws inspiration from Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism.” I diverge from Berlant in order to foreground how this optimistic attachment to the good life promised by liberal democracy is rooted in the affective-aesthetic infrastructure of whiteness. Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2011.
Bouteldja, Houria, Whites, Jews, and Us, Semiotext(e), California, 2016, 42.