Racial Immanence. Marissa K. López

ignoring the long history of neuroscientific debates surrounding the relationship between affect and cognition. Only a very small percentage of “thinking” is entirely cognitive, Leys notes, citing one scientific school of affect studies that understands “thinking” as largely nonrepresentational practices of embodied habit (Leys 452). Similarly, Chen, emphasizing speech as a “corporeal, sensual, embodied act” (53), describes language as a series of “multimodal, conceptual directives” that happen simultaneously and constitutively in body and brain (52). Gilb’s fiction, which assumes the mutual interplay of mind and body, parallels Chen’s language theory and occupies the middle ground between the opposing schools of scientific thought on affect described by Leys. But Gilb is not making scientific arguments, and neither am I. What I aim to do here is use the ambiguity surrounding affect to frame my readings of Gilb and to outline a nonrepresentational way of reading race.

      This poses a not insignificant methodological challenge since, as Chen notes, it is nearly impossible to read any other way. Since Western philosophy’s linguistic turn in the early twentieth century, language has, Chen writes, become “bleached of its quality to be anything but referential, structural, or performative” (53). Inspired by Chen’s work on the animative, vivifying, and material power of language, in what follows, I track Gilb’s inscrutable yet influential bodies across three texts: Gilb’s short stories “Death Mask” (1993) and “please, thank you” (2011), and his first novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994). Throughout these three pieces, the body maintains an ambiguous and tenuous relation to language and narrative, hovering between the poles of materiality and abstraction in the same way the Sun Stone oscillates between linear and cyclical time. The human body refutes the death mask of ethnic labels in a deconstructive critique that leans toward a redemptive, if unknowable, materiality in “Death Mask.” Last Known Residence embraces the mysteries of the body as the protagonist, Mickey, turns away from the pursuit of knowledge to an appreciation of sense experience. Finally, in “please, thank you,” the body becomes a way of being in the world, a mode of interpretation in which the protagonist, a recovering stroke victim, undergoes hours of confusing “speech therapy” that appear to him to have little to do with speech. Thus we move, in the twenty-year trajectory these texts bookend, from physical disquietude to a productive sense of “sense.”4

      To get at this sense of the imbrication of words and feelings, or text and body, I read choratically, borrowing from Rebekah Sheldon’s work as I describe in the introduction to this book, in order to propose a concept of “racial immanence.” With this phrase I do not mean, as Manthia Diawara does, to imply racial truths or pure racial characteristics.5 Quite the contrary: there is no racial truth; “racial immanence” is shorthand for my argument that language, especially as Gilb deploys it, is part of an embodied, racial process. With the term I play on Kant’s transcendent categories of thought to suggest race not as an abstraction but as derived from the material world. Race might elude totalizing narration, but that does not mean it is beyond our perception. Here I am influenced by Quentin Meillassoux’s rejection of “finitude”: the idea that absolute knowledge of any sort is impossible, that we can know the world only as it is revealed to us, through, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, our bodies.6 Race might not be a transcendent category of truth, in other words, but it is, I argue, a category of physical, affective experience that catalyzes personal and political change in the world.

      The Immanent Time of the Body: “The Death Mask of Pancho Villa”

      Race functions as just this sort of catalyzing agent in Gilb’s writing, and racial immanence is, in many ways, a strategy of disidentification. As José Muñoz defines it, “disidentification” describes “the strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (4). Gilb’s deployment of the body is a disidentification with racial discourse in the majoritarian and the minoritarian contexts of ethnic studies. He privileges the body but not, as Merleau-Ponty does, as a means of achieving knowledge about the world. Gilb’s approach to sensory experience more resembles that of Henri Bergson, whose theories of sense, duration, and narration, as I explicate below, illuminate Gilb’s fictional project, which relies on close, at times clinical, attention to human bodies that function for him, as the Sun Stone has for centuries of archaeologists, as durational, nonreferential narrative objects.

      In “Death Mask,” for example, the narrator uses his physical imperfections to limn the outlines of a truth he cannot narrate. He tells the reader that he has been “getting soft” (17) from being out of work, that being barefoot makes him feel vulnerable to violence (18, 19, 21), and that he sees Gabe as “somehow being healthier than” him (19). The narrator perceives, but can neither fully understand nor articulate, his physical imperfections. Gabe’s lighting a joint makes the narrator want to go back to bed, which confuses him as he usually enjoys smoking. He accepts the joint because he does not “know how to say no to this too” (21). The narrator has trouble understanding other bodies as well as his own. He takes careful note of Gabe’s body language but can interpret it only as “some excess of something” that he “can’t figure out” (22). Ortíz’s body, too, confuses the narrator: “his gauntness … translates into something else [he] can’t quite put a name on” (19), and his smile, which contrasts sharply with his awkward and otherwise humorless demeanor, is disturbing (19, 21).

      This attention to physical health, gauntness, and inarticulable excess foregrounds the body in ways that invite analysis within a disability studies framework. Two problems arise from such an approach, however. First, while several key disability studies works share my interest in the interplay of bodily sense and social knowledge, they focus primarily on representations rather than enactments of sense experience, and I read Gilb as interested in the latter.7 Second, while disability scholars do take careful account of disability as a function of global capital’s attempts to manage the body, race is often seen as just one facet of such management.8 Foundational works in the field tend to assume that the disabled body grounds all other physical particularities.9 While more recent scholarship moves away from identitarian hierarchizing toward increasingly philosophical and ecumenical considerations of physical difference, such work still puts representational pressure on bodies perceived as different.10 It is a slippery slope from representation to identity, an explanation of being that Gilb’s work, with his imperfect bodies driving readers relentlessly away from meaning, is designed to resist.11

      Just as scholars have been unable to identify the face at the center of the Sun Stone, bodies in Gilb’s fiction refuse to become objects of truth; refusing knowledge of any sort, they represent neither things nor ideas. Affect theory presents itself as a welcoming home for fiction such as Gilb’s that dwells on, but explicitly rejects interpreting, the body, and yet affect theory also tends to suborn race to a universal physicality. Scholars have long understood race as an ideological construct, exactly the sort of thing that affect theory might help us move “beyond.” As Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg explain in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, affect is “the name we give to those forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing” (1). If race is ideological, a function of “conscious knowing,” then where do we find it in a story like “Death Mask”?

      Race in “Death Mask” is wholly immanent. It manifests at the end of the story, after the narrator has definitively refused to see the mask, and he describes himself, after forcing Ortíz to justify his travel plans for the mask, as having “stolen his smile” (25). The stealing of the smile is a moment of racial immanence where history can be narrated only through bodily interaction. The men’s bodies become a site of conflict that remains unwritten; the body’s opacity masks interpersonal tensions that cannot emerge in narrative form because the narrator can only physically experience rather than comprehend them.

      I use “race” rather than “ethnicity” to describe this sensory entanglement between the narrator and Ortíz, and it is crucial to keep the difference between the two terms in mind when thinking through racial immanence. Race, a concept developed from purportedly biological characteristics, has been used to justify all manner of state-sanctioned violence against people of color and to systematically exclude them from institutions of power and social mobility. Ethnicity, on the