To Disembody: The Administration of Hunger and Dismemberment

a talk by

Alyosha goldstein

My paper this afternoon seeks to think with the video-performance work of the Mohawk/Blackfoot artist Merritt Johnson. Approaching Johnson’s video/performance as addressed to a politics of relationality and embodied survival, this paper discusses selections from the Exorcising America series as a way of thinking about practices of vulnerability in a context of protracted colonial, racial, and sexual violence.  Exorcising America is a series of short single-channel video performances ongoing since January 2014 - presently comprised of approximately 26 installments - that play on the instructional/how-to/self-help genre as a way of imagining Indigenous life otherwise under the everyday banalities and brutalities of colonization, as quotidian lessons in purging the toxicity of colonial predation. Johnson describes the series as providing “lifestyle instructions and demonstrations” that convey “a model for ‘do this and something will happen.’ It’s a promise, an invitation to this new possible future.” [i]

           Rather than simply appropriating the instructional/self-help genre as an actualization of or invitation to what can readily be discerned as resistance or resurgence, the videos underscore the normalized machinations of power and play on the desire for individuated self-transformation as itself bound up with the logic of colonial subjection. Survival and the internalization of violence, endurance and degradation, coexist unreconciled. The voice-over in “Not Asking for Anything” warns that “Asking for help can lead to confusion of what you’re really asking for.  These exercises should be practiced daily to maintain top condition and to counteract the confusion you otherwise cause. Remember, not having it coming depends on decisions you cannot make.” As exercises for “not asking for anything” and “not having it coming” the video performance highlights how intentionality is willfully ignored and made imperceptible by the perpetrators of sexual harassment and gender violence. This is not an exercise in resignation to victimization, but one that exposes the promise of self-determination as premised on a self nonetheless constituted in relation to vulnerability and illegibility. 

Exorcising America: Not asking

In Exorcising America, the videos primarily depict the artist alone in an interior space with a small number of props related to the theme of the performance. The performances are composed of several gestures or movements accompanied by voice-over instructions and include a brief summary text. For instance, the online text accompanying “Mouth Exorcises” explains that the video imparts a means of improving “mouth and tongue control” with the “benefits” of protection from the effects of “lactose intolerance, contagious forms of abuse, high blood sugar, accepting empty apologies for violence, diabetes, heart disease, silence, inherited risk factors, and distraction.” Other installments are devoted to such “topics” as “Give and Take,” “Pain Management,” and “Disappearing Exercises.”

Exorcising America: Mouth Exercises

         My intention in this paper is not to analyze Johnson’s work, as it is already, in and of itself, a practice of critical analysis, - I am simply thinking alongside it because I believe it poses interesting questions for us to grapple with collectively - but to ask how these “exercises” or “exorcisms”—as heuristics, exertions, procedures—might focus attention on the uncomfortable relation between, or bind of, violability and vulnerability, violence and capacity, knowing and unknowing.  The videos parody a genre that trades on its claims to instill a confidence, self-possessed agency, and improvement untroubled by unconscious drives, ambivalence, and unevenly distributed premature death.  However much the exercises perform a casting out, a conjured expulsion of “America,” of colonial possession, an undertaking of making unpossessed, the destructive forces that occupy and devour stolen lands and render life bare linger. Viewers are compelled to ask what sort of visceral or eviscerated trace lives on across the unsettled relations of aspiration and refusal, autonomy and subjection, intimacy and separation that these lessons enact.

          The eleventh video in the Exorcising America series, entitled “Not Biting the Hand That Feeds You,” advises that “When living hand to mouth the incidence of injury due to bitten hands increases, so please use caution when practicing these exercises.” Here “living hand to mouth,” precariously from land to body, is a condition that follows in part from colonial displacement and the emplacement and emplotment of the colonial state in which hunger is used as both a weapon and calculated means of contingent relief in order to discipline expropriated peoples into compliance and conformity with governmental mandates.  An indispensable historical sleight of hand, an impression, an appearance that inverts the relations of presumed dependency, has been to turn treaty obligations that require the colonial state to provide food, annuities, and other contractually agreed upon goods and services into a gift, an emblem of the colonial state’s concern with providing for the welfare of the less fortunate.  As with the technologies of citizenship that presume to absorb and assimilate colonized peoples under an exceptionalist premise of colonialism’s ultimate tutelary culmination in democratic inclusion, holding life otherwise in abeyance, the apparatus of ongoing colonization brutalizes so as to extend a hand, to offer relief from the starvation and aggressions it has perpetrated, cultivated, and perpetuated.

       A wide range of U.S. colonial strategies have deployed hunger as a weapon against Native peoples[ii]. Such practices have been so widespread as to defy summary.  During the genocidal land-grabs called Indian removal or as a deliberate scorched-earth military tactic, the starvation of Native peoples has served as a frequent instrument in the service of U.S. colonization. This was the case when, under Kit Carson’s command, during the 1863-1864 campaign against the Diné, the U.S. Army destroyed Navajo crops and orchards and a bounty was offered to soldiers for each horse, mule, and sheep they killed or captured. The policy of Navajo extermination by methodical deprivation and exposure continued through the Long Walk and lethal imprisonment at the Bosque Redondo concentration camp. In the same decade, the systematic slaughter of buffalo during the wars against the Plains Indians also implemented a strategy of attrition by starvation.  Likewise, General George R. Crook saw the 1878 Bannock War as an outcome of Indian policy that made confinement on reservations a death sentence, observing that “It cannot be expected that they will stay on reservations where there is no possible way to get food, and see their wives and children starve and die around them. We have taken their lands, deprived them of every means of living.”  Instances of such conditions were common across reservations and a direct result of U.S. actions.

           Mass starvation has also often been a consequence of U.S. policies and programs or settler actions even when not explicitly articulated as an objective. For example, in the wake of the 1862 Homestead Act which encouraged white settlement in the Gila River valley in the Arizona territory, settlers not only seized land but diverted huge quantities of water from the river, decimating the crops of the down-river Pima Indians to the degree that the tribe went from prosperous farming and trading to pervasive conditions of destitution and famine in less than a decade. In 1895, Wee Paps, a Pima convicted of grand larceny in the territorial district court for stealing horses and trading them for food, explained that “Until the past few years we have always had plenty of water to irrigate our farms, and we never knew what want was…  The Government refuses to give us food and we do not ask for it; we only ask for [our] water”[iii]. 

            Despite settler disavowal, food from the U.S. government for Native peoples was most often a part of stipulations for rations and annuities provided in exchange for land cessions.  Indeed, as Jacki Rand shows so vividly in the case of the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek and the Kiowa, U.S. legislators disclaimed treaty obligations and recast “appropriations not as payments for massive land cessions, but as handouts to a broken people they no longer needed to fear or respect.”[iv] Rand notes further how the depletion of the buffalo population “transformed rations and annuities [which the U.S. was required to provide under the 1867 treaty] from an optional supplementary resource into a subsistence necessity.”[v] The local Indian agent and federal policymakers took advantage of the dire situation as an opportunity to use the withholding of rations to force the Kiowas into submission.  The conditions faced by the Kiowas were not exceptional but rather are indicative of the U.S. calculus of rations and manufactured scarcity on reservations more broadly.

            The national food assistance programs created in the U.S. during the 1930s and made a recurring part of the federal budget in 1964 were not linked to federal Indian policy, but were available to Native peoples to the same parsimonious extent they were to other impoverished people in the U.S.  It was not until the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, established by the Food Stamp Act of 1977, that the federal government initiated a specific program addressed to Indian hunger[vi]. As with the U.S. semi-welfare state in general, food assistance itself has been a frequent target for congressional budget cuts, and, currently is under renewed attack from conservative and neoliberal lawmakers. But also of particular significance for anti-Indian ideology is the way in which the minimal access to food provided by the federal government is imagined to be evidence of the dependency of indigenous peoples, ostensibly reconfirming their abject status as “domestic dependent nations” and wards of the state. The logistics of humanitarian reason here are not mechanisms of redress, but rather presuppose hunger as a weapon that aims to produce compliance, complicity, and gratitude.

            As with many of the other videos in Exorcising America, “Not Biting the Hand That Feeds You” conveys a deliberate tension between seemingly willful self-harm as perhaps the only available recourse to agential power and defiant practices that interrupt and refuse. The violence enacted is matter-of-fact and dispassionate in its presentation, as if unremarkable, mundane. On the one hand, the video assures that viewer that “What’s great about this exercise is that you’re protecting the hand that feeds you and anyone your voice might disturb.” On the other hand, the instructions warn that “There’s no telling when you might bite the hands that feed you.  You are especially dangerous when you’re hungry.  As you exercise, you’ll become more dangerous, so please use caution.”  What may appear to be lessons in sustained suffering and collaborating in one’s own abuse and violation—“breath slowly and deeply to manage your hunger and aversion to being restrained”—nevertheless gesture towards an enhanced capacity—“daily exercise will allow you to increase your stamina and resolve.”  This capacity, even if ambiguously suspended between inward and outward direction, is ultimately a threat, an embodied autonomy and self-determination that exceeds the death worlds of colonial governmentality.  It is a promise of control that, while extending protection to the forces of violation, by the very assertion and exertion of capacity usurps the colonial monopoly on violence and foreshadows futures otherwise. 

Exorcising America: Not biting the hand that feeds yoU

In conclusion, I want to consider this video performance in what has to do with thinking about vulnerability. What might this video have to do with thinking about vulnerability as being rendered violable, exposed, and susceptible to violence and vulnerability as a form of courageous and maybe even radical openness; as a grounded connection and intimacy that reinvigorates relationality and collectivity? In the introduction to their edited volume Vulnerability in resistance, Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay observe that ''dominant conceptions of vulnerability and of action presuppose and support the idea that paternalism is the sight of agency and vulnerability, understood only as victimization, passivity, invariably the sight of inaction" [vii]. They ask a number of questions that I believe Johnson's videos also pose: how are vulnerability and bodily exposure related, especially when we think about the exposure of the body to power? Is that exposure both perilous and enabling? In what ways is vulnerability bound up with the problem of precarity?

          Johnson’s video performances eschew the logics of empowerment, a simple taking power in an opposition between being possessed and dispossession, even as they play on the promise of certainty, enhancement, and transformation. The instructional/self-help genre champions individuation and the fantasy of self-mastery, and mastery in general, as well as reifying interiority and the positivist functionality of rational choice. There are only the willful and those who lack resolve and succumb to their own failure of will power [viii].

          Exorcising America inverts the logic of self-help to make manifest the imposed violability, the relentless somatic and psychic trespass.  The videos complicate standard progressive histories that fixate on Native death and genocide as foregone conclusion and tragic loss, that vilify past excesses of state and settler violence only to relegate Native peoples to the past.  But in parodying the instructional/self-help genre, Johnson likewise suggests ways to disclaim heroic narratives of resistance and overcoming the odds. Unraveling the generic logic of colonial-capitalist possession and control, Exorcising America presents aesthetic strategies that undo normative trajectories and labor to defamiliarize and estrange the coercions of common sense, of possibilities within reason.

          In this sense, Johnson’s videos also imagine vulnerability as responsibility, as a living with, a persistence under conditions of impossibility.  Vulnerability is an active social relation, among people as well as with the non-human world.  The video “Knowing Your Place” cautions the viewer to “Please remember that outside assessments of your place may vary, practicing these exercises daily may help you determine and eventually know your place despite outside influence.” “Water Safety Exercises” tells how to “learn to recognize when water is unsafe,” but also warns that “water safety exercises may not fully prevent or avert health complications from unsafe water.”

Exorcising America: water safety exercises

            As the video shows Johnson leaning forward to sip what appears to be oil slicked across the surface of water in glass container and spit the material into a nearby cup, the voice-over instructs: “continue removing the threat from the water, one mouthful at a time. Once you have removed enough of the threat from the water, so water is safe, use the water to clean your face.”  These exercises convey both vulnerability as exposure and harm, and vulnerability as relation and intimacy. They are instructions for an obligation to provide for the safety of the water; ingesting and spitting out the residue of extractive toxicity; placing body and being in the way of the effluent of pipelines. In turn, the water cleanses, washes away oil and saliva. These lessons do not offer improvement, achievement, or mastery. They are lessons that remain fraught, frightening, and relentless. But as a confluence of body, land, and water they are instructions for living under conditions that appear directed only toward a perpetual accumulation saturated with death and dismemberment. These remain exorcisms that sustain life nonetheless, training for living otherwise.

NOTES

[i]

Victoria Hutter, “Art Talk with Merritt Johnson,”Art Works Blog, July 28, 2016, https://www.arts.gov/art-works/2016/art-talk-merritt-johnson

[ii]

Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014). 

[iii]

David H. DeJong, Stealing the Gila: The Pima Agricultural Economy and Water Deprivation, 1848-1921 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 100.

[iv]

Jacki Thompson Rand, Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 45. Similar machinations are evident with regard to the Ute, as Thomas A. Krainz demonstrates in Delivering Aid: Implementing Progressive Era Welfare in the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 51-60.

[v]

Rand,Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State, 58. 

[vi]

Kenneth Feingold, Nancy Pindus, Diane Levy, Tess Tannehill, and Walter Hillabrant, Tribal Food Assistance: A Comparison of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, November 2009).

[vii] Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, "Introduction," Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 1.

[viii]

For more on the analysis of “willfulness,” see Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

Alyosha Goldstein, Renisa Mawani, Mark Harris Q&A

Merritt Johnson's website: Flashbang giveaway