“I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” (Frantz Fanon 2017, 82)

The ambition to create understanding for Children Born of War (CBOW) that permeates this project also includes the wish to ‘unwrite’ the objectification and dehumanisation that lies at the core of their challenging situation. If it were possible to remove the label of ‘CBOW’, then these children would probably receive the same protection and help as all other children.

Read more about the CBOW and prejudice in the texts “Lebensborn and Children Born of War” and “Prejudice and Symbolic Violence” in the library.

In the quote above, Frantz Fanon describes the challenge of blackness and racism, and how this objectification has limited his potential and opportunities. Although the challenge of blackness differs from that of the CBOW – the former being a visible trait and the latter being based on invisible genes, and the former concerning a large group of people struggling with global racism and the latter concerning isolated individuals trying to be invisible – I find the quote relevant for the situation of CBOW who experience that their existence is unwanted from the moment of their birth. Many of the CBOWspend their entire lives unable to escape the objectification that has placed them in the category of the ostracised.

No subject without an object

In order to explore the possibility of ‘unwriting’ this labelling as ‘other’, it is necessary to discuss the basic process of objectification. Sociologist and philosopher Theodore Adorno describes the object as being inherently connected to the subject. The idea of a subject is, in itself, an objectification, and an objectification cannot come into existence without the defining act of an individual. According to Adorno, it isn’t even possible to think about a human individual outside of an act of objectification:

“For both meanings have reciprocal need of each other […] No concept of the subject can have the element of individual humanity […] Conversely, the particular human individual, as soon as one reflects upon it under the guise of the universality of its concept, which does not signify merely some particular being hic et nunc, is already transformed into a universal, similar to what was expressed in the idealist concept of the subject; even the expression ‘particular person’ requires the concept of species simply in order to be meaningful.”(Adorno 1998, 245)

There exists an act of defining that results in an object, and the one doing the defining can, in return, be objectified as a ‘subject’: “Defining means as much as subjectively, by means of a rigidly applied concept, capturing something objective, no matter what it may be in itself.”(Adorno 1998, 246).

Adorno explains that this act of definition is an act of domination – of having the authority and power to define what the ‘other’ is: “Mind’s claim to independence announces its claim to domination. Once radically separated from the object, subject reduces the object to itself, subject swallows object, forgetting how much it is object itself” (Adorno 1998, 246). An object therefore always implies the existence of an experiencing subject and an act of domination from the latter by its unilateral defining of the ‘other’.

Knowledge and objectification

This process of objectification is fundamental to the way humans communicate. We make sense of our surroundings by categorising them into words. According to Lev Vygotskij “[t]he word does not relate to a single object, but to an entire group or class of objects. Therefore, every word is a concealed generalization.” (Vygotskij 1962, 7).

These generalisations into words are the elements that form our language and our written or verbal communication. This means that we can only communicate through language by using generalisations – objectifications – that carry with them the defining power of the subjects who shaped them. Vygotsky describes how human thought has to go through a transformation to be adapted to language, and how meaning will be lost in the process:

“[...] the transition from thought to speech is an extremely complex process which involves the partitioning of the thought and its recreation in words. This is why thought does not correspond with the word, why it doesn’t even correspond with the word meanings in which it is expressed.”(Vygotskij 1962, 242)

Knowledge and power

Our knowledge is stored and communicated in language. Adorno states that knowledge is not possible without objectification. As the subject is also an object, it follows that there is also no such thing as ‘subjective knowledge’. All knowledge is thus shaped by the defining power of the subjects that generalise a class of objects into words, and it becomes impossible to avoid this power structure when using language.

This phenomenon forms the basis of feminist literary theory, arguing that the written language and knowledge have mainly been produced by men – framing women as the ‘other’ in the human way of binary thinking of ‘light or darkness’ or ‘good or bad’.

Yadav demonstrates this frustration with Western epistemology and dualism when writing:

“The language of bivalence, the rational/irrational, necessary/contingent, stable/precarious, core/peripheral, harnessed in the master/slave mentality, exhibits itself predominantly in the scientifictechnological disembodied gazing and the desire to control everything. Epistemology shows tremendous faith in the cognitive abilities of men to know and master everything.” (Yadav 2018, 375)

This power imbalance in language and knowledge is also at the core of the concept of ‘epistemic violence’, where different groups of ‘the other’ are being silenced by the dominance of Western thinking. This dominance is inherent in what is often presented as ‘objective, true knowledge’, which is created using Western methods of knowledge production:

“Key to the epistemological imperialism of Western social science is the assumption that its methods of observation, experimentation, and quantification that separate and distance subject (observer) from object (observed) guarantee its objectivity. While implying its own universal validity, this ‘objective’ social science contrasts itself with folk forms of knowledge that are only ‘true’ for, thus implying no validity beyond, the ‘folk’. The subject position of social science implies a hierarchy of knowledge that places itself ‘above’ and folk knowledge ‘below’. By privileging its own subject position, Western social science facilitates its epistemic imperialism defined as a mode of dominating, silencing, and appropriating ‘othered’ forms of knowledge.” (Neilson 2020, 449)

The denial of ‘objective science’ of its own subjectivity while looking down on the other’s knowledge as ‘subjective folk knowledge’ is an act of silencing non-Western knowledge, by not listening:

 “By failing to acknowledge its subject location, Western social science not only facilitates ‘othering’, it also impoverishes human knowledge and, ultimately, undermines human solidarity.”(Neilson 2020, 449)

Prejudice ingrained in language

This mechanism seems closely related to the phenomenon of ‘symbolic violence’, where persons of power can objectify and dehumanise groups of people in such a way that the dehumanising is systematically reproduced in the culture as a legitimate prejudice. For the Norwegian CBOW r, the symbolic violence could be summed up with one expression: ‘German brats’ (tyskerunger)[1].

Read more about symbolic violence in the text “Prejudice and symbolic violence” in the library.

Sociologist and philosopher Denise Ferreira Da Silva also refers to symbolic violence when she addresses the deep-rooted racism against Black people in “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics” (Da Silva 2014). She looks at the historical background of the ‘Category of Blackness’, and demonstrates how the value of the contribution of Black people has systematically been under-reported and hidden. Her conclusion is that the world’s current way of thinking and knowing is based on the idea of subject and object, and is inherently racist[2].

“My point is that the known and knowable World and our critical intellectual tools modelled after the Category of Blackness consistently reproduce the effects of efficient causality. Stuck in the always already there (of) Thought – as reproduced in concepts and categories – where the Category of Blackness (like other social categories), because it refigures formalizations (as laws, calculations or measurements) arrests Blackness’s creative potential (that which slavery has never been able to destruct), boycotting the impact of the exposure of violence (symbolic and total), which is, as Barbara Christian has engaged so brilliantly, the Black Feminist Citic’s recurrent task. (Da Silva 2014, 84)

The depressing conclusion for the ‘othered’, whether belonging to the category of Blackness, of non-Western peoples or the CBOW, is that the othering is ingrained in the way we think, that silencing is perpetuated through epistemic violence, and suffering through symbolic violence.

Unwriting the subject-object binary

Although Adorno describes us as being imprisoned by the consequences of the subject-object binary, he still tries to imagine an alternative. He calls it a ‘state of peace’ for thinking and knowledge:

“The present concept is so shameful because it betrays what is best – the potential for agreement between human beings and things – to the idea of imparting information between subjects according to the exigencies of subjective reason. In its proper place, even epistemologically, the relationship of subject and object would lie in a peace achieved between human beings as well as between them and their Other. Peace is the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other.” (Adorno 1998, 247)

Da Silva does not agree with this – that it is possible to remove the Category of Blackness from the ways in which we think. She describes a racism that is self-perpetuating, even when the historical background is more or less forgotten. It cannot be removed:

“Emancipating Blackness from the World, then, requires that knowing and doing be emancipated from Thought, unhinged from the many ways in which Thought – the said seat of the universal – is limited, constrained and arrested by Truth.”(Da Silva 2014, 86)

Nothing less than a new way of thinking and knowing is needed, and she does not think that an evolution of today’s philosophy of knowing will suffice:

“For what I am highlighting here is the fact that categorization functions in an ontological context governed by Time. That is, while I agree with Sylvia Wynter in that the task involves ‘unwriting of our present normative defining of the secular mode of the Subject’, I do not think that its effect, ‘the de-structuring of the principles of Sameness and Difference’ suffices. […] i find that the principle of Sameness and Difference in either its religious or biological formulation is an insufficient point of departure for the question of Blackness. For this reason, I am convinced that a radical departure, one that does not stop at the critique of the formal table of sameness and difference, is in need.” (Da Silva 2014, 87-88)

She envisions an “End of the World as we know it” (Da Silva 2014, 84). In her search for a new world and way of thinking, she turns to art. It is in the literature of Octavia Butler that she finds what she calls “a description of the existence as marked by virtuality: matter imagined as contingency and possibility rather than necessity and determinacy”(Da Silva 2014, 92). She uses the terms ‘transubstantiality’, ‘transversability’ and ‘traversability’ to describe fluent alternatives to static definitions.

“Note that these descriptors are not meant to name or determine something, which would be nothing more than a rehearsal of the moves of the philosophers of universal reason, in its historical and scientific stages. They are guides for the imagination.” (Da Silva 2014, 94)

She describes the three terms as follows: “[…] transversability assumes the existence of lines that run parallel but which can be transversed by another line – which might as well be an indentation in space-time, […] traversability, the moving back and forth to different points in time”, and transubstantiality as breaking “through the formal lines of space inscribed by our categories (of body, of species, of genus)”(Da Silva 2014, 94). She looks for the transgressing that is not limited by either categories, time or space.

Reading the ambiguous

Da Silva finds these transgressing, non-defined elements in her reading of Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel. Her reading is consistent with the post-structuralist school of ‘reader response’ theory, where the meaning of a text is formed by the reader’s interpretation. The author’s intentions are not relevant, and the meaning of the text will differ for all readers, depending on their background and contexts. A text is thus a ‘guide for the imagination’ instead of a defining truth. Rimmon-Kenan describes reading as:

“[…] a continuous process of forming hypotheses, reinforcing them, developing them, modifying them, and sometimes replacing them by others or dropping them altogether […] But sometimes the reader closes a book without a definitive solution. This may be caused by the co-existence of a few ‘finalized’ hypotheses which either complement each other in some way (multiple meaning) or mutually exclude each other without providing grounds for deciding between them (narrative ambiguity).” (Rimmon-Kenan 1983, 121)

This describes a process where the use of language does not end in a definition imposed by a defining subject, but is instead a process where an author is opening up a space for potential meanings and a process where the reader gets to look for a meaning.

Creating room for thoughts

It is encouraging that Adorno and Da Silva point out potential directions for understanding beyond the problematic concepts of subject and object. This might lead to ways of unwriting objectification and communication without domination.

Da Silva finds hope in the ambiguous space that is created in the act of reading literature – in reading art. Other forms of artistic expression are examples of communication without the use of verbal or written language. The focus of the reader response theory on the active reader resembles ideas about the appreciation of art. Ingar Brinck describes the aesthetic experience as “enacted and skilful, based in the recognition of others’ experiences as distinct from one’s own”. She sees it as an active process of sense-making:

“The dynamic approach aims to explain the emergence of aesthetic experience in terms of the reciprocal interaction between viewer and artwork. I argue that aesthetic experience emerges by participatory sense-making and revolves around movement as a means for creating meaning.” (Brinck 2018, 201)

Hopefully, art’s power to create experiences beyond words and logic can lead to the discovery of new modes of thinking that can make us more compassionate and less judgemental.

Read more about art, interpretation and emotion in the text “Empathy and Simulation” in the library.

Based on the thoughts discussed in this text, hope for an unwriting of dehumanisation can be found in the use of art and the creation of material that invites readers to actively engage and reflect in order to find their meanings in the ambiguous space created by the artwork – replacing definition with inspiration.