In July of 2016, a grad student at York University submitted a paper (possibly his Master's Thesis) with the title Cacophonous Settler Grounded Normativity: Interrelationality with the More-Than-Human World as a Path for Decolonial Transformation. Benjamin Kapron is a settler student of the Indigenous theorists that developed Grounded Normativity (which we will expand on later), and in a little over a hundred pages he laid out his thoughts for more appropriate and more effective settler engagement in decolonization. Kapron notes that although "adhering to settler grounded normativity does not, itself, transform the settler/Indigenous relationship; it does not decolonize," he sees settler grounded normativity as "predominantly a path for becoming 'post-settler," as a tool or tactic to help stop imagining a "settler future."
After a thorough review of this paper (definitely longer than seven and a half minutes) we have to say there's very little to criticize in Kapron's work. It's even tempting to say that the only noticeable problem with the work is that it doesn't go far enough. Kapron explicitly states that settler grounded normativity (as he describes it) "is not a path to decolonization in the sense of a strategy to challenge the settler state". So let's get to work on building one that can do just that. If Ben Kapron's Cacophonous Settler Grounded Normativity is a fire under one or more settler structures, this article is looking to pour gasoline on that fire. For some reason most of the gasoline on hand is of some French ultra-left variety.
Dear Settler, before you can learn to step out from underneath the settler state and cast its burning ruins into the sea, you have to be able to see just how deeply embedded in it you are, how embedded it is in you. To talk of the ways that capitalism and Empire mobilize identities (white, Christian, man/woman, middle class, American) to shape us into willing subjects, into participating in our own exploitation - that would only be the beginning. Capitalism's hooks go much deeper than identity, much deeper than "psychology." As if the microplastics in my fucking gray matter weren't too on the nose of a metaphor already, there is now a physical, a neurological component to the control that capitalism and Empire can exert over us. Billions of dollars are spent learning how to shift us into different emotional states, into deadening our reactions to certain kinds of stimulus but responding more intensely to others, into defining and valorizing particular ways of framing what we experience, and therefore how we understand it.
There are two concepts, two figures of humanity under late capitalism that we must borrow from the French-Italian collective Tiqqun (the Bloom and the Young-Girl), as well as another that must be fabricated on the spot out of already existing parts (the Fodder). Much has been written about the Bloom, but only a little will be written here. It's needed mostly as a stepping stone for understanding the real stars of the show. Bloom is almost anyone, but also no one, no-thing. Bloom is a concept for understanding what has happened to human subjectivity under Capitalism. The Bloom is somewhat miserable, possibly more isolated than words can describe, even when surrounded by friends and family. Bloom is an empty vortex, a maelstrom of indifference. The Bloom is at least somewhat aware of its alienation, but spends a great deal of its time trying to avoid that feeling. Bloom is not a distinct human subject, all of us carry at least a little Bloom, but some of us are more defined by it than others. If capitalism is an eldritch horror of flesh, claws, and tentacles grasping parasitically on the surface of the Earth, Bloom is somewhere along the surface of that horror. It is "on the edge" of capitalism and Empire but still firmly a part of them - as a subject Bloom is difficult for the forces of capital to change very drastically, but not impossible. The real terror is what's happening closer to the center of those systems, as well as what lies beneath them along the surface of the Earth.
The Young-Girl as a concept is perhaps poorly named, but not named without reason. Young, "because adolescence is the period of time with none but a consumptive relation to civil society," and Girl, "because it is the sphere of reproduction," over which women still reign, "that must be colonized" by Capital. The Young-Girl is a Bloom which has been sharpened into one of capitalism's finest weapons. It is the product of a civilization that has permitted generations of children to be the targets of an increasingly ravenous and unforgiving market – permitted capitalism to begin to shape our development before we had even an inkling of self-awareness. "The Young Girl is not always young and, increasingly, not even a girl. She is but the figure of total integration into a disintegrating social whole." The Young-Girl is an omen of disaster, at once a tyrant but a tyrant we would give almost anything to serve. She is the figure of permissive authority which Foucault tried to warn us of at length. The Young-Girl wants nothing for herself (nothing that she can articulate anyways), beyond to increase her own power, her own value, through the sale or consumption of her own body. The Young-Girl is not simply a figure, a "metaphor" for people adapted to living within capitalism, it is a core part of the infrastructure of Empire. Not only is it Human-Capital embodied, the commodity which makes all other commodities possible, it has a specific role to play in the maintenance of Empire: the assimilation of other bodies into more Young-Girls, assimilation into that dreadful smugness of the Unthinking Majority. The Young-Girl may be the figure of assimilation into the logic of the market, but she excels at helping everyone around her to assimilate into all of the structures of colonialism, White Supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy. The Young-Girl will set upon a Bloom like God shaping Man in his own image, "because the Young-Girl is the living presence of everything that, humanely, wants our death. She is not only the purest product of the Spectacle, she is the plastic proof of our love for it. It is through her that we ourselves pursue our own perdition."
Every uncritically-White-person and every uncritical-settler is thus a Young-Girl, assuming it has not already stepped forward to assert itself as a goddamn fascist. It's your well-to-do uncle who compelled his daughter not to use her privilege to become a doctor in support of some impoverished country, which would have "wasted her potential". It's your grandmother who tried desperately to see you raised as a Catholic. It's your father who married a cop, and your grandfather that worked himself to death. The Young-Girl is any businessman that has successfully schmoozed up to his superiors and convinced them of his virility in business, who has some knack for convincing clients to part with their money for the promise of making more. It is a settler political party that can wash its sins in the river of "harm reduction," seducing some countless millions of settlers into forgetting the structural role they play in settler-colonial domination. The Young-Girl is the compulsion to live as if one were not aging, to live as if time were not passing. It is the insistence that "just trying to live one's life" should offer some kind of absolution while the planet is being burned for profit.
Tiqqun sketches out at least one more figure of Empire but does not necessarily name it as a concept. What we call the Fodder is none other than the Necropolitical Subject: the one who is excluded, whose death is of little to no consequence. Herman and Chomsky's "Unworthy Victim." The Palestinian, and also the vast majority of all people living outside the Imperial Core countries. But not you, Dear Bloom. You're actually not permitted to die, and a considerable amount of resources are dedicated to preventing you from meeting an untimely death - at least not until the invisible hand has had a fair bit of time to determine that you really are just too difficult to exploit. Then you too might be permitted to become Fodder.
With these figures of the Bloom, the Young-Girl, and the Fodder in hand, we should now have much less trouble understanding the gravity of our situation: "The present production apparatus is therefore, on the one hand, a gigantic machine for psychic and physical mobilization...a sorting machine that allocates survival to compliant subjectivities and rejects all 'problem individuals.'"
Given a bit more work, we may soon see a way to put an end to settler/Indigenous relations and begin to create something new. But some readers may want to take a break here and go check out the article on how voting isn't harm reduction if they haven't already, or on the infrastructures of White settler perception. Because this next part isn't fun to write and it's probably even less fun for some of you to read. Before we can move back into describing what Grounded Normativity and its settler variations are and could be, we need to make one more thing absolutely clear. Despite the Fodder's Being-Toward-Death, it too still has a specific function.
The Fodder, much like the Young-Girl, is much more than mere metaphor. These two sides of the same coin marked ASSIMILATE or ANNIHILATE are critical infrastructure to Empire, and we must sabotage every attempt at perpetuating them. Empire cannot function without the ability to hold people in conditions likely to cause their death, and to use the threat of similar treatment to mobilize countless others into serving it. This is not something you can remove by voting, or passing a law: it exists outside of written law in a space known as the State of Exception, but is also held and re-expressed physically in the bodies of settlers. The State of Exception is nothing less than the suspension of the normal rule of law, a suspension which the settler state (and liberal democracy in general) has always depended on, and a suspension that the state (and its comprador news media) is free to invoke because it has supreme authority in deciding what is and is not an emergency.
The continued production of human subjects as new Fodder for Empire has been allowed to persist thus far because settler bodies have been shaped by centuries of repetition to uphold this practice. Some settlers find joy in the Necropolitical, they support with their whole chest the liquidation of some Other in the name of “a right to self-defense.” But Empire doesn't need every settler's enthusiastic consent. From others all it requires is indifference and inaction. Enmity and apathy are not just feelings the settler is frequently submerged in but are also fuel and lubricant for a social machine that feeds on mass-death.
This Necropolitical drive, this pathological insistence that (settler) life can only come at the expense of another, at the expense of the Native, the Palestinian, the immigrant at the border wall, the protestor, the homeless - this is the heartbeat of settler civilization. “There is no ‘clash of civilizations’. There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the atmosphere…any strictly social contestation that refuses to see what we're facing is not the crisis of a society but the extinction of a civilization becomes an accomplice in its perpetuation…To decide for the death of civilization, then to work out how it will happen: only decision will rid us of the corpse.”
This drumbeat of death will not stop until you snuff it out: until you differentiate yourself from settlers by physically putting yourselves between the settler state and its Fodder, again and again, until the machinery has been stressed to its limit. “When power is in the gutter, it’s enough to walk over it.” In the words of Mario Savio who once uttered the very illiberal solution to university education being run as a business: "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
The part where we finally talk about what Grounded Normativity is:Kapron takes Glen Coulthard’s definition for Grounded Normativity from what may be its original inception in Red Skin, White Masks: “The theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land - a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms.”
Kapron intends to establish a settler counterpart to Grounded Normativity, and begins with a three part framework for what he believes is necessary to make the concept more accessible and understood:He notes that Indigenous theorists tend to take the second part as somewhat for granted. Rather than to grow up raised with an understanding of the interconnectedness of the world, to be a settler is to be raised with a relation to land and the world that is unrecognizable from this, and to embody this difference in everyday life. In the words of some of the same authors quoted so heavily further above: “What has congealed as an environment is a relationship to the world based on management, which is to say on estrangement.” The settler is “half-asleep and always ready to close its eyes on the war that rages all around it.” Settler Grounded Normativity is a project by settlers for the purpose of one day abolishing the settler, and giving birth to a new (and at the same time old) kind of human.
A considerable portion of this project is spent theorizing what it actually means to re-establish ethical relations with the more-than-human world, with not only nonhuman animals but with plants, water, earth, and sky. Kapron cites heavily a work called Thinking through animals : identity, difference, indistinction. We will summarize quickly the three kinds of ethics considered here as well as the direction Ben himself decides to go:
Identity:Seeing animals as deserving ethical consideration where they are shown to posses “logos” (rationality, and the capacities for language, consciousness, and subjectivity which may follow)
Difference:Extending ethical relations onto animals by nature of them being an Other. Capable of critiquing identity theories of ethics but not necessarily of disrupting human/nonhuman relations. Each animal’s “Otherness” is typically flattened into a singular, homogeneous difference, making it difficult to actually attend to each being’s particular needs.
Indistinction:The most promising school of thought that Kapron borrows from this work. Built on the understanding that human and nonhuman animals are not as fundamentally different as some of us would like to believe. This is the first conception for ethical relations that could actually disrupt the existing human/animal false dichotomy and force us to consider revolutionary ways of living with our nonhuman kin.
Cacophony:But Indistinction proves to be still not enough for Kapron. An ethics grounded in indistinction risks erasing certain differences that we cannot afford to forget yet, including the way (settler) humans have constructed an anthropocentric hierarchy over all other forms of life. Kapron borrows and further develops the concept of cacophony because it encourages a diversity of tactics and allows us to hold space for the understanding that some of us are more responsible for upholding white/settler domination than others. Cacophony also points to an important point that Ben Kapron seems to share with some of the French ultra-left theorists: that “revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance.”
Ben Kapron stresses that settlers are simply not capable of developing their own form of grounded normativity without engaging more with Indigenous ways of knowing, not in a vacuum or from a book but alongside actual Indigenous Peoples. And while it is important to note that settlers need ethical relations with Indigenous People, settlers also cannot permit themselves to become dependent on Indigenous People for every decision. Settler grounded normativity has to be a creative process, because it is the foundation for self-creation into something that one day will no longer be called “settler.” One of the long term goals of settler grounded normativity is to produce a new collective of humans who no longer maintain a strict separation between the sphere of nature that we “use” to support our own life and the sphere of nature which we hold as sacred. It is a decision not just to believe that water is life, or that the land as a system of relations is alive. It is a commitment to turn those beliefs into daily action. To be gentle with plants and animals, to look everywhere for new ways to live alongside them as our relatives and not as our subjects, to be able to look at a pill-bug or a worm as a striving, living being no less deserving of respect than ourselves.
If you have enough background knowledge and already have relationships with people Indigenous to the lands you live in, you could start practicing Kapron's vision for settler grounded normativity right now. But to establish a form of settler grounded normativity that is capable of directly challenging the settler state and associated settler structures? This "unsettled" grounded normativity will require you to "put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels" of the settler state. A truly “unsettled” grounded normativity would seek to encourage a cacophony of voices not only for the building of nondominating and nonhierarchical relations, but also to actively tear apart systems which harm the interconnectedness that we now hold sacred.