#nijah cunningham

[ahistoryofanxietyandanxietyand]

This moralization is enacted through a performance of vulnerability in which “Blue Lives Matter” translates a disparate array of actions, feelings, utterances, mindsets, opinions, and fantasies into a homogenous field of negative sentiments towards the police: Protest is transformed into a sign of aggression, congregating on the street into a riotous threat, self-preservation into resisting arrest. As a result, a wide range of emotive forces and entire social worlds are perceived as forms of terror directed towards the police.

from Blue Life by Tiana Reid&Nijah Cunningham

[unusualmodesofresistance]

Blue life is not a personhood but rather a spectral legal identity that mimics vulnerability. Blue life is no more than a figuration. Blue life effectively obscures the violent operations of police power by attempting to give it flesh. Blue life is the byproduct of a spirit possession ritual in which the formless authority of police power momentarily inhabits the body and poses as a form of life. Blue life is always under threat but can never perish. Blue life is what you get when you confuse a job for a social existence, an occupational hazard for an ontological crisis. Even more, it creates an equivalence between two disparate “sides” that are in fact not sides at all. It is impossible to inhabit the “I” of blue life. No one can be on the side of blue life. It is merely a conceit that simulates a threat in order to justify the expansion of state power.

from Blue Life by Tiana Reid&Nijah Cunningham

[unusualmodesofresistance]

We also know that the police do not simply enforce the law. The police protect the state’s monopoly on violence and establish the parameters of legitimate uses of force. This double operation is the paradox of police violence: it simultaneously affirms the rule of law and exercises the authority to act outside of the legal framework. The peculiar institution of policing is endowed with a “formless” power that conceals the state’s impotence. Like a ghost that seeks out the unruly, the police are an extralegal force.

from Blue Life by Tiana Reid&Nijah Cunningham

[unusualmodesofresistance]

The people that hurt understand that there is something to believe in buried beneath the fabrications of hate that surround blue life. The darkness that puts the apocryphal matter of blue life on edge and keeps it up at night is where we find our hope. Blue life is afraid of darkness because the dark anticipates the coming of a new day that has yet to arrive.

from Blue Life by Tiana Reid&Nijah Cunningham

[unusualmodesofresistance]

“Blue Lives Matter” is, fundamentally, a moral claim that conjures an ever-present threat “out there.” It fabricates a hatred of the police that somehow supersedes the violence and terror that the police state injects into everyday life. This moralization is enacted through a performance of vulnerability in which “Blue Lives Matter” translates a disparate array of actions, feelings, utterances, mindsets, opinions, and fantasies into a homogenous field of negative sentiments towards the police: Protest is transformed into a sign of aggression, congregating on the street into a riotous threat, self-preservation into resisting arrest. As a result, a wide range of emotive forces and entire social worlds are perceived as forms of terror directed towards the police.

from Blue Life by Tiana Reid&Nijah Cunningham

[unusualmodesofresistance]

We also know that the police do not simply enforce the law. The police protect the state’s monopoly on violence and establish the parameters of legitimate uses of force. This double operation is the paradox of police violence: it simultaneously affirms the rule of law and exercises the authority to act outside of the legal framework. The peculiar institution of policing is endowed with a “formless” power that conceals the state’s impotence. Like a ghost that seeks out the unruly, the police are an extralegal force.

Blue Life by Tiana Reid&Nijah Cunninghman

[ahistoryofanxietyandanxietyand]

Blue life is not a personhood but rather a spectral legal identity that mimics vulnerability. Blue life is no more than a figuration. Blue life effectively obscures the violent operations of police power by attempting to give it flesh. Blue life is the byproduct of a spirit possession ritual in which the formless authority of police power momentarily inhabits the body and poses as a form of life. Blue life is always under threat but can never perish. Blue life is what you get when you confuse a job for a social existence, an occupational hazard for an ontological crisis. Even more, it creates an equivalence between two disparate “sides” that are in fact not sides at all. It is impossible to inhabit the “I” of blue life. No one can be on the side of blue life. It is merely a conceit that simulates a threat in order to justify the expansion of state power.

from Blue Life by Tiana Reid&Nijah Cunningham

[unusualmodesofresistance]

Whether or not such a conspiracy exists, the idea of individuals working in concert to terrorize and attack the police would be unimaginable without the performative labor that “Blue Lives Matter” enables. Under the brush of “Blue Lives Matter,” grievances before (and beyond) the law lose all distinction. We know that Christopher Dorner’s machismo is not the same as Korryn Gaines’s armed self-defense, nor is that the same as Valerie Castile’s prophetic rage. But the law must mistranslate everything into hate.

from Blue Life by Tiana Reid&Nijah Cunningham