Theoretical Living

[theoreticalliving]

Posing Questions in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You

Necessary spoilers below

Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You will likely be compared to Jordan Peele’s Get Out as the must-see satire/horror story of contemporary (Black) American life this year. Certainly both films have in common, beyond their genre bonafides, rumination on the commodification and labor of Black life and the compromises upwardly-mobile Black men make under White supremacist racial capitalism. Yet whereas Get Out was more invested in the psychic labor Blackness does for Whites and only obliquely alluded to the politics of labor, Sorry to Bother You directly attacks the question of (Black) inequality and labor struggles under racial capitalism. Yet while a politics of labor is what is most immediately attractive about the film, I think ultimately the film shows that the resistance that comes from a labor politics is wholly insufficient for actually challenging racial capitalism, and in this may be directly addressing pertinent questions on the Left.

Drawing on the film criticism ofFrank Wilderson, he argues that power to pose the question is the greatest power of all” (viiii), and that in the 60’s and 70’s a series of Black filmmakers did precisely that, motivated by the Black Power movement, Watts Rebellion, and Black Liberation Army to directly address the possibilities and costs of Black people on the move towards freedom. Certainly Riley could be seen to be motivated by contemporary concerns in the questions the film poses. Only a couple fantastical twists truly separate his Oakland from the nightmarish caste society of the Bay Area. He also depicts a vibrant political movement of union organizers, black-clad anarchists and DIY-artists, and the requisite police violence and repression they confront. Yet Wilderson also argues that there is a difference between the question of the Worker—alienated by labor yet positioned within civil society—and the question of the Slave whose exclusion forms the very possibility of the world—while the Slave labors they are fundamentally defined by their openness to gratuitous violence, fungibility, and natal alienation. Where the Worker wants to overthrow capital, the Slave wants to destroy the world itself, and it is only the “ruse of analogy” that depicts the question of the Slave as the same as the question of the Worker.

So despite Cassius’s presence as a Black man, alongside other Black co-workers, much of the film poses the question of the Worker. Cassius is forced to sell his labor to survive, he feels alienated from any potential life possibilities—see his constant concerns about who will remember him—and survival under capitalism forces him to become estranged from his loves ones and culture, to adopt the eponymous White Voice that sells access and power to the world. Then there is the mega-company and capitalist villain of the movie WorryFree, who force workers into lifetime contracts in return for food and shelter. Within the movie itself this is critiqued as a return to slavery, yet curiously most of the workers depicted are White. We should also remember from Wilderson that  while the Slave performs labor they are not defined by it. Slavery itself was not a contract but pure violence and extraction. It is also striking that we see repeated signs that complete families can join WorryFree, as it at least points to the maintenance of a family structure under extreme labor exploitation that was not true of slavery. So while WorryFree is the satirical endgame of the Worker’s alienation and exploitation under capitalism, it is not the same as being a Slave.

Why does this matter politically? Because within the film a politics of labor organized around the Worker ultimately appears wholly inadequate to the problem of racial capitalism. The organizer Squeeze attempts to form a union at Cassius’s telemarketing company Regal Wave, and the conflict of the film initially comes from Cassius being a scab and betraying his fellow workers. Yet there is never a culmination to this union plot line: we do not see the moment of victory, one of the activists who strikes Cassius with a soda can sells out to get her own TV endorsements, and at the (pseudo) end of the film Cassius plans to go back to work at the company. The character who would be the viewer’s locus of Leftist identification, the Asian-American Squeeze, appears competent but equally as interested in his sexual pursuit of Detroit than meaningfully challenging capital. There are repeated scenes of workers striking outside the premise, but they appear cyclical, another example of labor spinning its wheels without purpose or catalyst to a qualitatively different stage of struggle.

This is where the twist of the film occurs (one I was not prepared for at all) and swerves towards the position of the Slave and the radicality borne from the question of the Slave. WorryFree is literally turning humans into horse-humans, or equi-sapians, to replace its own workforce with the promise of being stronger, more productive, and more obedient. While again equi-sapians are made for the purpose of labor, that is not how they are defined for the viewer. Their being is open to gratuitous violence, as we first see one screaming in pain and begging for help, they are fungible in that they cross the threshold of both the Human and Blackness, and there is an implied degree of natal alienation or at least exaggerated and aberrant sexuality (through the jock of the benefits of having a horse penis). Yet where the equi-sapians appear as victims initially, in the climax of the film they appear as themselves the subjects of politics through the only action that could be meaningfully possible, the rejection and destruction of racial capitalism. As the strikers attempt to keep out the scabs, only to be violently beaten down by the police, it is the equi-sapians—freed by a changed-of-heart Cassius—who appear to fight off the police with their enhanced strength. Not a workers strike but the specter of a Slave revolt is what appears as a decisive blow against capital. While the scene ends with a declaration of solidarity between the workings and the equi-sapians, there is a striking difference of capacity between them.

This is reinforced through the bait-and-switch ending. Cassius, who initially appeared to have harmlessly snorted coke, did actually take the equi-sapian drug and begins to transform. The film cuts off here and goes to credits, yet cuts again to WorryFree CEO Steve Lift’s house, where the newly equi-sapian Cassius appears leading an army(?) of his fellow equi-sapians to invade the house, where the film then cuts to credits without showing the implied violence against the CEO after his door is broken down. Perhaps they do find a cure, or perhaps they merely kill the CEO. Yet whereas the Regal Wave strike stayed at the workplace and was ineffectual until the appearance of the equi-sapians, it is the equi-sapians who charge directly into the lair of capital, as embodied by the CEO.

I find another similarity here to the climax of Get Out, where the main character must also violently confront his White captors and literally kill them. Both films tarry with depicting Fanonian violence of overcoming White supremacist racial capitalism. This is not a gratuitous violence, as critics of Fanon often allege he endorsed, but simply the reversal of the violence imposed on the main characters. As oppression is maintained by the pure force of violence, its inversion is necessarily a violent upheaval. I don’t think its a coincidence that the revolt of the equi-sapians raises both the specter of the Slave revolt—as the creation of “complete disorder” as Fanon and Wilderson puts it—and of a revolt against the Human itself, as the originary differentiation that separates (White) Man from his others and opens the zone of fungibility that the Slave occupies. In some ways the equi-sapians are more Black than the actual Black characters we see on the screen, as both open to the gratuitous violence of the Slave but also enacting a gratuitous freedom that is more often associated with the eruption of Blackness on screen, as in 70’s films such as Bush Mama or The Spook Who Came in from the Cold, depictions of Black revolutionaries in movement.

This is all to say that while it is easy to see an insightful critique of contemporary capitalism in the film and a rumination on struggle against it—as prominent these days from post-Occupy activists to the DSA and Sandernistas—the question of the Worker is not what actually motivates radical change. It is the question of the Slave and the ensemble of gratuitous violence, gratuitous freedom, and complete disorder that portray the briefest glimmer of revolutionary change. It is the question not of anti-capitalism but of anti-Blackness and the end of the world.

A last note, certainly compared to Get Out’s well-oiled machine of cringe comedy and suspenseful horror, Riley has made a much more uneven film. The satire ranges from directly on the nose to overly broad, the romantic story between Cassius and Detroit mostly does not actually develop or change, and is used to reflect more on Cassius’s developments than Detroit. Detroit’s plot line is a satire of the art world that feels done before (though also a sign that Detroit has less room to critique Cassius than she admits). While certainly the Bechdel test is not the end all/be all of ethical film criticism, it is noticeable that the film fails it. A stinging, genre-infused satire for Black women remains to be made.

[theoreticalliving]

Star Trek’s Utopia in Process

At the beginning of Star Trek: Beyond Captain Kirk remarks that his ship's five-year journey has started to feel “episodic,” a comment that any Trekkie in the audience would immediately recognize as an in-joke to the famous five-year journey of The Original Series. Yet, in the context of the movie, this comment is meant as a serious reflection on the actual consequences of a five-year journey in deep space, of encounters with new aliens and planets that must inevitably be left to meet new ones, and so on and so on. This has Kirk asking the question that I do not think any Trek character has ever asked: is this all there is?

There is a consensus that modern Trek's relationship to The Original Series is to explore, question, and at some points even prove false the supposed utopianism of the original series. Where Gene Roddenberry imagined a future that was post-capitalist, post-racist, post-sexist and where humanity's energies could be devoted to exploring the stars and expanding human intelligence, modern Trek has tried to show the more realistic consequences of an all-powerful intergalactic federation whose sole aim is to bring other planets into its sphere of influence. Deep Space Nine took these influences to their darkest: characters openly described the Federation as an imperialist superpower, the covert Section 31 tried to commit genocide on a whole (fascistic) alien species, Starfleet officers routinely engaged in at best ambiguous and at worst criminal actions, and an intergalactic war cost millions of lives and devastated countless worlds and civilizations. The Movie Universe has also engaged in such critiques. After all, the real villain of Into Darkness is not Khan as another genocidal and genetically-enhanced warlord but Starfleet Admiral Marcus, who intentionally freed Khan for Section 31 as part of an elaborate gambit to bait the Klingon empire into a war.

Yet Beyond takes a step back from all this, and in that way feels more genuinely like Star Trek than the two previous movies. Beyond seems to accept that at a certain level the Federation is a utopia. The whole sequence of the Enterprise entering the deep space base Yorktown, an elaborate series of ring worlds linked with each other, is the first movie scene that has genuinely awed me in a long time and made me think that this is a future worth fighting for. That's why it's interesting to step back and ask the question—not the one that says every utopia is inevitability a dystopia—but what exactly is utopia for? From our present standpoint, the utopia of the Federation feels as far away as it's ever been, but it's worth also imagining that if we could have the future of full communism what would drive people then?

Other Star Trek series have never quite asked the question this directly as far as I can recall; it has most often arisen just in the narrative fact that there needs to be some conflict to drive a show. The final encounter between Picard and Q in The Next Generation gave a more hopeful answer to this question, arguing that even the utopia of the Federation was itself only a prelude to real “history” as it were. The real journey of Humanity would not be exploring the stars but exploring the infinities of time and space, ultimately to become cosmic beings like the Q themselves. In its usual characterization Deep Space Nine gives a darker answer in the case of Julian Bashir. While we are given precious little details about how the Federation's post-capitalism works, it seems pretty apparent that it most often functions as a giant meritocracy. People have all of their needs fulfilled and are pushed to become the very best versions of themselves, but there is still endless sorting and ranking upon which psychic rewards rest. The character Julian Bashir, the resident doctor of Deep Space Nine, was born with some unspecified learning defect that made him “slower” than others. There is no hint that this would have caused him to lead a materially unprivileged life, but his parents could not handle the shame and so get illegal genetic enhancements for Bashir that, in his own words, killed the past version of him. There's also the subtext that Bashir's father is a “failure” in life, floating from what job to another, yet again with no evidence of materially suffering from this. DS9 spends more time reflecting on how Bashir feels about his enhancements, but it's also worth asking what kind of society that is a material utopia could still drive parents to engage in incredibly dangerous medical procedures for their child just so they are not “left behind.”

Returning to Beyond, at first glance the villain Krall looks like a retread of Khan/Marcus. The alien is actually a Starfleet Captain from an Enterprise-era ship, the Franklin, that was lost in a wormhole and crash landed on an isolated planet. Krall has used alien technology to prolong his life and now wants to strike back at the Federation for abandoning him and his crew. Yet Krall's full background raises more questions about his exact motivations and hatred of the Federation. Krall started his career in the pre-Federation union of planets that was created at the end of ENT as a MACO, or essentially space marine, who fought in the apparently violent Xindi and Romulan wars. With the birth of the Federation and its ethos of peace though, his past as a warrior was now useless and he was given a starship and told to explore the stars, a task he never asked for or sought. Krall is an example then of what Raymond Williams calls a residual social formation, a warrior and military man in a society whose utopianism disavows both.

This raises an interesting question that we rarely ask in our desire for any future at all: what elements of  society now would survive into a post-capitalist one, which ones should or shouldn't, and whats the danger of those who would reject utopia, either out of hatred or boredom? In recently reviewing various Marxist social theorists of the 60's/70's, I am often struck by both their even-handed assessment of their historical moment and their affirmation that “actually existing socialism” did exist and could be improved. One the one hand they are much more critical of that era's bureaucratic and welfare-oriented social democracies than we, post-neoliberalism, are now; they fully recognized the violence inherent in these systems and the need to propose leftist solutions for them than allow these problems to be captured by the Right. Yet they also had a certain faith that the transformation of capitalism into something else was possible, through a combination of political power and policy transformations. They recognized then that socialism would not be a panacea but a process, and that even utopia could be improved.

After two action-filled hours, Beyond comes to a similar conclusion. Kirk is reaffirmed in his status as captain and his mission to explore the galaxy. Paraphrasing his words, he would rather die helping people than live in dignity having killed them, and that is a pretty good ethos for the Federation as utopia. We are still left with the questions of for what purpose is utopia, what will drive us even when our material needs are all met, and what forms of utopia will still create conflict and loss. It certainly is not perfect, but the desire to improve is one small way of preventing a full slippage into dystopia. No utopia is complete, but that does not mean it is an automatic failure. I agree with Gerry Canavan, to a degree, that the Movie series has probably worked itself into a deadend, at least in the eyes of its creators, but Beyond has left me with the feeling that these finally are characters I would like to see again and that the greatest story of Star Trek that still needs to be told is the transformation and the development of the Federation itself, as a utopia in progress. Maybe the forthcoming Star Trek: Discovery will do that, but given that it will be streaming on CBS's own app it's clear that the present is still pretty dark.

[theoreticalliving]

Whither the Party

As far as I can recall, the initial premise of the Sanders' campaign was that the System is definitely “rigged”. Hillary Clinton had the support of major donors, news media, Wall Street, and importantly the party apparatus, all of which would work to ensure her election. This analysis is rooted in a Marxist understanding of civil society and the State that, rather than being neutral arbiters, are themselves thoroughly infused by the bourgeoisie, or in Sanders' terms the 1%, and dedicated to the reproduction of class rule. Sanders' campaign then would basically be a protest against this structure and attempt to highlight issues that were structurally sidelined.

Of course, the funny thing was that Sanders started winning a lot more primaries than even a protest campaign should have been able. Sanders' complaints about a “rigged” system started to sound hollow when he seemed to be doing fine within it. This isn't to say that the system wasn't “rigged”. After all Sanders' still got significantly little media coverage and endorsements from party apparatchik and other wielders of power. Sanders' success then raised the specter of a proper social democratic campaign instead of just a protest one, where the Sanders “revolution” would properly seize control of State power and smash the capitalist State apparatus, though I believe that even for his label as a social democrat Sanders never went this far in describing his revolution.

In the end Sanders did not win, most likely from a combination of structural factors his campaign initially identified and its own failure to really outreach to African-American voters in the South. Despite claims by prominent African-American leftists who endorsed Sanders and argued that his class-based politics was perfectly compatible with racial justice, the organizational decision to write off the South was catastrophic and gave Clinton a buffer of delegates that Sanders could not overcome. This is all before the question of superdelegates, which for all of the ink spilled on the issue are irrelevant purely for the fact that Sanders never won even enough regular delegates to put him over Clinton.

This leads us to the issue on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, which is meant to portray party unity, where an email leak shows that, lo and behold, the Sanders campaign was right all along and indeed the DNC did privilege the Clinton campaign against Sanders, including the chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schulz who has been forced to resign over the issue (though it’s up for debate how much the rhetorical privileging of DNC officials for Clinton translated into material rigging against Sanders).

One way of responding to this disclosure is to return to the Sanders campaign's original understanding of the Democratic Party as one element in a class structure fundamentally designed to reproduce class power, and on the basis of that analysis produce a critique of the Democratic Party for its class allegiance to the 1% and forward a strategy for either taking it over or developing other bastions of working class power against the party apparatus and ultimately the State that supports it. Certainly some Sanders supporters will put forward this program (I expect to see an opinion on the Jacobin at any moment).

Yet among other Sanders supporters, I see absolute shock that the DNC was corrupt the whole time—even if this assumption of corruption was one of the main axioms of the whole campaign—and arguments that the party should be made properly “neutral” and never interfere in campaigns. However, this argument reproduces a dangerous logic of the liberal State that leaves any Sanders program bereft of an analysis of power in politics. This argument is based on the idea, one of who's progenitors is Hegel, that the State is a neutral and rational container of civil society relations. Individuals and groups, in their roles as private citizens, may compete among themselves for various rewards and advantages, but before the State they are all equal and the State will be the decider of last resort. To call for a perfectly neutral party is just to reproduce the State in miniature.

Yet, as generations of Marxist theorists have told us, the State is never either rational or neutral, but always dominated by a particular class with its own class interests that it seeks to reproduce through state power. In the same way parties serve to reproduce this state of affairs. They nominate and privilege some candidates over others, they privilege some issues over others, and interact differently with different constituencies. It was on this analysis that the first working-class parties established themselves, precisely because of the need for a working-class party that stood apart from, but related to, the dominant class structure. No party or State that ever proclaims itself neutral will serve the interests or power of the oppressed, precisely because neutrality is another weapon that the powerful deploy.

If Bernie Sanders wants to come out now, after all these revelations, and say that the DNC is corrupt and so his supporters should organize to take it over, that's fine. If he says that the DNC is unreformable that's also fine. Both are strategies, despite the pro's and cons involved, rooted in an analysis of class structure and power. But to say that the main problem with the DNC is that it's not neutral enough should never be the answer.

On a final note, much was made earlier in the primaries of the political science book The Party Decides and the failure it seemed for the parties to actually decide this election. Indeed, the Republican Party failed to decide and that has given us the threat of vulgar fascism, while by all evidence the Democratic Party did decide and that has produced an outcry against the party as a structure of power and decision itself. Lest we collapse and dismiss a couple centuries worth of reflecting on the party in Leftist thought, perhaps it is time to return to those debates about the party form and democratic centralism, of taking over the State versus dismantling it, and in the light of Occupy and other horizontal-organizing reflect on exactly what kind of power a “revolution” wants and the structure and organization proper to it.

[theoreticalliving]

between the world, against the world, end of the world

Much of the critical reaction to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me responds to its apparent rejection of what Cornel West calls the Black Prophetic tradition, or perhaps what James Cone would call the Black theology of liberation. Coates is an avowed atheist, though for reasons I would outline below I think it would be better to call him a materialist, who disavows any belief in a God who will ultimately bring redemption for black suffering. Against Marcus Garvey’s wishes, Coates sees no promised “return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of the Middle Passage undead.” Though he does not state it in the book it seems clear that for Coates suffering is not redemptive; it merely is. This disturbs many of Coates’ readers, particularly his white ones, who want something good to come out of all the destruction that whiteness has wrought--the many thousands gone as Toni Morrison says--but there is no messiah here to placate white guilt. Whiteness has made itself off of the horror of black bodies and it is the only thing that can destroy itself, whether intentionally or not however is Coates’ open question.

Given his rejection of God and his detournement of James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, suffused with its own Christian themes, critics immediately jump to labeling Coates’ an atheist. Yet I think the worldview we get in this book is slightly different and a bit richer than simply not believing in God. In the deepest sense Coates’ world is materialistic; there is more than one reason that Coates’ calls those people who think they are white “Dreamers.” Coates describes a world of bodies, themselves made of flesh and bone and blood, but also ephemeral bodies. Life only flashes up for a moment in time through an unlikely series of random accidents and contingencies, which makes the tragedy of black life all the greater for the callousness in which whiteness snuffs out even the briefest moment of light. As he writes, “I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us--Christians, Muslims, atheists--lived in fear of this truth.” Instead of this singularity of the body leading to a callous disregard for live or nihilism, as theists often want to argue, it is because “the spirit and soul are the body and brain” that life is so precious for Coates.

Much of the book describes Coates’ lifelong journey to see the world as it “really” is, beyond ideologies and fantasies generated by both whiteness and blackness. Indeed this endless struggle by Coates to see the world has been described by critics as Coates attempt to be realistic, to describe American race relations beyond liberal pieties and white guilt. Indeed Coates strives for a kind of realism throughout the book, but I think more importantly this realism will often slip, without a moment's notice, into a horror of reality. For no doubt that the story Coates tells here is also a horror story, the greatest horror story that has been going on for 500 years and more. Horror occurs on Coates’ childhood playground, when another kid inexplicably pulls out a gun and just as randomly doesn’t shoot. As Coates writes, “I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog.” Horror occurs when Coates’ Howard University classmate Prince Jones is chased across three states and gunned down by a corrupt cop taking on the implacable role of the Terminator or Frankenstein’s Monster. Horror coincides with the history of African-Americans, from the Middle Passage to the slave plantation, through the Civil War and lynch mobs and the carceral continuum.

In her book Horrorism Adriana Cavarero describes the title as referring to the subjects of violence who experience the world in horror rather than those who inflict terror on others. The experience of horror breaks down the boundaries of the human ego that separates itself from the world. Horror “aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body, tearing at its constitutive vulnerability. What is at stake is not the end of a human life but the human condition itself, as incarnated in the singularity of vulnerable bodies.” Elaine Scarry in her great work on torture will similarly describe the valence of pain as world-destroying. What is at stake in pain is “the making and unmaking of the world” for pain destroys “all aspects of self and world.” Pain, and particularly pain of the body, collapses the distinction between being in the world and being of the world. Or as the early Emmanuel Levinas would put it, the collapse of the unique existent into the anonymous realm of existence, where being itself is horror in its inescapability. Coates’ describes such a horror when he is frozen before the boy’s gun, unable to escape his body in that moment where it faces death, or in the black body that cannot escape its blackness in the eyes of the police. In horror’s description of the tenuous claim our bodies have to subjecthood, and the always inherent danger slipping back into the horror of the “pure” being of the body, it also speaks to Coates’ concern with black people’s attempt to gain a foothold on humanity in a white supremacist society that would only see them as bodies.

Horror is a condition of reality precisely because, from the horrorist point of view of the victim, the eldritch abomination of whiteness stalks the world; a horror that the Dreamers deny. In this sense Coates then also carries some unlikely resonances with the 20th century’s most prominent horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was also an avowed materialist, believing purely in a world of atoms chaotically colliding across the void. Even his monsters are material, if necessarily obeying laws of physics completely alien to our limited human perspective. He also often describes a certain desire to see the world “realistically,”as it is in the Kantian in-itself, yet for Lovecraft’s protagonists such a quest could only end in madness, given his seamless alignment of horror and reality. Reality is horror for Lovecraft, yet not because of implacable violence but because of its innate resistance to cognitive comprehension. Lovecraft was also something of a Dreamer then, if only a dreamer of nightmares. When black bodies appear in Lovecraft’s fictions they always already point to aberration, madness, death. Blackness is a sign of greater cosmic evils, ironically through their hideous presence (Lovecraft’s letters are quite vocal on his disdain for even seeing African-Americans in public) pointing to the supposedly greater horror of nothingness. Yet this nothingness is still another kind of Dream, hiding the true abomination of Whiteness that structures Lovecraft’s universe.

Coates does identify horror in the world, but it is not unknowable; along with his rejection of theistic platitudes there is also the rejection of a theodicy of evil that even Lovecraft maintains in his atheism. Horror can be precisely traced, through bodies and circumstances and histories of plunder. This is what it means to see the world “realistically,” to trace out the genealogy of its formation. This is what Coates calls the Struggle, the project that is left behind after the Death of God and Evil. At the end of the book Coates’ urges his son to struggle, “Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name.” Yet he also warns “do not struggle for the Dreamers,” for it is their own task to wake up, see reality, and begin their own struggle. This struggle is crucially important to the fate of the world itself. In a surprising turn at the end of the book Coates’ directly connects white supremacy and its plundering to climate change and the Anthropocene. In Whiteness’ desire for plunder it has plundered “not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself.” White people’s desire birthed the Anthropocene through globalized networks of cotton production to the flight to the suburbs spurred by cheap gasoline that is “the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.”

In the title Between the World and Me, drawn from a Richard Wright poem that is also the epigraph to the book, Coates’ conjures an image of Whiteness as blocking access to the World. It is Whiteness as its own World that must be struggled against in the name of a different World. Yet at the end of the book Coates’ has no pretension that this World is itself a place of “home” and unproblematic comfort. He writes, “The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us.” Here he comes close to Eugene Thacker’s description of a World-Without-Us, the radical idea of a world absent humans, a world that indeed exists solely for itself absent any concern for the birth of our species or our inevitable extinction. Yet describing the World-Without-Us also inevitably means discussing the end of “our” World that turns into one Without-Us. In a rare prophetic moment--and channeling Baldwin--Coates writes that the vengeance of the Earth is “not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky….Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas.” The true horror of Whiteness is not just its plunder of black bodies but also of the World and so inviting its own end that unfortunately its victims will also not escape. This is the nightmare that needs to waken up the Dreamers, for even if they fail to become human for the sake of the black bodies they’ve plundered perhaps concern for their own fate will finally shock them. In the meantime the only thing to have faith in is the Struggle; the rest is horror.

[theoreticalliving]

Southern Horrors and The Unspeakable

The headline for today’s Charleston Post & Courier features in bold print “’The unspeakable has happened in our city,’” a line most likely spoken by long-time mayor Joe Riley. Such a line has already been used by many to describe the act of mass violence in Charleston. The “unspeakable” and its cognates—the unthinkable, the unnameable, the indescribable—all are used to paradoxically describe what seems to be beyond description. Such language points to the gratuitous nature of the violence inflicted and the singularity of its victims lives. How could any life cut short be summarized with fidelity? Yet that often does not seem to be the frame from which we hear about the “unspeakable” nature of this crime. Instead of disavowing authenticity, the “unspeakable” in this case, as employed by politicians and pundits and all with an investment in ignorance, acts more as a placeholder for explanation. These crimes are “unspeakable,” so how could we possibly explain them or understand why the shooter did what he did? This despite the fact that even within 24 hours we have written, photographic, and anecdotal evidence of the shooter’s racial animus and existence in an ecology of white supremacist influence. At this moment the “unspeakable” appears to describe an absence where the presence of racial violence in America becomes impossible to ignore.

It feels prescient now to remember that Toni Morrison titled her 1988 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which form the basis to her later book Playing in the Dark, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken.” Most directly Morrison uses that phrase to refer to “the ways in which the presence of Afro-Americans has shaped the choices, the language, the structure—the meaning of so much American literature. A search, in other words, for the ghost in the machine.” The ghost in the machine is more than just literary devices, however, and points the unacknowledged legacies of the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and the carceral continuum that continue to haunt America. In America it is abundantly clear that black suffering is unrepresentable in the world of Whiteness; that claims by African-Americans to personhood, humanity—to being itself—are denied and appear as nothing more than what Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman call “black noise.” Theorists of anti-blackness—like Jared Sexton, Frank B. Wilderson, Joy James, and Saidiya Hartman—have articulated how chattel slavery formed the figure of the Slave through general dishonor of personhood, gratuitous violence beyond mere exploitation of labor, and natal alienation through the denial of ancestors, kin, and progeny. Emancipation got ride of slavery, in the narrowest sense of the term, but not the Slave as a figure of the black body as non-being. The Slave continues to exist in the white imaginary in the after-lives of slavery, attaching to the victims of state and police violence.

           Over a hundred years ago Ida B. Wells documented the confluence of white violence directed at black bodies in the epidemic of Southern lynchings, another history that the Charleston shooter is a part of that most do not want to admit. In her two aptly named anti-lynching pamphlets Southern Horrors and A Red Record Wells set out to chart not only the ubiquity of lynching through statistics and well-sourced anecdotes but also to reveal the set of lies and myths around which lynching was popularly justified. This was not a simple task however. A Red Record opens by noting how the “student of American sociology” will note in 1894 the growing awareness of lynching as a phenomenon so common that “scenes of unusual brutality failed to have any visible effect upon the humane sentiments” of Americans. Immediately the problem is highlighted, of how to raise outrage against events that are so common as to become a new normal. Lynching becomes a moment where reality and horror, the ordinary and the spectacular, the speakable and the unspeakable, collide, in where reality itself is so horrifying that it cannot be conveyed and yet it must be. While Wells never seems to lose faith in her writing, her pamphlets are filled with this tension between describing a horror so as not to inure her audience to it but still to affect some change within them. Her first pamphlet Southern Horrors captures this dilemma well. Wells calls the pamphlet an “array of facts” that will hopefully stimulate action for justice, while Frederick Douglass more affectively describes reading the pamphlet as evoking “a scream of horror, shame and indignation.”

What exactly are the horrors that the title invokes and that provoked Douglass’s scream? First there is the horror of the violence inflicted on black bodies themselves, against men, women, and children as Wells documents. Then there is the white horror that lynching is done in the name of. The prevailing justification for lynching was that black men were sexually assaulting white women and for the Southern white man nothing so “fills the soul with horror, loathing and fury as the outraging of a white woman by a Negro” (let us not forget that the Charleston shooter claimed to also act in defense of white femininity). Wells spends much of her sociological analysis to debunk this horror, showing again and again how cases of alleged sexual assault were actually about punishing black men for having consensual relations with white women, often at the initiation of white women themselves. As Wells acerbically writes, “there are white women in the South who love the Afro-American's company even as there are white men notorious for their preference for Afro-American women.” Gender, sexuality, and horror collide as white men morph their fear of consensual inter-racial relationships into horrific sexual assaults, all the while disavowing their own horrific treatment of black women. These interpersonal relationships of fear, terror, and murder spiral out to encompass new horrors, to reveal a South “brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants” so that government and law itself are revealed as always at the hand for outraged mobs. The final horror Wells reflects upon is the hidden meaning behind all this violence. Not retaliation for sexual assaults against white women, as Wells debunks, or a simple breakdown in law and order in the South, but instead a concerted effort to reverse the gains made by African-Americans in the Reconstruction era. Horror itself becomes a political tactic, the spectacular violence of lynching serving as both a punishment and a warning for an African-American community attempting to maintain upward mobility.

Wells’ document is eerily and unfortunately prescient today, even before Charleston in the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Grey, Rekia Boyd and countless others. Her listing of episode after episode of violent murder invokes the latest list of names to come out of police victims of violence. Her breaking down of the myth of black criminality echoes attempts to debunk the apparent criminal signifiers of Trayvon Martin’s hoodie and Michael Brown’s facebook photos. She documents both the breakdown of the law in the face of racial vigilante violence and the unfortunate collusion of that same law with racial violence, as today’s police encounters and stand-your-ground laws also attribute to the continuing entanglement of the state and racist violence. Yet most importantly here Wells is also always working with, and working up to the point of, the problem of representing black suffering when the default assumption is that black suffering does not exist, where black people can never be the victims of crime but only its instigators.

Attempts to name the Charleston shooting as “unspeakable” are a part of this history of failing to name, whether intentionally or not, black suffering; it tries to dissociate the Charleston shooter from this larger context of racial violence that forms America. It is trying to say that there is no connection between the Charleston shooter and the cop who shot Walter Scott in North Charleston. It is to disavow that the Charleston shooter acted in the name of Whiteness and that Whiteness is also the foundation of the American state and its officers. It is an attempt to already portray the deaths of nine black individuals as a different kind of “Southern horror,” as a horror that is singular and not connected to that other gothic heritage of the South (and the South itself as just the most brazen part of American white supremacy). Instead the “unspeakable think unspoken” in these events is the continued erasure of Whiteness itself. The horror that Wells named and continues today is the eldritch abomination of Whiteness. That is what lies unspeakable in Charleston today and will continue to as long as it is not exorcised, a process that begins with naming it for what it is.

[gunjap]

黄金合体 GOLD GUNDAM TRYON 3: Amazing! PHOTO REVIEW, Info http://www.gunjap.net/site/?p=254984

[theoreticalliving]

fucking hyper mode here

[sonofbaldwin]

The More You Know

Did you know that white people had to write letters of confirmation at the beginning of slave narratives to testify, with the use of their Whiteness, that the accounts were true and, therefore, safe for other white people to believe?

‪#‎JonStewart‬’s (and others) popularity in regard to racial matters confirms that nothing has changed in that regard.

[theoreticalliving]

Hannibal’s Aesthetics, Whitehead’s Devil

“You no longer have ethical concerns, Hannibal. Only aesthetic ones.”

On the one hand, as a viewer we intimately already know what Gillian Anderson’s Bedelia Du Maurier means by this statement. Hannibal himself is the arch-aesthete, applying the same meticulous care and devotion to arranging food on a plate or analyzing Italian poetry as cutting up a body; this is a man after all who has killed people for simply being a bore. Yet there is a tension in the statement as well, in the split between aesthetics and ethics. What would it mean for Hannibal to have ethical reasons instead of aesthetic ones? Would he then be an ethical serial killer? And is the flipside that we are meant to understand every other character in the show, with all their flaws, as ethical? Is perhaps the reason they are perpetually trapped by Hannibal’s intentions because they are unable to think aesthetically?

Any viewing of Hannibal quickly shows how serious the show takes aesthetics. In terms of its visuals, sounds, and performances the show is as crafted as Hannibal’s meals, ironically often placing the viewer in the realm of Hannibal’s aesthetic concerns over Bedelia’s ethical ones. Aesthetics is a very broad category when it comes to Hannibal however. Aesthetics does not just happen in the shows presentation but appears to dominate the very logic of its universe; like a medieval tapestry, Hannibal works more through symbolic logic than mechanistic ones. For example, why does Will keep imagining a stag-headed demon hunting him, to the point even in the latest episode of imagining it emerging, like a twisted earth-bound butterfly, from a mutilated corpse? One answer is that Will has by this point suffered multiple traumas—emotional and physical—that make hallucinations likely. Another is that the stag visually represents Hannibal’s continuing influence over Will. And then there’s the perspective that the stag-demon is as real as Will or Hannibal and exists simultaneously in their “real” world and their “symbolic” world. Like a perversion of Donna Haraway’s natureculture, the stag-demon connects both the physical and mental universes to draw the intricate web of Hannibal’s universe.

As the show’s third season begins it seems like its creators are also increasingly taking this route, leaving mechanical logic by the wayside to investigate more interesting questions. There’s always been the sense in previous seasons that Hannibal acts like the devil, with Mads Mikkelson saying this is what separates his portrayal from Anthony Hopkin’s serial killer; Hannibal isn’t an extreme outlier in a world of human concerns, instead he’s an otherworldly force altogether infecting and corrupting reality. In this season the show itself is mulling the question as well, with Will having his own monologue comparing Hannibal to God and the possibility that Hannibal is the rebel in God’s creation (all this happens in a Florentine church, so again aesthetic logic at work). In a rich scene from the conclusion of season two, Hannibal boasts of his own ability to defy causality, to put the “broken tea cup” of him, Will, and the supposedly-dead Abigail back together again, and season three sees him effortlessly moving between identities, adopting the persona of a world-famous professor with no one even blinking an eye.

In a sense human intentions amount to very little in Hannibal’s universe. The world only consists of flows—of blood, desire, food, water, meat—that seem to congeal into something we call everyday reality, but it’s Hannibal’s job to point out the lie of that reality, to break down other characters’ supposed solidity and put them in touch with something more “primordial.” The process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who ironically for this discussion inspired a whole school of Christian theology, wrote that the world does not just consist of “matters of fact,” which is to say the laws of classical Newtonian physics, but also of “matters of value.” Reality itself then contains an aesthetic quality in its becoming; objects want to “satisfy” their intentions in a “beautiful” way, which Whitehead also identifies with a certain sense of harmony.  Steven Shaviro calls Whiteheadian aesthetics “our concern for the world, and for entities in the world” and is a way for Whitehead to explain why novelty and creativity exists in the universe; in the unique intermixture of things something new always emerges. At the peak of this process of creativity is an entity that Whitehead calls God, who acts as a lure for propelling creativity in the universe and thus rather that existing outside of reality seems to be immanent within it.

Whitehead does not contemplate the existence of a devil in his universe however; there is no rebel to defy God’s creativity. In a tongue-in-cheek fashion I may suggest Hannibal as a suitable model for Whitehead’s devil, and Whiteheadian aesthetics as a model for Hannibal’s alluring quality. One possibility of a Whiteheadian devil would be an entity that dulls or impedes the process of creativity; it attempts to solidify reality into one of only stasis. This would only suit however if we took the devil as only a dichotomous opposition to God and not in its more radical form as corrupter; to entertain the possibility as Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller suggests that Hannibal perhaps understands humans better than anyone. A Whiteheadian devil would be fully immersed in the creative universe, be completely concerned with it, but instead of producing harmony it produces fractures, makes holes. Much as Hannibal does, a Whiteheadian devil darkens the universe through its concern with aesthetics divorced from what we may now call the ethics of harmonious becoming. It points to those moments in Whitehead’s own project when he doubts the ability of human consciousness to fully comprehend the universe, to exist as more than a “dim searchlight” showing us pieces and hiding the devil in the shadows.

In this universe then Hannibal exists as the real possibility of evil in the world. Evil is an ontological process that is also creative and concerned with Beauty, but one that follows its own aesthetic ideals. Maybe this is how we should understand Bedelia’s charge; that Hannibal’s aesthetics disrupt harmony in the world, as least the kind of harmony we perceive from the limited standpoint of our “human” consciousness. To the extent that Hannibal counts as a show about horror—along with its other genre classifications—we can point to two sources of terror. There is Hannibal as someone relatable as human, if monstrous, who can manipulate and torture everyone around him. Then there is Hannibal as the possibility of radical evil—as the eldritch abomination manifested by the stag-demon. He does not manipulate people but the laws of reality itself, revealing a brief glimpse of a darkness that dims outside the reach of human “ethics.” Bedelia thinks that ethics may act as a counterpoint to Hannibal’s aesthetics, but in a universe that operates under aesthetical logic in the final tally how much faith does Bedelia want to place in ethics? As season three continues it will be interesting to see how this relationship plays out.

[theoreticalliving]

Some Further Thoughts on Trigger Warnings and Title IX

I originally wrote about trigger warnings about a year ago, but want to write down some recent thoughts I had in response to Laura Kipnis’s latest article in the Chronicle (which was open access earlier today). Kipnis originally wrote an article for the Chronicle decrying attempts to police discourse on campus, particularly around issues of sexual assault and trigger warnings, and the misappropriation of Title IX for these ends. In a follow-up article Kipnis reveals herself to be undergoing her own Title IX inquiry now, in response to student claims that the original article had a “chilling effect” on their ability to speak out. I have no interest in commenting on the specifics of Kipnis’s case nor do I agree with her interpretations of feminism or campus culture, but I think it does point to some interesting developments over the past year, as Title IX has become more of a resource for addressing concerns about sexual assault and rape culture on campuses. These are first and foremost speculative thoughts and open to revision.

I agree with Kipnis that Title IX has been problematically placed as the universal answer to questions of gender discrimination and sexual assault on campuses. I think there are strategic and material reasons for this though that Kipnis glosses over in wanting to blame everything on bad activists. It is often the case that Title IX is the only resource that students have in making claims to redress and reparations from universities. The reality is that, despite all the blame placed on the student-as-consumer model, students are often incredibly disempowered vis-a-vis professors and, more importantly, administrative officials. Absent a strong student movement, strong student government, or meaningful sites of access and decision-making the only resource students do have to fall back on are Title IX and other more quasi-legal administrative processes. It is also important to remember that the effectiveness of Title IX varies significantly depending on the university’s commitment to it and even individual staff people.

On the other hand I do not think students are purely reactive in their turn to Title IX. I think certain student activists are interested in Title IX as a tool for changing hegemonic notions of consent and practice on college campuses. This approach does have the problematic outcome of empowering administrative officials, and ultimately the State, as adjudicators of what counts as “justice” in these cases, but it may at least have the outcome of actually shifting campus cultures for the better. But again, I do not see how this strategy could ultimately be successful without challenging the disempowerment of students in relation to administrative officials.

This brings me to a larger issue that I think Kipnis ignores and is often missing from discussions around trigger warnings and other efforts to reform campus cultures. I think trigger warnings can be beneficial in practice but also agree that they are best left to the discretion of faculty members than attempts to create broad policies by administrators who are most removed from the classroom (this article usefully outlines trigger warnings as a form of faculty best practices though I disagree with viewing students as patients). Yet triggers warnings, like Title IX complaints, are a means for students to gain some leverage of power and voice in their education. Often opponents of trigger warnings frame their objection as students trying to avoid discomfort or being challenged in the classroom. I want to ask, however, where did we get this model that the teacher and the students are antagonists and the student must be shocked out of their conformity?

Perhaps it does go all the way back to Socrates—that famous asshole—but it’s also important to remember that even since the advent of modern education in the 19th century the classroom has for most of its history been an oppressive space. Students were placed under the dictates of precise canons, unfeeling teaching, and corporal punishment. This is not even to mention all the people who were not even entitled to an education until the 20th century and the many who fail to get a good education now. Framed against this history, trigger warnings look more like another attempt to give students some say in their education. The introduction of trigger warnings should not be seen as a means to cut off dialogue, but as the beginning of a dialogue between students and professors about the content and design of students’ education.

Students will continue to turn to extra-collegial practices as long as they feel shutout of universities themselves, practices that in the long run continue to erode the remaining legitimacy of universities (thought universities are also already doing a great job at that without any help from students). This is all to say that trigger warnings and Title IX complains are both meaningful, if sometimes flawed attempts, to address real problems and crises occurring on college campuses but in the long run real solutions must involved the democratization of colleges across students, professors, and workers and the disempowerment of the administrative class.

[niknak79]

[eclipsebykimlipmp3-deactivated2]

Cop Parents Pull Strings for their Son to Cover Up Murder of Young Man at a Party

A community is outraged after a 20-year-old was murdered and the police are refusing to investigate.

This is absolutely ridiculous. This man, Ty Sawyer, was a student at the University of Delaware and was antagonized by a man named Patrick Downey, while at a party. The two of them got in a fight and Patrick literally beat this man to death. People are saying that this isn’t a crime because they “both agreed to fight” but honestly. Honestly. How in the world do you literally have a person kill a man, and face absolutely no repercussions? Even if you agreed to fight??? It’s not a coincidence that Downey is white and has family in the police force, who can pull the strings and get him out of trouble. Had this been the other way around, this man would be in jail right now, and everything about him would be exposed. But nope. This is abso fucking lutely ridiculous. This is too fucking close to home. The killer is still attending classes at UD. I want to bring this to your attention because many of my friends who attend this school feel unsafe. UD has a very infamous track record with this kind of thing and we need to expose them, and the family of Patrick Downey, for the scum they are.

No arrests. NO INVESTIGATION. According to UD, black lives do not matter. Please reblog this and spread the word, this is really important.

[catsbeaversandducks]

When you have cats, you’re never alone. They’re always there. Watching you.

Photos by ©guremike

[mashrou3-ummi]

by B.R. Ambedkar, first printing in 1936

This edition includes Mahatma Gandhi’s response to the text and Ambedkar’s response to Gandhi as appendices

[entanglingbriars]

Added to my reading list.

[derpycats]

Nick just rock climbing

[awesomepeoplereading]

Ambedkar reads, is reminded that today is his birthday.

[sharkodactyl]

southern california gothic

It is summer. The sun is shining. It is winter. The sun is shining. You aren’t certain, upon reflection, when the last time was that the sun was not shining.

You are starting to fear that In-N-Out is not actually a burger chain, but rather a cult. Whenever you bring it up people’s eyes glaze over. They are so hungry. Oh, god, they are all so hungry.

You’re fairly certain that one Starbucks store is following you. There wasn’t a Starbucks on that corner a minute ago…right?

There is some sort of warp in the space-time continuum near Los Angeles. There is no other explanation for why you have been stuck in traffic this long. No matter what channel you turn the radio to, all you can hear is static. Occasionally: the distant sound of a voice speaking in Spanish, as if trying to convey a message to you from many miles away.

When the rain starts, everyone around you panics. What do they know that you don’t?

[fanfoolishness]

- You hear them sometimes, shrieking overhead. They look like birds but no birds that you ever knew. Once you catch them in a pair of binoculars. You slowly lower the lenses. They are not birds and never were.

- You walk along riverbeds. They’re concrete, dry, empty. What’s a river? you wonder sometimes, but you never find out.

- At times when you drive over the hill into Los Angeles you see it waiting, looming above the short skyscrapers. You tell yourself it’s only grey smog choking the sky, but sometimes it looks like a wave. Like the Pacific has finally revolted against this city nestled between so many faults. You eagerly watch for it to move, to engulf, but not yet. Not yet.

- The palm trees aren’t from here. The jacarandas aren’t from here. The people aren’t from here. Nothing really lives here. Nothing really stays.

- There is an hour every night where the roaches gather on the street corner. The insect hour, maybe, where they discuss new business, see long lost friends. You tread carefully. The last time you crushed one the infestation in your squat two-level apartment six blocks down lasted for weeks.

- There’s another earthquake on another day, shaking the office and sending supplies tumbling, and when you ask your coworkers about it they stare at you blankly. “What earthquake?” they ask, and you realize they can’t feel them anymore.

[memewhore]