ramblings n thoughts – Page 2

Deformation, Information, On Formation

Noise matters. Ever tried to have a conversation on a phone with poor reception, snaps, crackles and pops interrupting your ability to hear? It’s a Wednesday and you’re waiting for a friend to arrive. This friend is on a train or a subway or bus. And each time you almost hear there was perhaps an incident. But you are unsure because the noise made itself intensely felt in the conversation, it announced itself as a deformation to smooth conversation. So it is this Wednesday, or that other one – no matter, really – but the noise frustrates. Such frustration is the matter, the material, of conversation. So you end up hearing your phone partner – or perhaps it is you that is saying it – “Can you hear me? Hello! Are you there?”Noise matters. The conversation between friends or lovers or business partners on this or that Wednesday has to be about the noise, about the antagonism in order to have clarity. Noise interrupts flow. So the conversation ends up being about the interruptive. Once clarity gained, once signal clear, “Oh, I didn’t hear you.” “Repeat what you said.” “I was going through a tunnel.” “You were muffled” “I couldn’t hear.” Noise. I have been thinking about noise a lot lately, its texture and weight, its meaning for black performance in churches, on film, across stages. There is noise. Like D’angelo’s “The Line,” in which Dino Palladrino keeps the same bass line throughout the entire song except for moment 4’52” with a noticeable alternation, noise is that which seems most off but can perhaps be the foundation that transforms everything that comes before and after it.

So yes, there is noise in Beyoncé’s latest offering “Formation.” And such noise matters. It is noise that begs our attention. It is a Saturday and someone posted a link to a internet breaking video. There is praise and joy and thinkpieces and laughter. But at my viewing, there is also noise.Look at the brilliant energy Beyoncé caused to erupt since the weekend of February 6, 2016. An energy brilliant and bright that has within it the possibility for transformation. I seriously did not want to write about Beyoncé mostly because I already have. I think the furor and intensity of the responses compel us all to think. And I believe deeply in the pleasure and joy that emanates from her work and that people find within it. As a cisgay black dude, one that misses going to No Parking and Secret and Escuelita in New York now that I’m a Los Angeles resident, I know the transformative power of the beat drop with a Beyoncé song. Don’t let the bass lick of “Deja Vu” slide in the middle of a set, don’t let “drop down low, sweep the floor with it” be rehearsed publicly. Life will be got and that’s all good. So I’m all about joy and pleasure and being happy and free. And the way Black women’s joy and pleasure has been scrutinized and sanitized and made almost impossible – certainly always criticized and problematized and dismissed and discarded – in this writing about “Formation” I want to say up front that I am in favor of pleasure and joy. It is what I write about and research generally.

But joy and pleasure do not emerge ex nihilo, which is why we have to be extremely intentional about what we praise and why. At first I thought it unfair to analyze the video because right wing folks are ridiculous. This engagement is just not that. They dismiss Beyoncé because they are terrible. But because “Formation” aspires toward radicalism, Beyoncé and team invite us to critically engage it. Her continued movements within the currents and flows of the conversation, the necessary and urgent noise making, of black feminisms, womanist thought and the Black Radical Tradition, it seems to me, begs us to engage her on the terrain upon which she stands.

The berets at the super bowl, the faux black panther outfits? The afros and pumped fists? We are called upon by the production of “Formation” itself as something revolutionary and radical, which means it should be held to such a standard. Holding it to such a standard does not presume that any of us stands there, has achieved there, because “there” is not a space to obtain or possess but a movement, a flow – like the gathering of waters – in whose currents we must maneuver. And it seems to me to be the case that the refusal to engage and interrogate the class politics of the video – a class politics that shows up through consumerism, materialism and benevolent capitalism – emerges out of a belief that she can’t handle the conversation, that it is too difficult.I want to talk about and think through the openings created and the delimitations of dancing and singing over consumerist class culture that makes the noise of a desired “Black Bill Gates” and “the best revenge is getting paper” audible. These two statements are seeming aberrations, they are noise that needs cancelation – so far, it seems, unfortunately through refusing to engage it – that we need to feel its vibration in and on and through us. It is a noise that the lyricism of “Formation” couldn’t leave alone, Beyoncé had to get it out. And since it was offered to us, let us consider it.

Let’s take seriously all of our capacities to think…considering the possibilities and limitations of consumerism, materialism and capitalism are not mere academic worries or trifles. The water crisis in Flint, the school crisis in Detroit and Philadelphia and Atlanta, the policing crisis nationwide, the suffering of black, brown, indigenous, poor worldwide, are not disconnected from representation and images. We cannot on the one hand desire to say that the cultural production – always an endeavor, intellectual – is important for thinking with then balk at the occasion for thinking if it entails pushback or disagreement or dissent. That to ask, or to offer really, that perhaps many of us don’t believe in Beyoncé’s intellectual capacity when she herself makes clear that she wants to be taken seriously on the grounds of her aesthetic projects – her dance formations and sartorial choices and lyricism – as practices of the intellect. Can we be joyful about the lyrics that praise Jackson 5 noses, the dual register and play of “baby hair” in its Black English Vernacular force only to dismiss the lyrics that praise unabashed, unfettered capitalist consumption? They exist within the same delimitation, within the same song. We can deal with the complexity, the contradiction. And it seems we have been invited to converse about such complexity and contradiction because the visually stunning images and bass line were offered to us for our engagement.

There is noise. The noise of the desire for a Black Bill Gates, for revenge being best served as getting paper – and paper could be degrees, sure, but also monetary – presents for us a disjoint and disjuncture. The disjoint between image and sound would be cool because black performance is always more than double, is always irreducibly plural. Black performance occurs on multiple registers, is multimodal, arrhythmic, polyrhythmic. Like the young folks say, there’s levels to this shit. But what when rather than an intentional disjoint and disjunction, one desired coherence, one desired consistency? What when one does not imagine that messages about capitalist consumption as a moral good is inconsistent with a message about loving your black flesh, your baby hair and your baby hair?

Sometimes I like Paul. You know Paul, the Apostle, the one that told slaves to obey their masters, the Paul that said in his flesh was no good thing. But he said more. I do dig the fact that he did say, “be not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” And I like that he said that he lived his life in such a way that caused him to write that we should continue to move towards – what I will say here is – justice, equity. He said it was not that as though he had already attained that which he sought but that he would relinquish those things that had hindered him in times past and would continue, and would press toward the mark in the cause of justice. So I like Paul not for what he at all times said. There was noise that inflect how he should be heard, that should compel us to think about his contradictions. Through attention to those contradictions we can know that none of us is exempt and each must be diligent to contend against injustice. I like Paul because in him one really gets a sense that he was trying to figure out how to do justice in his world.

So with the release of “Formation” has been a very intense response from all kinds of people. Twitter was aflutter and Facebook debates have caused rifts between friends and strangers. One thing said about Beyoncé in defense of her is “it’s never enough!” And what is meant by that is some of us want to continually criticize and analyze and scrutinize what she does. But it seems to me to be the case that, yes, for those of us concerned with justice, “it” never is enough. Nor should it be. And I think the perniciousness of the inequity of the economy is discounted when it’s said that “Formation” is just a video, that it is not that deep. Because it is more than a video: it provided jobs to workers in the film and music industries, it is an advertisement for merchandise on her website and for her upcoming tour, it is what colonial states like Israel will use as cultural capital to justify their existence against Palestinian life.

So we do not have the luxury for time off. We have to push each other. Yet as anyone versed in black feminism and womanist thought would know, critique is not neutral and has a context of emergence. So the critique, the pressure and weight to be anti-capitalist, decolonial, anti-imperialist, a prison abolitionist, against privatized education should not befall as the burden of the individual. So insofar as we want to have more than simply a conversation about the political economy but an interrogation of it that is produced through and produces inequity, it is not the burden of the individual.

I work for a university. Universities are currently bastions of neoliberal theory and practice. What I mean is that universities are privatizing education, exploiting local and state resources, are primary exponents of displacement of financially poor communities. Universities currently seem to be more interested in private wealth management and real estate building projects than they are about the work of education, especially teaching and education for the cause of justice, in the cause of alleviating the suffering of people in the world. Lots of universities have senior administration from banking and military industries, folks that have little vested interest in the production of truth and making a more just society. That to say I work within an institutional practice that produces and is produced by racial capitalism, that digs its heels into the privatizing of public resources, an institution that promotes inequity under the guise of multiculturalism and diversity. There is a reason why universities and colleges have pamphlets of smiling young folks of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Under the guise of diversity and multiculturalism is the fact of the political economy of inequity.

Yet, I must press. My colleagues must press. We all press. We cannot be comfortable. We have to figure out ways to inhabit these spaces while pressing for justice. This is an ethical demand that gurantees discomfort and to be a challenge. And the call to press is not just made to celebrities but to us all. We all share the load. We all have to speak forcefully against capitalism and the way the political economy moralizes against the poor and working class.I wonder who celebrities are to us, why we invest so much time and energy into their worlds. I understand being moved by music, a play, the sound of a sermon, a guitar lick, a drum solo, a textured voice. I understand being moved by the dynamism of a Jordan dunk, the gravity of a Nina Simone arpeggio, the weight and texture of a Kim Burrell riff, the joy and frivolity of a Cam dab, the lightness and sweetness of Whitney’s timbre. But at times we invest something terribly overwrought in these figures which disfigures them – many lament having to be everything for everyone – and disfigures us in kind. Such investment is largely about the ways they come to be powerful, and this within a political economy of inequity. Such investment is largely about what they have attained financially, about their capacity for benevolence because of such acquisition, about gettin’ that paper.

Being a Black Bill Gates, getting paper all, on face value, seem to be ok. But is revenge what we most desire? Is choreographic reversal – wherein the police have their hands up – most desired? That is perhaps true for some of us. But that is not the force of one strain of the Black Radical Tradition. How does one get paper in a fundamentally inequitable economy? And though some argue that one has to attain wealth to speak truthfully, to produce revolution, I fear a misunderstanding of the tradition. Do we wanna rearrange the pieces on the board or blow up the game altogether?

We are all drowning. We need a way out, a way of escape. This isn’t a demand for a politics of purity but for pressing. Pressing each and all of us forces us all to consider how our complicity to the workings of the political economy is demanded of us in order to live. We have to be able to imagine that we can do and live and be otherwise than through the organization of wealth as is the status quo, through the organization of resources through inequity. We cannot let the fact that each of us has our complicity demanded of us be a reason to disengage from the necessity of critical analysis and, hopefully, a lot of imagining and in such imagining, bringing into being otherwise possibilities. We who are abolitionists come from a tradition, a rich and long tradition, wherein liberation was not conferred by Lincoln or others. The enslaved in the United States emancipated themselves through a general strike. We come from that tradition, one that saw the necessity of thinking and living and imagining otherwise.

We are contending against nothing short of empire and its rapacious violence. It is good and right and ethical to ask of Beyoncé to boycott her upcoming performances in Tel Aviv to stand in solidarity with Palestinians who are victim of ongoing violent occupation. It is good and right and ethical to ask Beyoncé to think more about the violence that grounds capitalism, the sorta violence and violation that produces the wealth of a Bill Gates and the violence of benevolent capitalism that is the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation is responsible for pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the privatization of public education, a process that has dispossessed lots of black women teachers, lots of students from neighborhood schools and, yes, lots of black, brown and indigenous people from neighborhoods. It seems our imaginations have become constrained by the political economy, by the current order of things, the contemporary neoliberal organization of knowledge.Think, for example, of schools in Pennsylvania and New Orleans. There have been huge disinvestments in local and state funds for public education, contributing to the crumbling of buildings, the breakup of teacher unions, the lack of capital investment for the futures of black, brown, indigenous, poor educational possibilities. After such disinvestment, the promise of state of the art facilities and teachers that can train students from programs like Teach for America, this after the disinvestment and disenfranchisement. Only after disinvestment is the possibility for profit, which prompts certain organizations to show so-called care and concern. This care and concern obtains only because there is a profit to be made by those that have been marginalized because of the political economy.

And consider the city of Cleveland filing a claim against Tamir Rice’s estate for $500. That is not a lot of money for a city at all. So let me opine: it’s not about the money at all, it’s not about the desire to further humiliate, to further demonstrate power, to further cause the family turmoil. The city could sue for $1 or $10 or $100K and I suspect the reasoning behind it would be the same. Yes, the claim is about the ambulance ride for Tamir. But the state murdered Tamir through an incompetent officer then lied about the event. This lawsuit is legal but is it ethical? The lawsuit is the demonstration of the ways the political economy conspires with the law to produce unethical behavior, to produce violence. So perhaps getting paper, perhaps benevolent capitalism, is not what we need to alleviate suffering. We really need a way out, a way otherwise.

There is no, there cannot ever be, a revolutionary nor radical capitalism. The system of economics is fundamentally exploitive. We have to attend to the alleviation of suffering. It is our task.How to speak to and against these disinvestments that have ruptured the lives of black, brown, indigenous, working class life? How to speak to and against it in the cause of justice? This is demanded of us. That the black political elite have been at the helm of the privatized education movement should not deter us from speaking truthfully. We cannot allow the articulation of our marginalization to allow us to have a neoliberal political horizon, one of profitability and convenience. Is this not what we learn from black feminists pressing against black patriarchy and misogynoir, against those that would marginalize black women from leadership positions and organizing because they are women? Is this not what we learn from black queer folks pressing against the heteronormative impulses that serve as the basis for much rhetoric regarding black community and its disruption of family through racial capital, Middle Passage, enslavement? We learn, in other words, that we who believe in freedom cannot rest because freedom is not a place but a practice, liberation is not something we can possess but only something in which we participate. We can never be satisfied, we can never obtain, we have to keep living and being and striving to do otherwise.

It’s ok to have pleasure. And this is not me giving permission because, seriously, I am in no position to give or withhold. And as homie would say, who are me to judge? That is, it is not within my purview nor desire to make a claim on pleasure as a possibility. I write lovingly about my upbringing in the Blackpentecostal church, and this though I know and speak passionately and explicitly against its sexism, homophobia, classism and militarism and desires for empire. In each object is the capacity for multiplicity and sometimes what is in the object is the antidote, the corrective, to the way it can oppress and marginalize.So it appears to me that the desire to policitize “Formation” as a sort of pure performance or as one that can only be analyzed on some of what it gives, does the work of placing the pleasure gained from it in the zone of the political. Pure insofar as class becomes a category that is not under scrutiny nor is it analyzed. This placement into the zone of the political can occur because of the assumption that the political and the pleasurable are distinct categories that only sometimes criss-cross. The will to make Beyoncé malleable through placing her into already predetermined political projects simply instrumentalizes her as an object for our political theorizing, an instrumentalizing that is used in the service – rather than the disruption – of the neoliberal making of herself into a private, consumable product, good and service. And there is also the disappearance made audible through voices with flesh that is never seen. Queer presence is heard but not seen. It is not a disembodied experience but a removal of the flesh, a defleshing. Isn’t the defleshing of queerness on screen similar to a normative longing that produce resistance against, for example, queer folks leading in Black Lives Matter protests? That we should be seen but not heard or heard – that is, showing up – but not seen? It seems to me to be the case that we are afraid of being moved by aesthetics, that we cannot rest with the way she says – dual frequency – “baby hair” – with the color palette, with the dance formations. And it seems we cannot rest there because we think aesthetics lack intellectual content, that aesthetics are not a collective intellectual practice. So we force the pleasure and aesthetics into an already predetermined political project. And because we are radical and enjoy the content then, yes, the content itself must be radical too.

Perhaps it aspires towards such a radicalism, perhaps it moves towards it. And in that, we should celebrate. But there is more required of us all, yes. The reversal isn’t what we desire but a dismantling of the capacity to compel us to raise hands. Because, and this is also key, police are also exploited by the state though producing violence for it. We are all drowning.The people called black demonstrate that blackness is an orientation, a way of life. Black people are insofar as the flesh is performance. This performance is decolonial and abolitionist as its ground of being. Blackness cannot be possessed because it is not, but is the antagonism to, property. And, attendant to this, radical and revolutionary are not identities one can claim. Rather, radical and revolutionary are ways to be in the world, are orientations, are dispossessive in how such ways of life compel us to interrogation and reflection and collective, improvisational organizing. None of us is radical nor revolutionary. Rather, what we do can contribute to or take away from the work of radicalism and revolution. We can put our hands to the plow or take them off. But the work must, will, continue.The work of radicalism and revolution, currents and flows of the work, need us all, we all can and need to participate. These ways of life are not possessive and aren’t property. Rather, people that have come in its name – people in the Black Radical Tradition, for example – enact the tradition rather than identify as the tradition. So, sure, some of us may not get every cue and marker in “Formation” immediately but that just impresses upon us the necessity for community and study as a way to think together. That we do not get the cues does not mean something is not for us, not if those things are made available to us, to the world.

The context of emergence of our practices, given the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal ordering of the world, should force us to be diligent to act against it. That ordering is violent. I always wonder what we would do, say, wear, how we would behave, in absence of that ordering, in absence of that violence. So the celebration of identity, one’s race, ethnicity, gender, religion, of itself isn’t a radical or revolutionary thing. And that’s true even if you are from a historically and contemporarily marginalized group. The question, the challenge, is this: how does this celebration contribute to the work of justice and equity, to the alleviating of suffering?Noise matters. So perhaps we can ask in that ways does “Formation” prompt the imaginations of some to live more deliberately in such a way that does justice against inequity and violence. And we can ask while also experiencing the materiality of the noise, the noise we must engage and through engagement use as a platform for seeking to think and do and be otherwise. Because otherwise is possible. And that’s the beauty of and the dissent about the video: that it opens a space of articulation for imagination and collective thought.

Against Islamophobia (A Black Christian* Response)

Silence will not protect…

There are times of laughter and frivolity. There are times of tears and melancholy. But these are not those times, or not those times only. These times demand that we stand up for what is good and right and just. The times, our times, are indeed urgent. We cannot sit idly by as brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles — kith and kin alike — are beholden to all forms of violence. Not in our names. There is no one way to be, perform nor live out Christianity. There are conservative, moderate and liberal Christianities, there are apocalyptic eschatologies and agnostic ideologies. Christianity varies, has texture and weight, has difference internal to its logic. We speak desiring a modality of Christianity to be heard that is restive, that is resistant, to Islamophobia as against our ethical and moral worldview. Though we identify as Christian (*or have deep roots in Christian traditions), which informs the ways we exist, which informs our pursuit of justice, we will not allow Islamophobia to be perpetuated in the name of Christians, particularly Black Christians and those of us with deep roots from within — even if we have left — this tradition. Targets of Islamophobia are kith and kin alike. But even if they were not, what is good and right and just is to demand that Islamophobia, fear mongering that targets Muslims and Islam, cease with certain swiftness.

What is Islamophobia?

Islamophobia is fear, hatred and prejudice as the precursor to the proliferation of violence against people that identify as — or are perceived to be — Muslim, and against the religion of Islam itself. Islamophobia precipitates violence and violation based not in truth nor justice but in a politics of difference, in a politics that assumes difference is likewise deficiency. Islamophobia allows for Islam and for people that are, or are perceived to be, Muslim to be stereotyped as inherently violent, as inherently anti-woman (we do not say anti-feminist, since many promoting fear of Islam and its adherents are also against feminisms in their many varieties), as inherently against technological, philosophical and moral progress. Islam and Muslims are figured, through the political economic imagination, as a thwarting to the flourishing of Western civil society. Islamophobia includes a range of attitudes and behaviors that target Islam and those believed to be Muslim as in need of remediation. It is important to note that through the public discourse, Islam and those perceived to be Muslims are racialized as different, as deficient. That is, Islamophobia cannot but share in the general Western tendency to identity difference-as-deficit, and such deficit as deficiency is always part of the project of racial logic.

Islamophobia targets those that are are, or are perceived to be Muslim, and women are very often the victims of such violence because of the religious practices of covering, because of the apparentness of religious conviction worn on the flesh. In a world that targets flesh based on real or perceived race, on ethnic and religious background, it is important to stand against Islamophobia as it shares in a general targeting of difference worn on and as the flesh. As such, standing against Islamophobia is a feminist, Black feminist, womanist and Black queer theoretical and material practice, it is a feminist, Black feminist, womanist and Black queer ethical charge of which those committed to justice must take up.

Why do we care?

This summer, Muslims lead a campaign to raise money for Black churches that experienced arson at the hands of racist ideology and white supremacist thinking, they demonstrated a commitment to justice that modeled for us what it means to live out one’s conviction and practice of justice in the flesh, as a way of life. The raising of money for Black churches was not necessarily about shared theologies and worship practices but about constituting a way of life that honors the personhood of all, that honors all without regard to theologies and worship practices. Such living out is a model and must be returned. One cannot be content with the current political moment. Calls from Christian university presidents, from politicians, and from “ordinary Americans” have allowed us to listen into the ways Islam and Muslims are becoming the scapegoat for a range of political behaviors that produce violence globally. It is time, it seems, to really live out the ethics of the Christian Testament’s “Good Samaritan,” it is time to step up and support those that are being targeted by the pernicious evils of the political economy, an uncontrolled white heterosexist capitalist patriarchy run amok that has as its grounding violence against difference.

We do not have to wonder how violence, of Nazism or Middle Passage as examples, occurs. We look at Donald Trump and we laugh and think it’s all a joke while his words are used as fuel for violence. People listening and responding favorably to such messages of violence do so because they are gravely afraid of losing their so-called “culture,” because of the blacks and the latinx and the indigenous and the gays and the the trans* and the muslims and the feminists. People listen to such messages of violence and respond in kind because the messages name the anger felt towards a political economy but place, wrongfully so, on the ones that are most marginalized by the political economy. It is this that we resist, that we stand against.

This is no mere call for interfaith dialogue that leaves intact structural inequity. This is not a call for crass multiculturalism that does not get to the root of structural inequity and violence. This is not a call to hold hands and sing as the end goal, though holding hands and singing together celebrates the flesh of one another as worthy of being touched, held, loved. Rather, this is a call for a direct confrontation with the evils of xenophobia, racism and violent cultural nationalism that produces violence against those our political economy, with mainstream media as its agent, choose to misunderstand and misrepresent. This is a call to seek and do justice as a way of life, celebrating that our differences do not have to separate us but can present otherwise possibilities for organizing, for being with each other in way to, together, confront the evils of this world. Our Black Muslim kith and kin modeled for us what that kind of love looks like in the face of adversity. And the love and concern shown emerges from a religious commitment and feeling not dissimilar to a Christian commitment and feeling. Such love and concern is not about the safety from harm as the raising of money this summer demonstrated that such is not the case. Rather, the love and concern is about an ethical life, a moral life, a way that antagonizes the normative way of living as separated, as segregated, as categorically distinct.

Bafflement and Outrage…

We will not allow the voices of hatred to drown out and overwhelm, we will not allow for those voices to be the only ones felt in this moment of crisis. Our ability to be baffled and outraged is a gift, it lets us know that we have not submitted to nor accepted the current loud discourse of Islamophobia. We transform this bafflement and outrage into otherwise ways to sense each other, to be in affinity with each other. We do not use the perniciousness of our times to create our relationality but simply use the capacity for relationality to rise to the occasion of our current antiblack, Islamophobic political economic moment. We recognize that our relationality is not created by the violence and violation of hate and fear mongering because we will not and will no longer be lulled to the sleep of comfort and satisfaction when it is not “our” group that is targeted for violence and violation. Our relationality exists previous to the situation, we simply must live and love our way to it. Bafflement and outrage are what animated James Baldwin’s ethical and moral demand to the world — in response to Angela Davis’s having been incarcerated — an injunction he made on himself demands of us now:

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own — which it is — and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

We, Black Christians and Christian adjacent persons (I describe myself as Agnostic and Pentecostal, Agnosticostal) must fight for the lives of our kith and kin as if they are our own, because they are our own.

Finally, [sisters and brothers], whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

We hold each other, love each other, work with and struggle in joy to produce otherwise possibilities for world making with each other. Our flesh is your flesh. Our lives are your lives. We seek, together, to do otherwise than this.

Learn More:

#BlackIslamSyllabus Council on American-Islamic Relations

Muslim Advocates Muslim Anti-Racist Collaborative

Sapelo Square

[If there are other organizations, local or national, that you want included, the list can be updated; simply comment.]

(What I Mean When I Say) Neoliberalism

Remember Blackplanet? Remember how you wanted to add swag to your page by animations and images, changing the background from the standard selections to personalized HTML possibilities? Remember the animated dollar signs that some users would place on their pages, animated dollar signs that would be placed at varied intervals?Those dollar signs were supposed to show us that, yes, this person indeed cared about gettin that coin, about saving, about wealth. But if you ever tried to grasp it, you’d see that you’d just be putting fingerprints on a screen. To grasp at a dollar sign as a form of something you can own, can hold in hand, while the material of it withers away? There is no content of the HTLM code, no content that is itself the creation or sustenance of wealth. It is just the appearance of a sign that is supposed to mean, supposed to register, a range of ideas. And neoliberalism is all about the appearance of signs without the change to structures and institutions of inequity.

I use the terms neoliberalism and neoliberal pretty frequently and felt it necessary to explicate the concept, or at least how I think the terms. What do I mean when I talk about neoliberalism? When I discuss it, I am primarily talking about the structure of the economy through policy measures that include making private public goods and opening up such goods to the private sector, austerity measures, the reduction of regulation practices that allowed for unfettered economic exploitation, openings to international markets that produce economic crises abroad while limiting job opportunities domestically, the reduction in the spending of governments. When I use it, I hone in on the making private of public goods and services by subjecting such goods and services subject to market forces and trends, allowing such goods and services to be subject to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” Such measures produce the occasion where profit on what should be things available to all for free like healthcare, education, housing is made. Importantly, reductions in government spending do not occur in uniform fashion, it is not applied to all sectors equally. For example, in military operations there is not a decrease but an increase in governmental expenditures; monies that could be used for the greater good, to create equity are siphoned off for measures — a mix of government and private sector spending — that further destabilizes the world, creates more violence and produces the occasion for ongoing “intervention” and the monies such so-called interventions require.

Along with such inequitable spending, with the making private public goods and services subjecting them to market forces and trends, is the degradation of and moralizing against those who then cannot afford what were or should be readily available to all without controversy. The degradation of and moralizing against persons that cannot afford now profitable goods and services is about transforming inherent inequity into a seeming moral failure for groups negatively impacted, about making them responsible for their purported personal, private behaviors that are supposedly the reasons obstructing their clear path to success. It is an economic system that requires an internalization of fear and shame, though such is an affect of inequity masquerading as its cause. And this because neoliberalism is grounded in hiding in plain sight the perniciousness of its enactment.

What are examples of neoliberalism?Neoliberal policy doesn’t simply appear with measures that many would, or could, immediately dismiss as bad. Prisons that are run by private corporations are one, though minuscule — though certainly problematic and in need of remediation — example. That prisons can be produced through the logic of profit, for many, makes absolutely no sense because such corporations would need to guarantee that each “bed” is “occupied,” which runs counter to the very idea of rehabilitation that prison, many presume, is supposed to produce. And that incarcerated persons’ labors can be exploited in both publicly and privately held prisons, that they can work for so many hours for so little pay, is in need of interrogation. And many were rightfully angry at the exorbitant, rapid increase in cost — 5000% increase — for medicine for people living with HIV. Yet this is the end result of making goods and services that should be available to all subject to market forces. Should incarceration allow for profitability? Should quality healthcare only be available to those that can afford expensive hospital bills? Should healthcare lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal debt and bankruptcy? These policies — prison and healthcare — many readily understand as problematic. But there are others that almost feel too good and warm hearts that are equally in need of interrogation and that because the logics of economic inequity are what ground the very forces that produce these things.

Yet, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, state colleges and universities and even the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative all follow the same patterns of neoliberalism: each promote privatization of public goods and services, goods and services that should be available collectively. NCLB and RTTT each pressured local government, through the promise of federal funding, to privatize public schools. This happened, for example, by offering incentives for chartering parts (to varying degrees) of local public school districts. These charters would allow for public funding to be used in private organizations, making of public schooling a private market. And in the case of RTTT, school districts were quite literally subject to competition, following the logics of capitalist economics, that competition creates opportunity. Schools, in other words, are offered up to the logic of business administration and education is no longer primarily about the possibility of liberation. Instead, a problem of resource allocation because of competition is the result. But these educational institutions are also decidedly against teacher unions. Teacher unions are the organization of collectivities in the service of bargaining for better pay and work conditions, for better healthcare and training. To the degree that teacher unions are the targets for elimination of school privatization proponents is the degree to which collectivity, as a concept itself, is targeted by neoliberalism itself.Colleges and universities are especially guilty of neoliberalism with their transformation from spaces of education, questions, learning into spaces of private wealth management and real estate investment as the chief concerns. Colleges and universities have colluded with local municipalities in “redevelopment” efforts that have been nothing short of the displacement of communities, particularly low income, people of color, women. The lofts and condos and reclaimed wood, the coffee shops and walkable neighborhoods, are all good for individuals but have negative impacts on communities that are displaced.

Questions, no doubt, linger: What about the increase in people that are able to get medical care through the Affordable Care Act? Aren’t prisons about protecting communities? Aren’t charter schools giving parents in under resourced areas urgently needed options? Certainly, more people accessing doctors is a net good and protecting communities from violence and harm — when it does happen (and too much research demonstrates that the opposite is, in fact, the case, with regard to incarceration) — and certainly, kids learning at schools are commendable. But there remains the question of structural inequity that neoliberalism discards and, thus, leaves materially intact. What these various measures do, to varying degrees, is demonstrate the limits of the current political economy itself, the limits of the structural forces of capitalism to produce something along the line of justice. And in each case, these measures make citizenship an explicit case of indebtedness to the nation through financialization, through putting at remove the case and cause of justice by focusing on the so-thought urgency of now. So I think about the debt that college students are supposed to accrue in order to attain educations. But the debt accrued makes them — us — indebted financially, making our relation to the nation one of financial obligation to pay back. So our work, our labor, our practice, is in the service of us paying back to the nation the very possibility of being educated. It is a pernicious cycle.

Neoliberalism, for me, is a structural relation grounded in a presumption of individualism, of property as conferring worth and value, and a necessary degradation of publicly available, collectively held, socially sustained ways of providing care, for collectively held, socially sustained modes of relationality. Just like the degradation of collective organizing and bargaining of teacher unions, neoliberalism itself requires of us to be individuals against collectivities. This works itself out as caring about me and mine, of course, at the expense — unhappily, even — of others. Neoliberalism is a metaphysical relationship between the capacity to own private property and to be a private citizen, all effects of John Locke’s possessive individualism. Neoliberalization is about possessive possibility, about making goods and services subject to being owned and, thus, sold and exchanged for profit. Neoliberalism is a labor issue, an exploitation of labor and collectivity. Those of us doing its work, those of us producing its patterns without resistance have our labor exploited in ways that are structurally similar to — even if the material results and conditions of our lives differ — those that actively resist.—The point is not simply to name the relation but to change it, to imagine otherwise possibilities, to consider alternative modes of organizing. The point is not to individualize and internalize the critique of the political economy, it is not to individualize and internalize the critique of neoliberal policy. Such individualizing and internalizing produces the occasion for thinking that our personal, private work is important — and no doubt it is — but trades the personal as a disruption to the systemic and institutional. And that is the flaw. Surely, people have, do and will continue to produce work from within the zones of inequity, myself inclusive (since I work for a university). The point is to think about the forces that structure the political economy and find ways to collectively resist these forces, to work against them.

neutrinos and social life

one hundred trillion neutrinos pass through each of us every second, yet we cannot feel them with sensual registers already discovered. there are things so very small, so small that even the word “small” is too imprecise. yet. we are, likewise, so minuscule. we are so very tiny in comparison to the expanse of the universe. every time i worry about the perniciousness of our world, the ridiculous inequity and unceasing violence, i take comfort in our smallness. it’s a strange thing in which to find comfort, perhaps. but knowing how insignificant we are within this great expanse is beautiful to me.

it is not that what we experience is insignificant, no. it is very big and great and tumultuous and lovely, all. but that such big things can be, within the great expanse, nothing at all? beautiful. it comforts me that the racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism experienced are inventions, that they do not have to exist. and it comforts me to know that the great expanse with its relativity of time, that these isms we experience as great big things are nothing in the blip of time.isn’t it beautiful that something as small as we can experience such feelingly big emotions like joy and happiness and peace and love? and isn’t it beautiful that we that are so small can experience loss and grief and heartache from those lived who have passed on and away? isn’t it beautiful that the smell of earth and flowers and the taste of good food can move us deeply? and yet such things are nothing…? not nothing to us who experience such things, but nothing in terms of the great expanse of space-time, the great expanse of other worlds? beautiful.i’m thinking, of course, of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, how the story begins by describing how Maud Martha loved dandelions … she loved their prettiness, their appearance aesthetically, only second to their ordinariness, their everydayness … she felt that if something ordinary could be cherished, so could she. so in the ordinary, Maud Martha found the possibility for self love. so i guess i think about how ordinary we are and how we come to cherish each other and how we have big and small feelings. and within the great expanse, we are small and ordinary and nothing but we are and can be cherished.

a brief ramble about identity, spiritual identity and empire.

story time!

so when i was first deciding to come out as a gay [yes. said. just like that. lol], i really thought that the most important thing to do was to reconcile my spiritual life with my sexual desires and orientation. i thought that once that work was done that the work of justice would be complete, that i’d have a clear way to think about the world and how to interrogate it. and that because i thought so much of what i was experiencing in terms of cognitive, emotional and spiritual dissonance was because of the conflictual and complex and contradictory messages and thoughts and ideas and behaviors i was experiencing and noticing among others. i thought once i finally reconciled my spiritual practice with my sexual orientation, then i could be a regular preacher. i figured that what was needed was a simplistic widening of the theological circle, of theological thought, to include me …and that’s all true. i needed to be included. and i am quite glad i figured out – with a community of folks that held me up and accountable, that showed me otherwise ways to live – i’m glad i was allowed space to figure out how to do that reconciling work.

but.

what was so unsettling was that that reconciliation was so very me-based, it was so very individualistic. and, eventually, such a reconciliation was unsatisfying. it was when i began to think about empire, when i began to really think about how economy and politics affect the everyday living of folks, that i began to think more broadly and to put much less emphasis on my personal, private practice of personal, private spirituality – and importantly, the personal, private practice of personal, private sexuality. it was only when i began – again, with help of community that would hold me accountable – to connect concerns about one’s erotic life to the violent policing that is empire, when i began to think about how empire requires of us to submit to its will, how it requires of us to accept inequity as normative and immovable, it is when i began to think about all those things that the stakes became a lot more clear. the stakes are not fundamentally about my or your personal, private practices of personal, private erotics or other behaviors. the stakes are about the dismantling, the uprooting and discarding of systems that have us bound, systems that perpetuate violence, famine, lack … systems that have the many fight for squandered resources. and insofar as our differences – in terms of erotics, spiritual practice, race or class – marks us, our differences are sent into the world to make us know with stunning clarity that otherwise is possible. (sent: “[A] whole bunch of things sent me to say it…And that’s what I mean – to be sent, to be transported out of yourself, it’s an ecstatic experience, it’s not an experience of interiority, it’s an experience of exteriority, it’s an exteriorization. And so we’re sent. We’re sent to one another. We are sent by one another to one another.) we are sent into the world with the various, infinite differences we carry in order to critique the normative function and form of this inequitable world, to imagine that there is otherwise possibility.

a good friend said to me that we often “don’t realize the deep level of interrogation required” and i think that’s true. so much of the way we think our relation to the world has to be interrogated to really be committed to dismantling systems of oppression. i don’t want a religious community to accept my gay-as-hell-ness while also being a religious community complicit with warfare, with violence against black, brown and indigenous peoples, terrible immigration practices, water shutoffs, homelessness, joblessness, neoliberal logics of school and healthcare privatization, etc.the stakes are high. we are contending against nothing but systemic world inequity, produced by the very thing that gives or withholds from us our “rights.” and this is not easy. and this is not fun. but it is urgent and necessary.

there is much required of you. and me. to put your hand to the plow of justice means to commit to connecting the dots, to being unflinching – even when, especially if, we are fatigued and tired – to keep pressing. but we press together with community, we share the load, we bear the burden together. there’s so much more to do. but it’s not up to me or you or anyone else to do it alone … but it is up to us that are committed to justice to work together, even through disagreement and argument about how such work gets done, to commit to being with each other in community, to struggling together. because empire would have us be separated…and fighting each other so that it can do its perpetual violence in its many guises.

Against Water Shutoffs and Occupation: The Omm Bomm Ba Boom

The urgency to write has never felt more acute. To attend to, even through what seems to be utter powerlessness and fatigue, the atrocities being felt globally on both large and small scales is necessary. But how to do so, how to respond with a precision and clarity and depth and nuance and rigor. And, most importantly, care. To want to respond with care. And yes, as a modality of care, to respond with beauty. To desire the beautiful against violence and death. To trade beauty for ashes, to trade joy for mourning. All this is desirous now, even within – and pertinently because it emerges against – such varied, interrelated, large and small sorts of suffering. To imagine the otherwise, to live into it, to love and want it, to find that it already is and has always been enacted. Has always been with us. All it takes is a looking, a listening.

We come from and are within the tradition of the otherwise. The pattin juba. The work song, the raised spiritual. The hallelujah anyhow, nevertheless, in spite of. The moan, the shout. The play cousin and auntie, the mee-maw, mom-mom. The pop-pop. The “she be liiiiiike.” The habitual be.We come from and are and enact and announce what Amiri Baraka called the omm bomm ba boom. And this omm bomm ba boom is an energy, a force of vitality, flow. Keeps us alive against wishes for premature, social and physical death. Somehow, we make it.Violently excluded through law, as law, violently targeted by law, our flesh severed and ripped and chained; cuffed, ghettoed, held in occupation in militarized zones both here and there. The history of black flesh in western civilization is the perfecting of carceral and militarized terror, from pattyrollers to paddy rollers. The history of indigenous flesh in western civilization is the perfecting of genocide, of total obliteration and intense, intentional acts of forgetting. Access to resources – health, education, financial, food, shelter, air – obliterated, obliterated only insofar as we ever actually had full and free access in the first place. Yet the violently excluded created in the otherwise, with, in and through the verve of the oom bomm ba boom, not merely from or because of duress. But created because beauty and joy are there, flourish there, in the omm bomm ba boom. Created with, in and through because the omm bomm ba boom does not find its genesis or originary moment in acts of violence but, rather, rises to the occasion of violence. It is what we have, it is what we outpour. The violence of law cannot create joy or beauty. No wonder why it’s across the railroad tracks, in the zones of the excluded, that those considered to have everything eternally return to sit with, learn from, voyeuristically interrogate and almost always misappropriate those of us considered to have and be nothing.Africville. Austin. Brixton. Brooklyn. Detroit. Gaza. Harlem. New Orleans. Sapelo Island. Silverlake.

The omm boom ba boom is a resource of perpetually imagining, while enacting in such imaginative drive, an otherwise. Here, now. Then, there.

There is an episode of “Twilight Zone” that I remember watching when I was a very young child. Titled “A Little Piece and Quiet,” the episode is about a housewife named Penny that was bothered by the noisiness of the world in which she lived. Awakened daily by a loud alarm clock, barking dogs, phones ringing, loud children and annoying husband, Penny simply wanted a space of reprieve, a Sabbath from noise, from the daily, ongoing clamor that seemed to her to be inescapable. While digging in her garden one day, she found a box containing a pendant and begins to wear the newfound jewelry. Later in the day, while her children were fighting and her husband was pestering her about his ripped shirt, she screamed “shut up” and time stopped. Finally, a moment of peace and quiet. The phrase “start talking” would allow time to begin again.But the episode is not only about loud children and the complaints of a husband. It is fundamentally about warfare and fear about nuclear weaponry. First aired in 1985, the episode is primarily about tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Throughout the episode were anti-nuclear weapons and Penny stopped time in order to be unbothered by them while shopping. The show ends with a problem: the United States is being bombarded with missiles from the Soviet Union and Penny froze time just … in time. She left the house to see people standing in the street looking at a missile just over the city about to make contact and, it is presumed, destroy everything and everyone. She had to decide if she would live in the quietude of this stopped time or if she would allow for the destroying of the world. In either case, sociality would be fundamentally annihilated.

This doomsday analysis where there is a rock and a hard place, where there are two insufferable options, seems to animate lots of contemporary “life after the end of the world” movies and television I’ve seen recently. Movies like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Snowpiercer, The Dark Knight Rises and television shows like The Leftovers each appear, in their own way, to exist within the logic of desiring a little peace and quiet that is nothing other than the choice between being utterly destroyed or being absolutely solitary. Each movie has its own plot, of course, so I’m conflating a bit for a larger point. These depictions of life after revolution, after the end of the earth, never disrupt the logic of whiteness and neoliberalism after the so-called revolutionary moments are enacted, after the “end of the world” as is currently known. The Dark Knight Rises, for example, could not decided if it wanted to be a critique of Wall Street and hypercapitalism, and the exploitation of the masses or if it wanted to be a critique against the masses, the commons, that produce such revolutionary pushback against the neoliberal state. Snowpiercer could only imagine getting off the train through side doors, never imagining people to be otherwise than self-motivated and self-absorbed when given the opportunity to lead. Planet of the Apes simply makes animals that have been exploited mirror the selfish, egotistical impulses of bad humans such that “revolution” that would overthrow inequitable power is co-constitutive with egotistical creatures that want to, excuse the term, “ape” the bourgeois subject of enlightened thought. And The Leftovers simply has lamentable characters that have nothing celebratory to give, have nothing other than melancholy through which to work, nothing but sadness, depression and despair.

Each depiction, in other words, is grounded in a refusal to think the radical tradition, the black radical tradition, the radical imagination of the otherwise that has always been enacted against the logics of western civilization’s theologies and philosophies of bourgeois subjects, rugged individuals, displacements from property, thefts of land. Each imagine from the axiom and necessity of whiteness and neoliberal anti-sociality as the only mode of organizing. They each grapple with the deleterious effects of western civilization without interrogating the grounds of this mode of civilizing the world. As such, each implodes and becomes undone by internal illogics, by internal conflictual loyalties. Each only imagines a kind of personhood that produces revolutionary upheaval or life after crisis through the perpetuation of individualist projects of narcissism and egotism. None of them considers the hard work and necessary sociality of the otherwise. Each can only imagine through forcing imagination to be within the bounds of the given, which is the known, world.These films reflect our world, fearing the leaps and bounds of imaginative flights of fancy, they do not “think enough…”

iii

The proliferation of warfare as quotidian, as an ordinary and everyday event, is here. And warfare has never only been about weapons that can produce death. Because of the interconnectivity of our digital and analogue world, we increasingly know this fact: warfare is about the evisceration of infrastructure. Stephen Graham, for example, writes, “The US and Israeli forces, for example, have worked systematically to ‘demodernize’ entire urban societies through the destruction of the infrastructure of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iraq since 1991. States have replaced total war against cities with the systemic destruction of water and electricity supplies with weapons – such as bombs which rain down millions of graphite spools to short-circuit electricity stations –designed specifically for this task.”

Or, in the case of Detroit, the state destroys simply by shutting off access to water by asserting that people would rather pay for cable television than life’s necessities. And I opine that this notion of television over and against water is simply another means to pathologize those that experience impoverishment because of the inequitable distribution of economic resources. Shutting off water in Detroit, the evisceration of infrastructural security and perhaps causing public health crises, is deemed an act countering the purported immorality and pathology of impoverished peoples. The Detroit water crisis is, in my estimation, an act of warfare. Detroit peoples are enemies of the state.Warfare as currently established in and as law, in other words, is a mode of punishment not simply for so-called wrongdoers nor aggressors against the nation, but is a punishment for a generalized way of life, a form of organizing and existing with other people. Warfare targets not individuals, but collectivities that are thought to be – through vulgar theologies and philosophies, – antagonistic. Warfare creates crises: public health, educational, environmental, existential. War produces damage to city infrastructure such that perhaps now we can think the relation between Iraq and Chicago, Detroit and Palestine – which is to say, rethink the relation of the so-called here and there – anew. Perhaps the portmanteau Chiraq is more precise than is initially apparent.

Warfare, through law, is about the excess it creates, making singular events of shootings, bombings, massacres, into iterable examples. Warfare is the enactment of law and is about curtailing possible future actions. It seeks to control, before any action at all, the very thought of others, it is a delimitation, a refusal to think too much, a fear of imagination as the grounds of its operation. The force of excess punishment is then the basis for warfare. We see and notice this in general legal practices. Folks that are said to have “broken the law” are sentenced not just because of their infraction but harshly so, often, in order to “make an example” for others of what is possible, of what the state has the capacity to produce. Such punishment of individuals, then, is never about their rehabilitation but about making the singular event a generalizable moment. Such that, when considering warfare, the destruction of infrastructure and the supposed “collateral damage” deaths of civilians is always already justified within the delimitation of its own thought logics. The state, simply, cannot imagine liberation, freedom, viable life. The state can only proliferate by refusing imagination, by constricting thought to the already given bourgeois subject of enlightened thought as most in need of protection. This subject is produced through capitalism, through the financialization and militarization of everyday life. This subject is produced through the aversion to blackness and the obliteration of indigenes. This subject is produced through the fiction of categorical distinction, through making theological, philosophical, material borders that separate us from them, here from there.

Joshua fought the battle of Jericho by, for seven days, marching around a wall that operated through the theological and philosophical thought of pure distinction. Folks on one side of the wall were given protection against the people on the other side. Enemies were considered to occupy separated territories and such territories had to be made to be purely different. But territorial difference did not emerge because of the land, but because of the way people thought about the land. Such that racialization – differentiation based on a mode of thinking difference as impenetrable – was created through walls. Whether those walls are physical or simply enacted by passports, visas and the possibility of gun violence, it is time to rethink the efficacy of such distinctions. Borders between the US and Mexico, between Gaza and Israel, between Chicago and Iraq, each serve the function of producing theological-philosophical distinction that can be maintained, that can be made to be pure. And these distinctions serve to justify violence against whomever is construed as “outside” its thought limits. The people existing within, and separated by, such borders become the embodiment of empire’s ruse: that we are different from them, that we are distinctly from here and not there, that here and there are both separate and in need of militarized defense.

My research, in general, is animated by considering the problematics that arise when some kind of thought is considered purely, absolutely, impenetrably different from other kinds of thought. I interrogate theology and philosophy as categories of pure difference, categories that cohere by negating all kinds of material, animated, fleshly modes of organization. The material, animated, fleshly modes of organization are thought to be the inhibition to quiet, frozen, thoughtful reflection. Who decides what is and is not theological or philosophical thought except the one that claims oneself to be a theologian, a philosopher? This claim for oneself as the grounds from which to decide difference is what informs the sorta nation building and differentiation in our milieu. Reflecting on the borders that have made Gaza an open air prison, the walls that separate the United States from Mexico, the supposed difference between Chicago and Iraq, all have given me a way to think more rigorously and imaginatively about how manifestations of physical, state-sanctioned differentiation are simply modes of thinking difference.

Yet it seems that cities, states, are blurring lines of absolute difference. As one example, “The New York Police Department…has recently established a chain of ten overseas offices as part of its burgeoning anti-terror efforts.”[1] What, then, is New York? What is that which marks its material distinction? What, in other words, does the “local” means in the age of digitization and militarization? The spread of municipal power through militarized surveillance and the always attendant possibility of combat makes these questions crucial. Militarization, the violence of empire, both produces categorical theological-philosophical distinction through borders while simultaneously it produces the “local,” now, as the possibility of violent encounter. The New York Police Department has expanded its reach by establishing offices overseas. The NYPD also surveils Muslim professors and students at University of Pennsylvania … in Philadelphia, PENNSYLVANIA and students at Yale in New Haven, CONNECTICUT. New York has produced itself as a city with a regulatory boundary that emerges from the capacity to surveil, to make certain groups enemy of its “municipality.” New York, in other words, is formed by what can happen to New York and the jurisdiction of policing now extends to any space, group, ideology, thought, mode of operation, mode of sociality, that they purport is a threat to that state configuration. With the spreading of NYPD, it is not that distinction itself has dissipated. Instead, the logic of distinction has been made more explicit, has been made to show itself as what it always was: a mode of thought, a theology-philosophy, a constrained, anti-imaginatory way to think the world. No longer is New York relegated to the land but is an ideology, producing with intensity the distinction between those that are thought to belong and those that do not. New distinctions, along with new territorial conflict, emerge concurrently.

Nahum Chandler, in his excellent work, elaborates how the operationalizing of pure distinction as the architectural core of western civilization finds its strongest articulation with W.E.B. Du Bois’s assertion, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” The current blurring of cities and states lines, through the spread of warfare tactics, seemingly do away with the calcifying of distinction, of difference as deficiency. Seemingly. What really proliferates is the logic of pure difference, the militarization of the color line. This makes of us all the possible enemies of the state. Eric Garner, according to some officers of the NYPD, became an enemy of the state of New York for attempting to sell untaxed cigarettes, ending in his murder. And people in France can be arrested for disturbing peace by protesting in the service of Palestinians. France, by refusing pro-Palestinian demonstrations, blurs the borders between itself and Israel. College students can be pepper sprayed and arrested for peaceful demonstration for lower tuition, militarizing even the college campus. The state produces difference, difference as enemy.

This is not to argue that difference doesn’t exist. This isn’t some melting pot cliché or desire for simple multiculturalism nor post-racialism. Rather, I am trying to point out that the logics of western civilization purport that difference is impenetrable – that it is unknowable – and as such, is fear-inducing and thus, must be controlled. Impenetrable difference is what must be pathologized by the nation-state, must be sought out, must be violently displaced in order to produce citizenship, to produce patriotism. To produce, in a word, sameness. The NYPD could not imagine that Eric Garner meant something to someone, that he was somebody. They could only think him through the theological-philosophical delimitation of the state, as black flesh in need of their harnessing and chokehold.

How dare she plant flowers in used grenade shells? How dare she take what was used to destroy and desire something beautiful to emerge from it? Such desiring, such planting of flowers, is the critique of the ongoing violence and violation of Palestinians bordered off, sequestered, occupied by the state of Israel. But look, most profoundly, at her and his hands.The pouring of water into grenade shells, the care and concern shown to the life that bursts forth and free from such desired death. This is the “hallelujah, anyhow.” It does not explain away death and destruction. What it demonstrates is that the force of imaginative possibility cannot be destroyed even by grenades, drones, ground attacks, airstrikes. Their hands delicately handle the would-be planters, their hands handle delicately the water bottles. A prayer released with each speck of dirt into the shell, with each droplet of water outpoured. A prayer and a breath. The otherwise imagined, the otherwise produced from the ruins, from the rubble, of violent encounter. The creation of a garden. The expansion of imagination.

How dare they dance in Waffle House?

Yahh at the waffle house

How dare these kids not look to saccharine, pathologizing, state-sanctioned “initiatives” to produce life? How dare they dance, take up space, as so many flowers emerging from the rubble? How dare these kids still move in and through the world, making their fleshly reality something with which – with noise, and rhythm and blues – we must contend? Each “aaahh!” a demonstration of the otherwise. The otherwise as already here. Their “aaahh!” and claps and stomps and snaps are revolutionary upheaval, not predicated upon the destroying of the world or making the singular individual most responsible for other, hopeful outcomes. Rather, they produce together in the here and now, the then and there. Look at the flesh, the care and nuance given through elongation and splits, bends, twists.

Produced with new gardens, with new dances, are choreographies and itineraries for otherwise worlds. Produced with, in, and as the verve and force of imaginative, speculative possibility is the omm bomm ba boom. New gardens, new dances, are imaginative like the black simile, the “she be liiiiike…” as descriptive for someone’s behavior. After such a declaration of how someone “be like,” is typically a performance: a voice change, a demonstration of choreography, a walk, a talk. Being, in such a social world, is predicated upon the articulation, elaboration and ornamentation of what it means to be like but not. This being like but not is displacement. How dare those of us that have been, and still are today, displaced through practices of settler colonialism, enslavement, mass incarceration, poverty, food instability, water shutoffs, open air prisons, how dare we produce life out of such rubble, against the desires of the rubble, against the desires of empire? How dare the kids be like while dancing, how dare the family be like while planting flowers? We try, with each breath, to inculcate within us the omm bomm ba boom.

Amiri Baraka knew something of the omm bomm ba boom, the force of resistance against violent uprooting and displacement that empire seeks to destroy. His words, prophetic, poetic, speak to us today still. We in deep trouble because the omm bomm ba boom is being banned, the gathering together in the name and cause of justice is being criminalized, the thirst for water, shelter, food being razed by infrastructural attack. We gotta find, keep, hold and give away the omm bomm ba boom. If empire expands the understanding of itself through violence, we gotta expand the notion of who we are, who we be, who we be liiiike through enlarging the omm bomm ba boom in our hearts.

—

[1]Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London ; New York: Verso, 2011), xvi.

** First published July 21, 2014

The “Biology” of the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative

We have been named from the outside, yet remain unknown. Needed for coherence, we have been disavowed for our fleshly capacity to derange normativity. We – us blacks and queers and women and trans* people and and and – are varied, many, intersecting varied modalities of identity. We – us that are not white, cis, heterosexual, male folks – come in many forms. We have been marked as marginal and discardable only after we arrived, marked from varied sides, from every whichaway. And this after our arrival only because rule and law exists insofar as it tries to correct an already existent unruliness. This unruliness is life, social life, life in and as blackness. Rules and laws are utilized to order the unruliness of the “us,” of the blacks and queers and women and trans* people and and and. Rules and laws “invent” as pathological our already existent mode of sociality as in need of control. Hoes and sissies and nappy hair in need of perms, rhetorically rehearse a more fundamental and foundational aversion to queer things, a queer mode of living that sets loose the very concept of blackness, because in such a concept is resistance that testifies to the power and force of gathering in the name and cause of something greater than the individual self. The individual self is a biological entity, a body, that can be counted.

But we live in a moment wherein the interrogation of the so-called naturalness of biology is necessary, wherein the social construction of the category needs be made explicit. Biology has never been on the side of the marginalized because the categorical mode of thought emerged from the same racialist projects that produced simple assertions about the purported simplemindedness of black folks. Biology has been used to pathologize; to on the one hand say that we simply are beholden to more primal urges and are thus unable to rise to the level of culture, while on the other it is used to explain away and justify things racism, patriarchy, sexism, homo- and transphobia. Think, for example, of the simplistic assertion that “men are visual creatures” … in such an assertion is a capitulation to sexual violence, is an assent to the notion that being “visual” is what disallows male-identified persons from acting justly because libidinal drives force them to look and to react with knee jerks and gazes and inequitable displays of power. The visuality of men, accepted as a biological – and thus, unavoidable – fact is the same sorta ideology that set loose not just the idea of racial difference but a hierarchy that says those who do not register visually as white are in need of constant correction and control through coercion. Visuality is but one register of such coercion. It occurs, likewise, in terms of how folks sound, how folks smell and feel, how folks taste. Biology, and really all of that which is called “science,” is harnessed in the service of patriarchy and no amount of appeals to it will do much good.

For Mom, On Father's Day — For Mom, On Father’s Day

Some of us have just celebrated, while others of us have lamented, Father’s Day in the United States. This day seems to bring out many emotions, and much of that emotive response is grounded in patriarchy and the purported need for a male-identified person to live “in the household” as proof positive of the proper development of children. It seems that a penis in the household becomes tantamount to a stabilizing presence, that the biologically male body serves as fortifying the unruliness and uncontrollability of the female flesh. The flesh of females, particularly and intensely the flesh of females that are likewise racialized black, register as that which is dangerous for biologically male and female children. We discovered this idea with Moynihan and his “report” that laid at the feet of black women the “tangle of pathology” of black social life. If a biological penis were in the household, then black social life would cohere with the wishes of the nation-state, reproducing the concept of the normative family, one that could be counted on to defend the nation, to be properly patriotic, to capitulate to the wishes of empire. The unruly biological black female mother has not the capacity within her to be a protector or provider, but merely functions as a presence of production. Black female flesh is proper for reproducing bodies for the furtherance of the goals of empire but certainly is not one that could provide something like stability in the lives of children. Such that black female flesh is constantly on display and desired for its capacities for production, though hypersexualized and discarded because of such hypersexualization.

So, many lamented the celebration of black women on Father’s Day, a day for folks with biological, and importantly not constructed, penises.This card seems to have offended people because according to many, “only men can be a father.” But what does this statement, and the sentiment behind it, actually mean? How have we arrived at a categorical distinction of what a father is supposed to be or mean or do that is not always and everywhere constructed by the milieu in which we live currently? If a father is one that protects, provides, cares for and is concerned with the concept of the family, how is that not reflected by the category we call “mother”? What, in theory and actuality, delineates the difference between such gendered roles? It all comes back to biology, how biology is utilized to not only make a claim for absolute difference but is used to then pathologize those of them, those of us, that do not abide by such strictures. Few of us, of course, do, but the aspiration towards such abiding is something to which we should attend in our intensely, explicitly neoliberal world. Rather than celebrating the fact that folks want to celebrate the important people in their lives, black female flesh, black mothers, were castigated for attempting to “play the role of the father,” because biology set the parameters for what is and is not possible for that categorical distinction. Biological distinction is, in other words, fuckin all of us up.

iii

Graduating and celebrating all sorts of academic accomplishments, Karlesha Thurman was called a “hoe” because of her public breastfeeding of her child during her graduation ceremony.Because the set of assumptions about black female flesh as always unruly and out of order, sex and sexuality are always already moralized against. Many attempted to defend Karlesha – and rightfully so because folks that argued against her were simply silly – by saying that she was producing a biological act by breastfeeding, that what she was doing was grounded in science, not cultural practice nor a general cultural immorality. But such defenses only worked in the service of reifying the absolute difference and distinction between science on the one hand and culture on the other. Those defenses that turned to science – through biology – as the means that normalized her breastfeeding only ended up mining the very category of black female pathology in order to articulate why she, as individuated, should be given a pass.But such should not be the case. Why do we allow dudes to walk around beaches and streets and clubs without shirts but not women? Is it because there is something inherently different in the chests of men and women biologically? Is it because folks want to protect women’s flesh from being subject to gratuitous violence and violation? Not so. Not at all. Women are subject to violence – sexual and otherwise – not because of the unruliness of their flesh but because of the cultural collusion with science that produces something like patriarchal, sexist renderings of culture. Folks talked shit about Karlesha Thurman because not even biology offers recourse, because blackness and female flesh exist outside the bounds of biology.What is it about Karlesha Thurman’s “biological” condition that made her a “hoe”…? What is it that transforms something that is natural into something that is in need of being tamed, controlled, relaxed? It is the collusion of cultural with science that produces such a rendering of her feeding her child. And this collusion of science and culture needs much attention and interrogation.

What we discover with Karlesha, and more emphatically with Blue Ivy Carter, is that there are two kinds of naturalness and, as such, two kinds of biological explanations for how folks exist in the world: that which is natural but in need of control and that which needs to be tamed; and that which should be cultivated, protected, proliferated, congratulated. Blue Ivy Carter has been the subject of hella scrutiny because of her hair, naturally grown out of her head though it may be.This particular photograph was such a problem that Blue Ivy became subject to a Change.org petition titled “Comb her hair”. The desire for her hair to be combed, to be otherwise than nappy – and both Crissle of The Read as well as Kimberly Foster at For Harriet have discussed this – is an affect of the naturalization of whiteness. But to move in their direction and further still, it is not just whiteness but the ways whiteness as biological is naturalized, how white bodies biologically are proper and that which falls beyond and aside the productions of white bodies are deemed problematic. Blue Ivy’s natural, biological hair is in need of taming, perming, combing, control. Her hair is not like other hair because, in effect, it is not white enough. Resorting to biological explanations for her hair simply won’t be enough because it is the unruliness of its blackness that is being interrogated, not any concept of so-called naturalness.

The unruliness of Blue Ivy’s hair, the unruliness of Karlesha Thurman’s breastfeeding, the unruliness of celebrating flesh that doesn’t have biological penises for Father’s Day: they all mine an already existent pathology of black social life as in need of control, particularly through acts of violence. And this is true not just for the flesh of women-identified folks but for men and boys as well. There is pathology that is assumed to be true for black social life and only then, after such pathology is established as axiomatic, do various modes of categorical thought come to “explain” the reasons for unruly, queer, off, problematic behavior. And it is the afterlife of presumably true black pathology that Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative (MBKI) coheres and builds its capacity for supposed change.

MBIK is a program that seeks to help black and brown boys with self esteem, to give them mentorship, particularly by telling them they have “no excuses” and by telling their parents that they are the ones most implicated in the failings of their children. The initiative was created on the heels of George Zimmerman’s egregious acquittal and after the murder of Jordan Davis. Yet, instead of talking about structural and institutional racism, about the ways blackness is figured in the national imaginary as dangerous, as violent and as – yes – pathological, Obama chose rather an initiative that would set at the feet of the children so-attacked their issues in need of change. Obama ongoingly utilizes so-called black pathology as a means to identify with black American community: though his father was Kenyan and his mother white American, he uses the narrative of the absentee black father – one with much popular appeal, though not verifiable “scientifically” (funny how even science and math would disavow the very appeal he makes to it) – in order to identify with black American social life. But more than identify with it, he seeks to continually distance himself from such social life by declaring his success even though he purportedly shares conditions with the black folks he chides. Obama talks often with black folks about how his father was missing and how he smoked marijuana, and it is that lack and bad behavior supposedly gives him a foundation to talk about and to black folks in the States and their ongoing failings with respect to being impoverished, lacking education, having poor health and being constantly incarcerated.

Obama’s speech that inaugurated the MBKI intimated that he is exceptional because, unlike most black (and brown) boys, he had folks that cared about him and his well-being throughout the duration of his life. Such that his “bad behavior” did not impact him negatively in ways that it does others. This is not him speaking to privilege but him distancing himself from the black and brown boys that normatively do not have folks who love, care, nor respect them. Yet there have been folks organizing in the service of and love for black and brown kids for centuries, institutions from churches and mosques and schools to sororities and fraternities and social organizations.

The very foundation of the MBKI is founded upon a faulty idea that black and brown boys don’t feel care or concern from an early age. Yet research from educators like Janice Hale has demonstrated that black kids enter schoolsmore excited and ready to learn, achieve better and are more active than any other racial ethnic group, which is why Hale argues so much in favor of early childhood education. Black kids enter into schooling situations ready to learn even if, as Obama pointed out, they have a less extensive vocabulary than do white children at the same age. The problem is precisely that early on, black children feel the effects of institutional structural inequity: this happens through both microaggressive racialist practices and through more official means like testing and placing kids into remedial classes because they have “behavioral issues.” MBKI includes women through negation, through saying that the pathologies of black womanhood, of black motherhood, of black teaching women is simply not enough to control the behavior of black boys. What is needed is the controlling, stabilizing force of the black father, the black man.

However, the main problem with MBKI is not that it does not explicitly include women in its plan – it includes women through pathologizing mothering and teaching – but that the initiative itself is grounded in a general, nonspecific black pathology as axiomatic. It is grounded in the conceptual zone and frame that says blackness is unruliness and this unruliness must be controlled through varied forms of violent encounter with the nation-state. Sometimes, the violent encounter is with Stop-and-Frisk measures, with the increasing militarization of state police and general police and carceral practices. Other times, the violent encounter is with Race to the Top and its focus on “accountability” and “results” and “no excuses,” though schooling in general has been assaulted under the this current and previous administrations in the service of privateering profits. And at other times, the violent encounter is with initiatives that simply rehearse the language, logic and rubrics of neoliberal, individualist uplift narratives. MBKI is a science project, one that is founded upon the need to understand and, thus control, black pathology.

Like so many Blue Ivy strands of uncombed hair, like so many Karlesha Thurman breastfeedings, like so many sissies in sanctuaries, MBKI is a tactic of controlling the excesses of black social life. We should resist this with all of our being.

“These hoes ain’t loyal,” is but one sensationalist quotation from Jamal Harrison Bryant’s recent sermon titled, “I Am My Enemies (sic) Worst Nightmare.” In this sermon, he also decried the fact that the Black Church has created the condition wherein the only black men willing to abide there are “sanctified sissies.” He also discussed how there are “more lesbians” in the black community than ever before. This all because of the dissolution of the black family as a categorically distinct and pure zone, one that is relegated to father, mother and children. The failure for loyalty is felt everywhere and throughout the sermon: women aren’t loyal to men, gays aren’t loyal to holy libidinal drives, all to say that the failure of loyalty is a debt and personal moral failing, is an individualist infraction that is in need of reproving and adjustment. Bryant relies on the same supposed pathologies of unruly black sexualities that produced the conditions wherein Karlesha Thurman could be called a hoe: that something about her, about our, flesh is excessive to the point of danger for the whole of the community. It is the job of the excessive ones to regulate our behaviors for the salvation of the community. But this move for regulation and repression is to occur so we can fully, as a community, participate in the bounds of neoliberalism, not to disrupt and disfigure its function and form. Perhaps being disloyal to such aspirations is a gift. What worries Bryant, I think, is what worries Obama: the unruliness and uncontrolled nature of black sociality. Each participates, through various rhetorics and modalities, in the belief of an already believed, a priori black pathology that has to be both sought after and, after being found, destroyed.

And it is this search for the destroying of unruliness, of untamed hair and breasts and sexualites, that allows me to finally understand what Hortense Spillers means when she says that the black American male-identified person has the unique opportunity to “say ‘yes’ to the female within.” And must respond not to this opportunity, but to it as demand. What Bryant’s sermon demonstrates is a desire to tame the unruliness of queerness, the unruliness of female flesh, that is not grounded in the biological body but in the force of that which is deemed unruly, queer, excessive by the nation-state, by the inequitable distribution of power. Bryant wants to tame and perm and relax and control the aesthetics of the Black Church, of Blackpentecostalism, because in such aesthetic practice is the deformation of the very aspiration towards inclusion in national political initiatives that are only ever aspirations towards inclusion in neoliberal violence. Obama likewise wants to search for and destroy a similar unruliness. He participates in this search through Race to the Top measures, through initiatives that are supposed to “keep,” but that refuse to name emphatically systemic and instructional racism, sexism, homophobia, violence. They each tend towards the basic, pernicious ideology of blackness as offense, blackness as toxic and immoral.

What is needed is a general disbelief in the projects of empire, no matter how seductive the call for inclusion. A disbelief in the idea that what we are and already have is not enough. A disbelief in the pernicious and insidious ways pathologizing blackness operates in our moment. A disbelief in the capacity of empire to produce justice. A disbelief that nappy hair is bad, that breastfeeding in public insinuates acts of flagrant violence, that sissies in sanctuaries are not likewise vital for the quickening force of religious community. What is needed is a disbelief in the law of the father because the “law” is what establishes the very capacity to be a father, it normativizes certain relations as more important than others. But this has never been the truth for black folks, and I suspect others as well. Play aunties, play cousins, mom-moms, paw-paws, half-sisters, half-brothers, the people down the street and up the way: other socialities exist and cannot be reduced to or contained by the biologic necessity of blood. Biology restricts sociality and purports to be itself the grounds of culture. And it is this same law that incarcerates with racial and classed bias.

Yet, we can do and think and be otherwise. We can keep each other aside from, outside and beyond milquetoast federal initiatives. What is needed, in other words, is a disbelief in the current configuration of things that press both science and culture into the service of finding and critiquing blackness as deficit and detriment. This disbelief is the saying ‘yes’ to the radical force of black womanhood within.

Nothingness and the Aesthetics of Having Been

Having been said to be nothing, this is a love letter written to we who have been, and are today still, said to have nothing. And to a tradition of such nothingness. This is a love letter to a love tradition, a tradition which emerges from within, carries and promises nothingness as the centrifugal, centripetal, centrifugitive force released against, and thus is a critical intervention into, the known world, the perniciously fictive worlds of our making. Some might call this fictive world “real.” Some might call this fictive world reality. Some might call this fictive world the project of western civilization, complete with its brutally violent capacity for rapacious captivity. This is a love letter to a tradition of the ever overflowing, excessive nothingness that protects itself, that with the breaking of families, of flesh, makes known and felt, the refusal of being destroyed. There is something in such nothingness that is not, but still ever excessively was, is and is yet to come. This is a love letter written against notions of ascendancy, written in favor of the social rather than modern liberal subject’s development. What emerges from the zone of nothingness, from the calculus of the discarded? If something makes itself felt, known, from the zone of those of us said to be and have nothing, then the interrogation of what nothingness means is our urgent task.

If you had been standing on the white sands of this island (Sapelo Island, GA) at dayclean in 1803, or a little later, you might have seen a tall, dark-skinned man with narrow features, his head covered with a cap resembling a Turkish fez, unfold his prayer mat, kneel and pray to the east while the sun rose. This was Bilali, the most famous and powerful of all the Africans who lived on this island during slavery days, and the first of my ancestors I can name.[i]

Born approximately 1760 in Timbo, Futa Jallon, Bilali was stolen into laborious conditions as a teenager and taken to Middle Caicos before being sold to Thomas Spalding of Sapelo Island in 1802. A collection of writings, known as Ben Ali’s Diary, was at least partially written by Bilali in Arabic script.[ii] Bilali’s writing is meditative speech and script, a mode of enfleshment on the page in both easily accessible and incoherent markings. A thirteen-page manuscript – five of which cannot be translated to any linguistic rhetoric or grammar, thus remaining opaque and impenetrable for any reader – written in the nineteenth century, it was given to Francis Goulding in 1859. Though discussed under the rubric of “autobiography,” the document contains no formal identifying information about its author, is not a collection of dates and life occurrences, does not have in it information about ancestry or progeny. It contains what I call a “choreosonic itinerary and protocol” for prayer and ablution, for praise to Allah. “Choreosonic” is a portmanteau underscoring the fact that choreography and sonicity, movement and sound, are inextricably linked and have to be thought together. As such, the choreosonic itinerary and protocol is a series of placements and arrangements for how blackness, life from within the zone of nothingness, through performance resisted the theological-philosophical modes of thought that created the concept of racial difference. Bilali’s writing begins with the opening benediction: “In the name of Allah, The Most Merciful The Most beneficent. Allah’s blessings upon our lord Muhammad, and upon his family and companions, blessings and salutations.”[iii] It includes: “Using both the right and left hands, one puts water into the mouth at least three times, and puts water into one’s nose three times [cleaning it]. One washes one’s face three times [7:1-11], then wipes the right hand up to the [elbow] joint [k`abain], and the left hand up to the [elbow] joint [k`abain].”[iv] And it includes the Adhan, the call to prayer, “Allah is Great, Allah is Great. I bear witness that [a’an] there is no god but Allah, I bear witness that [a’an] there is no god but Allah [9:1-14]…Come to prayer [hi ‘al salah], come to prayer [salah].”[v]

What has befuddled translators is the near five pages which do not translate into any linguistic content coherent for readers at all that is at the heart – in the middle – of the document. Indeterminacy is at the heart of the textual matter for thought, forcing scholars to ask: is the incoherent script the rehearsal of one who had not fully learned Arabic; is the script attempting to sound like what it looks like? More fundamentally, an ever unasked series of connected questions: what is this text? What is this nothingness at the core, at the heart, of the writing event’s performance? What is the mode of existence, the beingness, of one who would write such incoherences, such indeterminacies? Having been translatable text, why a breakdown in the middle? Why such nothingness at the interior of worship’s itinerary and protocol?Nothingness has at its core, meditation and celebration, often misunderstood because of its refusal to give itself over to rationalist projects of cognition and thought. The five pages of nonempty, non-readable script speaks back against, and is, resistance prior to the articulation and enunciation of power. Bilali’s script speaks against, in other words, the general conception of nothingness as pure emptiness and purely simple. Bilali’s graphemic markings serve to break down the distinction between script and speech, between talk and text, and is a preface, a prelude, a prolegomenon to the music, the sound, of nothingness. In a word, the nothingness of such script is anything but empty; it is, rather, full. Overflowing. Bilali’s writing is mystical in its unsaying: something is both given and withheld with incomprehensible script.

What does the interior of the chalk look like? Let us see. We break it into two pieces. Are we now at the interior? Exactly as before we are again outside. Nothing has changed. The pieces of chalk are smaller, but bigger or smaller does not matter now … The moment we wanted to open the chalk by breaking it, to grasp the interior, it had enclosed itself again. … In any case, such breaking up never yields anything but what was already here, from which it started.[vi]

Similar to what Martin Heidegger describes about the piece of chalk, Bilali’s script breaks grammar, the word itself, but holds within each broken fragment, each severed piece of flesh through brutal violence, something of the sociality that made the script possible, the conditions and zones of emergence and horizon. Broken and laid bare is the concept of the bourgeois individual of enlightenment, the one who writes oneself into being through autobiographesis, through scripting histories in diaries.The breaking makes intensely and intentionally evident the withholding of the centrifugitive force of black sociality. Having been, am, having been, will be.

III

This is a love letter to a tradition of those whom have been called, those who are still called, nothing. This is a love letter to those whom are thought to have nothing and, in such not having, have nothing to give. In another register and key, those whom are called nothing have also been called niggers. I quote at length. Apologies.

LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT NIGGERS, the oppressed minority within our minority. Always down. Always out. Always complaining that they can’t catch a break. Notoriously poor about doing for themselves. Constantly in need of a leader but unable to follow in any direction that’s navigated by hard work, self-reliance. And though they spliff and drink and procreate their way onto welfare doles and WIC lines, niggers will tell you their state of being is no fault of their own……So I say this: It’s time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck. Just as whites may be concerned with the good of all citizens but don’t travel their days worrying specifically about the well-being of hillbillies from Appalachia, we need to send niggers on their way. We need to start extolling the most virtuous of ourselves. It is time to celebrate the New Black Americans—those who have sealed the Deal, who aren’t beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right. It is time to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement.[vii]

In the screenplay for 12 Years a Slave, the character Clemons Ray conspires with Solomon Northup and another character to overthrow of the slaver boat saying, “the rest here are niggers, born and bred slaves. Niggers ain’t got no stomach for a fight, not a damn one.”[viii] Curious, the consistency between the statement in the film 12 Years a Slave and the rhetoric about the general incapacities for niggers in the former quote. Both were, curiously enough, written by John Ridley. The former statement about ascendancy was scripted in 2006, the latter, of course, in 2013. It is not that Northup’s narrative doesn’t think about peoples enslaved from birth as belonging to a particular kind of category. Indeed, Northup wrote, “There was not another slave we dared to trust. Brought up in fear and ignorance as they are, it can scarcely be conceived how servilely they will cringe before a white man’s look. It was not safe to deposit so bold a secret with any of them, and finally we three resolved to take upon ourselves alone the fearful responsibility of the attempt.”[ix] Whereas Northup seemed to ground his concern about not trusting others with a general desire to protect those others from possible harm – why else would he describe the attempt as a “fearful responsibility”? – Ridley transforms the scene utilizing language explicitly anti-social, explicitly making a categorical distinction that is supposedly ontological. They have, on the boat, alienated themselves, have already ascended. They are, on the boat already, New Black Americans.Ridley is interested in the “state of being” for those he calls nigger, for those whom we might think of as nothing. This state of being, this mode of existence is about the necessity to escape the social, the necessity to articulate oneself as individual against the social world. Ridley transforms the narrative into one wherein Northup must ascend from, escape the conditions of, remain unscathed by, the black social world, the world of niggers, the zone of nothingness. Such that the film merely represses any modality of sociality in the service of producing the individual. Such that any singing and dancing is labor for the master class. The world so construed, Northup’s fiddling and eventual singing of “Roll, Jordan, Roll” becomes a moment of defeat as he has, finally, descended fully into the dregs of the social world of the enslaved, descended fully into nothingness.

Having been born a freeman, and for more than thirty years enjoyed the blessings of liberty in a free State – and having at the end of that time been kidnapped and sold into Slavery, where I remained, until happily rescued in the month of January, 1853, after a bondage of twelve years – it has been suggested that an account of my life and fortunes would not be uninteresting to the public.[x]

Northup begins his narrative, first published in 1854, with the words “Having been…” How can we understand something about Northup’s having and, further, having been? What is presupposed with such a formulation? What is presupposed about being, about existence, about existence in black, about presupposition itself? Having been has within it the idea that there is something there, that something was there before the inaugural moment of its declaration. We can consider having been the perfect gerund and the subject of the sentence. Having is the present participle; been is the past participle. So though we can think of it as the perfect gerund, I want to consider the declaration which sets loose the narrative as the convergence of present and past, as a convergence which undoes notions of linear, progressive space and time.

Having been announces – through unsaying, through the nothingness of such non-speech – the otherwise, that which takes the form of the interrogative: What of the now? What of the soon to come? In the having been is the capacity for manifold temporality, an arhythmic modality of temporal measure against the line of Newtonian’s smooth transition from past to present to future, from here to there. The having been produces, perhaps W.E.B. Du Bois might say, the unasked question of being, of the being of blackness as manifold and, as always, interrogative, anticipatory, antagonistic. Anticipatory insofar as the having been anticipates a set of questions that are unasked, unvoiced, backgrounded, questions that are nothing but are still there, unasked and unvoiced in their fullness. Having been, what are you? Having been, what will you be?Bilali’s writing includes “a collection of divergent glossia in which none is ostensibly placed as authoritative”[xi]; maybe we can think about the noise, that which was discarded, as the sonic substance, the speechifying of nothingness, the nothingness of glossolalia. Bilali’s incoherent script that frustrates serves a general purpose for understanding how it is Ridley and McQueen read Northup’s narrative and discarded the various modalities of sociality Northup recalled with devastating precision. Where was the friendship between Eliza and Rose? Where was the friendship between Northup and the Chicopees people, wherein he returned to the woods often to eat, talk and dance with them, not as a mere spectator but as participant? Where were the children for whom Northup played the violin as he traveled from plantation to plantation, given he had extra time? Where were the amusements? I contend that, if one has a political aspiration for exceptionalism, individualism and ascendancy in mind, that such sociality registers as nothing at all, as pure nothingness, abject in its horror. Why does McQueen describe Northup’s narrative as a Brothers Grimm fairy tale that ends “happy ever after”; why does he describe Patsey, several times over and again, as “simple”?[xii] If Patsey was indeed simple, her fashioning of dolls from corn husks was not evidence of her thriving in the face of brutal horrors, it was evidence of her simply not knowing how bad things were, her not cognizing the gravity of the environment in which she existed. This, of course to me at least, is erroneous.

If Bilali’s script serves as a method for thinking the nothingness of blackness, perhaps we can understand the incomprehensible text as ecstatic, as enthusiastic, as intensely and intentionally a breakdown with grammar, an intensely and intentionally celebratory mood or reflection. My colleague Jonathan Adams calls it, like the church folks I know, “joy unspeakable,” wherein what it means to be unspeakable issues forth from the performance of, the inhabitation of, happiness that is against reason and rationality.Michael Sells, in Mystical Languages of Unsaying, says:

Every act of unsaying demands or presupposes a previous saying. Apophasis can reach a point of intensity such that no single proposition concerning the transcendent can stand on its own. Any saying (even a negative saying) demands a correcting proposition, an unsaying. But that correcting proposition which unsays the previous position is in itself a “saying” that must be “unsaid” in turn.[xiii]

But what we discover through Bilali’s script, in the incomprehensible blackness, the incomprehensible celebratory nothingness of the script, is the fact that one can say without saying, one can give while withholding as a matter, as the scripted, etched, written materiality, of praise. To write that which bodies forth as incomprehensible is to write non-readability into the text, to write the necessity to think a different relation to objects, objects that are supposed to be easily captured as flesh on mediums, bateaus and skiffs. To write the unasked question of being into the text by making markings that do not appear to readers as readable, Bilali’s document writes onto the page the question of being: what is this? And what of the one who scripted such irreducible incomprehension?Such that what is written in the incomprehensible text, in the nothingness of the sign, is the confrontation with the problem of the idea that text writes experience, that experience is easily turned into filmic scene, that cinematography captures precisely because what is being captured is an experience of nothingness, of objects who have nothing, objects who – like so many Patseys – are merely simple. The celebratory, loving mode of sociality Northup recalls in his text, indeed and again, is unspeakable. His text is a love letter to those described as nothing, those existing within the zone of nothingness. It is a love letter that is celebratory of a mode of sociality that is given in its unspokenness. This is to say the love and celebration, against representations of violence as a totalizing force, is not given to rationalist representation when such rationalism is grounded in individual exceptionalism. Having been subjected to the totalizing force violence, yet joy.Performance artist Alvin Lucier in his 1969 performance piece titled “I Am Sitting in a Room” shows the resonance of an empty room, the resonance of nothingness, making audible how that which is deemed nothing has material vibratory force.

From “I Am Sitting In A Room” (Lovely Music, Ltd., 1981)

The material vibratory force is nothing’s ethical injunction, its ethical demand on the world that would have such richness, such complexity, discarded. There is a structural, irreducible, inexhaustible incoherence at the heart of Northup beginning his narrative with the words having been, generative for disrupting logics of liberal subjectivity grounded in forward progression across space and time. The narrative begins with this incoherence, an incoherence not unlike the disruption into other epistemologies of time, space, the sacred and secular, the theologic and philosophic that came to be the displacement of flesh from land in the service of new world state juridical projects. Having been is the vibratory force of the ethical injunction that is not ever only about what Northup’s life was and could be but about everyone who was displaced through brutal violence into the system of enslavement. If there is a universalizing impulse, in other words, it is in that all can make a declaration of irreducible incoherence: having been, am, having been will be.

Bilali’s text, inclusive of the unreadable five pages, also importantly presupposes a deity that can understand incoherence. But perhaps not simply a deity but – because the text is a set of itineraries and protocols for worship – a community gathered by such incoherence as a mode of worship itself. It presupposes audience that would not deem the writing as incoherent, troubling the assumptive nature of declaring of objects what they do not themselves declare. The text resonates, it vibrates, it is both centripetal and centrifugal. The text is centrifugitive, moving in multiple directions at once, gathering and dispersing, through meditation, affirmation, negation. Unspeakable joy spoken in its being unsaid.

The choreosonic itinerary and protocol for certain political desires of ascendancy is nothing, as so many breaths we take, the materiality thought immaterial. Northup’s text can be considered a choreosonic itinerary and protocol because in it he gives such painstaking, exacting detail for how things were done on plantations. This is not limited to his descriptions of cotton picking and sugar cane harvesting. His attention to detail also included descriptions of dances, jokes, travels in woods to meet with friends. Bilali’s choreosonic itinerary and protocol converges with Northup’s in an indecipherability based in a refusal to consider sociality anything other than nothing, sociality as the zone of nothingness, not worth the time to represent in filmic renderings. Northup’s description of one dance, for example:

One “set” off, another takes its place, he or she remaining longest on the floor receiving the most uproarious commendation, and so the dancing continues until broad daylight. It does not cease with the sound of the fiddle, but in that case they set up a music peculiar to themselves. This is called “patting,” accompanied with one of those unmeaning songs, composed rather for its adaptation to a certain tune or measure, than for the purpose of expressing any distinct idea. The patting is performed by striking the hands on the knees, then striking the hands together, then striking the right shoulder with one hand, the left with the other – all the while keeping time with the feet, and singing…[xiv]

Northup offered a description for what is today known as “pattin juba.” Importantly, he says that the songs are “unmeaning” and are utilized more for the intensity of experience than something like giving an idea. Like Bilali’s writing, such choreosonic itinerary and protocol is grounded in the event of movement – whether hand across page, left-right, or body across ground – and in such movement is the necessity to think its sociality. But these movements take breath, they are breathed meditations, breathed sacraments offered by the social presupposing the having been. Dancing while singing aestheticizes the breath, it gives the breath the capacity to be utilized intentionally with force as a critical intervention into the idea that black flesh stolen only operates out of duress. What the breath gives, then, is the evidence of life in the flesh, life in black flesh, life in the zone of nothingness. What the breath gives, then, is an aesthetic practice of the having been.

[i]

Cornelia Bailey and Christena Bledsoe,

God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man

: A Saltwater Geechee Talks about Life on Sapelo Island

, 1st ed. (New York: Doubleday,, 2000), p. 1.

[ii]

There is contention as to the attribution of authorship of this collection of writings, though. Ronald Judy argues that authorship may be multiple and that, perhaps, only sections of the text may have been authored by Bilali himself, though this is difficult to determine. See Ronald A. T. Judy,

(Dis)forming the American Canon

: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular

(Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c1993.), p. 271.

Judy, p. 240.

Judy, pp. 240–1.

Judy, p. 242.

Martin Heidegger,

What Is a Thing?

(Chicago, H. Regnery Co. [1969, c1967]), pp. 19–20.

[vii]

John Ridley, ‘The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger’,

Esquire

, 2006 <http://www.esquire.com/features/essay/ESQ1206BLACKESSAY_108> [accessed 14 March 2014].

[viii]

Steve McQueen,

12 Years a Slave

(20th Century Fox, 2014).

[ix]

Solomon Northup and others,

Twelve Years a Slave

(New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2013), p. 41.

[x]

Northup and others, p. 5.

[xi]

Judy, p. 226.

[xii]

12 YEARS A SLAVE | Steve McQueen Q&A

, 2013 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrLEXgUncKw&feature=youtube_gdata_player> [accessed 15 March 2014].

[xiii]

Michael Anthony Sells,

Mystical Languages of Unsaying

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 3.

[xiv]

Northup and others, p. 144.–Special thanks to Imani Perry, Nahum Chandler, Arthur Jafa, Ronald Judy and Fred Moten whose works have all served as the background for this conversation.

blues clues

Kanye was certainly not the first to say, when he told Sway, “you ain’t got the answers…!” This is a rather common reply to people who opine about, and argue against, status quos in their variegated guises and how they must be destroyed in order to produce something like justice in the world. It is often claimed, for example, that if one is not offering a concrete set of solutions in a one-to-one relationship to the problems enumerated that they have an inherent flaw, the inherent flaw producing a fundamental incapacity for one to resist. That is, one isn’t allowed to disagree if they’ve not a list of otherwise plans. Though I disagree with the thrust of such ludicrous opinion, I still want to return to Blues for Mister Charles to offer a set of thought experiments, what my friend Lindsey Andrews says produces “questioning [that] leads…away from ‘explanation’ and allows [one] to describe anew time, history, and experience in ways that can respond to the insistent and unpredictable materiality of the world.” This, she further offers, can go “beyond epistemological determinism, closed ontologies, the limits of historical causality, ideology, and institutional structures.” So, in brief, I want to offer a few thought experiments that could help disrupt the notion of education, through the institution of schooling as it currently exists, in the service of privileging learning as a social, critical, open-ended practice.So, some made up thought experiments:

ONE

Organizations like Teach for America, as a friend once suggested, could focus on building capacity in cities rather than bring a supposed cadre of caring individuals from outside those cities – people from mostly elite, private universities – to teach. Instead of utilizing funds raised to train post-college students for five weeks in order to dedicate two years of teaching in underserved public schools, monies could be funneled to teachers, teacher assistants and aids who currently work in public schools. This would give them the resources to build capacity in location. It would disrupt the sort of logic of disaster capitalism and poverty volunteerism, wherein students from elite universities give time and energy to feel-good projects. This would, of course, mean a radical reorganization of funding for organizations like TFA, and would put pressure on thinking about local communities not as transient, but as places where people live, where people have thriving lives. This would simply give resources such that such thriving could be more achievable.

TWO

End standardized testing as it currently is apocalyptic literature. Standardized tests are high stakes for both teachers and students currently construed, and the ability for schools to receive funding under Race to the Top is connected to their performance on such tests. Such that they are apocalyptic in nature, meaning they serve a purportedly prophetic, end-times, doomsday function. They supposedly foretell the cognitive abilities of students and the pedagogical insufficiencies of instructors. They are used in the service of heightening the powers of the nation-state to determine the destiny of its subjects. In this literature, though, is not a renewal of the world but the perpetual brushing up against doom, against destruction, without ever a promise or movement towards justice. Simply, this literature is used to condemn certain classes of people to unending failure, economic and social lack.

THREE

I have been obsessed with versioning lately and Blackpentecostal singing has always intrigued me because people in different locations will sing the very same song with different words in different random places. Some fiction:

when i was a kid, this showed up mostly when we had visitors to our church or when we went to visit other churches for afternoon services at churches with whom we fellowshipped. my brother and i would notice how people would sing the same songs we knew but with subtle differences. of course, you’d have to be part of the pentecostal world to really appreciate it. but we loved to sing, for example, one song as

i believe god, i believe god / i believe god will do what he said
no matter what problems may bring / i believe, i believe god

but then we’d be somewhere else, some other church but they’d say

i believe god, i believe god / i believe god can do anything
no matter what problems may bring / i believe, i believe god

of course. the slight difference between “will do what he said” and “can do anything” is illusory to most. the rhythm was ostensibly the same. the repetition and the sentiment, pretty much consistent. but my brother and i’d hear this and we’d look at each other and smirk just a bit. not only smirk, i suppose, but we would want our correcting voices to be heard, so over the incorrectness, we’d say as loudly as possible – even if only to each other – will do what he said! – forcefully. it was a moment to articulate difference as inherently part of the pentecostal world in which we were part. it was cool because we’d notice the difference without being able to account for it or name what it meant. all we knew to do was keep singing what we knew the words to be a bit louder. it became an occasion for us to laugh with each other at them. it wasn’t disparaging or anything like that. they would take our well-worn testimony service songs (this, well before the advent of powerpoint and screens, at least in our churches) and enunciate them with different lyrics. they “messed up” our song. but the songs never belonged to us in the first place.

The critique in Blues for Mister Charles was about how education, through schooling, attempts to make us the best kinds of citizen-subjects, that it requires us to be indebted to the nation-state in order for its ongoing operation. So perhaps Blackpentecostal song can be an articulation of the resistance to normative function and form. This to say that Zora Neale Hurston’s concept of variation with difference has a lot to do with learning over and against schooling, over and against education. What she calls “characteristics” of black performance – with variation around a theme being a primary marker – is instructive for considering the utility of the local as a means to resist the governance, the governmentality, the surveilling that obtains to national standards, national rubrics.

Local disruptions are already proving to be critical interventions against national standards, against the notion of the standard. What Blackpentecostal singing does is not simply assert that the original is not the only way but that the very concept of pure origin must be interrogated, that what we have is only an irreducible series of relations. What works in Philadelphia is in relation to, but different from, what works in Chicago. And what works in Chicago is in relation to, but different from, what will work in Portland, Oregon, what will work in Los Angeles. But the desire to produce disruption to the logics of national standards, privatizing of education, charters and choices are variations on a theme. What is urgent in our times is that the theme under which we typically think about learning must be uprooted from the making of proper citizen subjects indebted to the nation-state.

To be clear, the idea of the local runs counter to the concepts of choice and charters because they are based in corporatized models, not simply nationalist but nationalist-towards-global competitiveness. And this because public resources are used in the name of local solutions but are exploited for private, anti-public and thus anti-social ends. More, these schools still proliferate the idea about education, through schooling, as making of its students proper, obedient citizens. These schools do not disrupt the logics of neoliberalisms, they are not freedom academies. Rather, they perniciously promote neoliberalism realities against imaginative leaps while lining pockets of elites.

FOUR

But what about going to college? Currently, the centering display of inequitable power within educational institutions is their desired capacity to make people accountable to themselves. Such that a student homeschooled, another unschooled and yet another traditionally schooled each must make their labor coherent and legible to whatever institution they desire to enter. The institution, however, is not required to make itself available to the desires and labor of such students, it is not about what the students bring but how said students can replicate the normative form of the institutions and the normative arc for becoming a citizen. One can spend their days in radical primary and secondary schools, backpack through Europe and volunteer for causes, but will still eventually need to “mature” and become cohesive, legible students that desire educations for a good jobs, in order to still replicate the indebtedness to the current configuration of political economic inequity. This notion of being mature has everything to do with the dissociation from, the escape from, the local as a normative trajectory of becoming.

The notion of “going away to school” is not transcendent across linear space and time, though it does function in our society to index the process of maturation. One’s ability to “go away” revolves around normative class aspirations and theories of citizenship, such that we consider those who live at home while in post-secondary education as in a wholly different and developmentally deficient progression categorically (thanks to Allison Curseen for prompting in me this idea regarding the difference between growth and development). In different Canadian provinces, for example, people tend to choose local universities, something like our community colleges, without there being a denigration of the concept. And even within the borders of these United States, many students attend state schools that are close to home, though the overarching narrative is that one should go away for college education. [Full disclosure: the university at which I teach has roughly 50% of its students from the immediate Southern California area and many live at home with parents.]I focus on the concept of going away to simply mark the ways a normative developmental narrative regarding one’s education often is about leaving the social space from which one emerges, about denigrating the sociality that makes us possible, in order to become the scholar, the theorist, the thinker, over and against the social that is the purported zone of homogeneity. But because of the digital, we actually have an opportunity to rethink what the bounds of the local are, sorta like when Jesus implies that one’s neighbor is whomever one finds oneself around in need at any given moment. The digital allows us to consider the emergence of localness as grounded in communities of theme, communities that are not just near each other physically, but communities that form of necessity in order to respond to moments of crisis. When Susan G. Komen decided to defund Planned Parenthood in 2012, a localized community emerged quickly to respond through email, message boards, tweets and facebook posts. This localness was based on the object of analysis having within itself a centripetal force such that folks gathered around it, mobilized around it, in order to enact change. So I’m not making an argument that folks must attend schools “close to home” physically as the corrective to the logics of education in the service of becoming citizen-subjects. Rather, I am arguing that the theme of learning being pressed into such service must be disrupted, and it can be disrupted through another spin, the spin of the object, the object drawing us to itself, the object of justice.

END

These are, admittedly, wild thought experiments. But that, I think, is my point. I’d like to imagine another way of being, another mode of thinking and learning that does not submit to the dominant narratives nor the current configurations of inequity. Perhaps wild thinking, radical imagination, can give a momentary disruption long enough to think that an otherwise is possible because it is, in all its unruliness, thinkable.

blues for mister charles

Our time is not unique. Ours is an ongoing rupture of violence and violation that was set loose into the world as far back as 1492, though the logics of displacement, aversion and the making of objects through categorical distinction no doubt existed previous to that historic flashpoint. Our time is not unique. Ours is one that attempts to consolidate revolutionary impulse and radical social form into ever-expansive neoliberal dreams. Our time is not unique. Ours is grounded in the flowering and flourishing of the promise citizenship, a promise that necessitates submitting ourselves to violence the nation-state imposes on its subjects. Our time is not unique. And yet we would do well to consider the form inequity takes in our milieu, we would do well to be attentive to the creative capacity and inventionary instinct internal to empire such that we can contend against injustice in all its guises.

Learning is not a luxury. Learning is what we do, what we be, when we gather together with others to think, to consider, to play the dozens, to laugh, to shout in church aisles, to dance in nightclubs, to sit on porches, to sit at tables eating starchy foods and fried meats. Learning is what we do, what we be, when we commit ourselves to sociality, when we commit ourselves to longsuffering that would have us – in all our fleshly thereness – be with, rather than raptured from, the worlds of our inhabitation.But learning is under radical assault. Learning is, because of schooling, being submitted to neoliberal realities against radically imagined fantasies. Schooling is becoming a privatized industry and this runs antithetical to the necessary openness to worlds that constitute the grounds for learning to occur. Schooling gives education but we are discovering a concept that we have already known, which we already been known for a long time: learning is not the primary goal of school but, rather, its goal is education. And being educated is about becoming the proper kind of subject, the proper kind of citizen, for the state’s use and exploitation. Education, so construed, is about making a promise today about one’s future relationship to the nation-state, it is about becoming indebted to a political order.[1] Learning, in such a configuration, is the resistance straining against such indebtedness because learning gives the tools for critical analytics, critical enfleshment, social flesh as a critique of governance.

Stefano Harney says of debt that, “The common way to understand debt…is that we are, by coming into debt, making a promise to act out capitalist social relations – as they currently exist – in the future.” And it is this common understanding of debt which is operationalized in the service of education currently. And I’m not just talking about, teachers in K-12 classrooms that are literally being encouraged to go into financial debt, taking “low interest” loans for school supplies. And I’m not only thinking about the financial debt college students accrue by taking out exorbitant loans in order to provide for their essentials, in order to eat and have shelter while attending post-secondary institutions.

I include all forms of schooling that would seek to make us better, more productive citizens for the nation-state as requiring of us a certain indebtedness for purportedly allowing us time and space to be educated. Education – through schooling – makes us debtors, the best kinds of citizens, through forcing the promise of futural relationships of inequity. Schooling is the instrument mobilized to deliver education, schooling attempts to suppress creativity, desire, uniqueness and sociality through standardized tests, assessment rubrics, core “standards.” Schooling, as a mode of administration, is against the very interrogation of current (anti-)social relations with respect to the current political economy. Schooling is about the inculcation and enactment of obedience: “What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish.” Yet James Baldwin offers, “The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.”

We are told that through schooling, if we work and study hard, that we too can go to college and get good jobs. But there is much that remains unsaid in such declarations. The hard work and study that produces an entrance into college and good jobs is the maintenance of the existing anti-social relations of inequity. These existing anti-social relations keep us forever competing against one another. Our labor is exploited to make the nation a strong global competitor. Suppressed, then discarded, is the question about the purpose of learning itself. Education is about the suppression of the question in order to gain entrance into normative mode of subjectivity, about our emergence into the “world” as it is currently construed. What also goes unsaid is that the suppression and eventual discarding of the question about the purpose of learning is as true for Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields as it is for thought that occurs within the delimitation of the Humanities. It is not the Humanities that are under assault; it is learning itself.

What is occurring with explicit intensity in our milieu is the trade-ification of all modes of knowledge such that anything learned is supposed to be used to make the nation-state competitive on a global scale. Folks majoring in business, law and medicine are just as discouraged from radical creative thinking as folks in the Humanities are. The lack of arts and music programs – discarded as so many unwanted questions – has had pernicious effects in poor K-12 school districts. No longer are arts and musical knowledges considered integral to the development of the whole student, save in situations where parents can afford such seeming excessive, creative luxuries. The indebtedness that becomes the foundational characteristic of education is virulent in its attack against various literacies, various social practices of learning.

Literacies are not eternal, they change over time. Literacies are always social practices, engagements with others in order to produce otherwise worlds of inhabitation and thus are not reducible to the technique of delivery. Important are what the techniques make possible and the kinds of interventions radical social practices of learning can be. For example, it was not always assumed that the ability to read and write would give coherence to something like a subject, it was not always thought that personhood was predicated on this particularized form of knowledge transfer. But the antebellum rule against reading and writing for enslaved folks is instructive. Though some theorists claim that reading and writing would allow enslaved persons the “establishment of the African’s human identity to the European world,” it seems more appropriate to consider how literacies were utilized to resist the nation-state’s violence and violation. What we must do in our own time is give attention to the antebellum period’s injunction against reading and writing, not because reading and writing confer personhood but because the one’s who were juridically prohibited from the practice recognized its utility. We must attend to the past in order to ask what the modes of learning are today being kept from the marginalized, what modes of literacies are today deemed unnecessary and are discarded as excess.

During the antebellum period what was given was an education that sought to suppress and discard difference, what we might think of as common standards. Indeed, various skills were acquired in order to keep the peculiar institution profitable – everything from agricultural sciences to hospitality. But there was also learning, learning through fleshly performance that was against the education that would make of these black objects mere organic machines with no will nor volition. The learning took place not just in the hush harbors and clearings. Learning also took place as the excessive creative force that sustained people during labor, such that singing and chanting and hollering could measure distance, denote time and provide protective noise for escapes. Folks learned against the trade-ification of education, against the skillset deemed necessary for labor.

And today, too, we have education wherein everything acquired is supposed to be instrumentalized into the service of the state, helping us become proper citizens. It would seem that the national Common Core Standards Initiative would address issues of access in education. The CCS only organizes learning such that it will have people both college and career ready. But the guise of “common standards” is quite antithetical to learning as social practice. The CCS contributes to the suppression and discarding of difference in the service of state power, is just another iteration – under neoliberal delusions – of the suppression and discarding of internal, irreducible difference. The critical intervention calls us to descend just below the surface.

iii

On the surface of things, it perhaps looks as if these various initiatives and calls for STEM education and denunciations of the Humanities, are means to care for individuals, to care for the “self.” But if there is anything artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s work has elaborated, it is the interrogation of surfaces.Piper’s Art for the Artworld Surface Pattern is a tightly constructed room, closed off from the world, full of sensory information on walls.[2]

The “piece” is a rather small room that could fit three to four persons in it. Walls flat with only one small entrance, the furnitureless room’s walls and ceiling are covered with newspaper clippings of various political struggles and world disasters. As well, “At arbitrary places across the photographs the words NOT A PERFORMANCE are stenciled in red” (162). There is also the insertion of sound and speech with a recorded tape loop. The speech is the repudiation of the material on the wall as art, it is a stereotyped reply about the aesthetics “that ignored completely [the] topical thrust” of the work (164). As such, the piece “surrounds you with the political problems you ignore and the rationalizations by which you attempt to avoid them” (161). The point of the overload of both visual and sonic material was to create a situation in which, “in order to distance oneself from the work, one would be forced to adopt some critical stance that did not itself express the aestheticizing response” (167).

People enter this art space only to be confronted with problems they’d much rather avoid. This confrontation takes place on the level of the scene constituted by the seen and the sound. What Piper does – by way of the words “NOT A PERFORMANCE” as well as the audio loop – is to gather and insert thought, which is typically thrown away. To be attentive to the “surface pattern” is to give attention to that which easily recedes, that which readily is discarded. Attending to the “surface pattern” equally requires attention to that which exits right below the surface, that which is barely there, that which shows up by way of a resistance to showing up. The “noisy” walls and speech saturate the room, causing the looking away, the aversion, for what is seen and heard. Piper uses the surface of walls and the plain-ordinary surface-level speech of dismissal to have viewers go below such surfaces, to confront the world.And on the surface of things, there seems to be much chattering about the need for quality education, for everyone from pre-K to post-secondary. But what this chattering does is obscure the ways education, through schooling, has followed the arc and trajectory of western theologic-philosophic concepts for the grounds of existence: the denunciation of the social in the service of the individual. Education, through schooling, is about the means to articulate a coherent, stable, impenetrable “self,” one that competes with others to prove worth and value, one who submits to metrics and measurements, to tests and examinations. This “self” also submits to being evaluated by those around about them and the examiner will make declarations about the capacity for the individual to be good, to be intelligent, to be normal. Just below the surface of the chattering is the desire to keep the status quo operational, is the desire to reduce the capacity for learning while increasing access to education. Barack Obama provides a sufficient example.Obama had the following to say about “Art History” as a mode of examining the world:

[A] lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career. But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree – I love art history. So I don’t want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. I’m just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need.

This pontificating cannot be divorced from the radical restructuring of public education currently under his administration. It has been noted time and again that his Race to the Top (RTTT) is more egregious than Bush’s No Child Left Behind, and it is not by accident that the privatization of public education under the guises of charters and choice has many of these “boutique” schools focusing on STEM rather than anything in the Humanities. It is also not by accident that many of the first programs that were defunded in public education were arts and music programs. It is not that Obama is against art-making itself as a practice. He used at least three Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service observations to put paintbrush to hand in order to show what service to one’s community looks like.

What is vilified, then, is not action – a trade, a skill – but thinking, collective, improvisational, social thinking about any range of actions one could take in the world. It is perfectly within the horizon of education to acquire a set of common actions in order to get tasks done; what is not encouraged is the theory that would have one thinking about color and saturation, about lines and texture. This is problematic and vulgar because it also assumes that intellection is a result of class, that learning only happens amongst elites. However, for example, the ruptures on warehouse floors in Detroit during the Black Power movement in the 60s and 70s with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers prove otherwise, workers reading Marx in order to critique unfair labor practices. So though Obama could go into schools to offer skills, there was no theorizing about the policies that create the conditions of inequity that produce the need to volunteer at such a location. Obama painting walls and wood while decrying art history only underscores the ways social intellectual practices as modes of inhabitation, as ways of life, are under assault.

Creative social intellectual practice itself is excess, and thus is only ever constitutive for an otherwise world’s production of joy and justice. With the assault to social practices of learning, creative enjoyment is then marshaled as a mode of labor – through volunteering – that must be relegated to days off, must be relegated to modes that do not have within them the critique of systemic injustice. This is the promise of being indebted to society through education: to carry into the future the present conditions of inequity, including such good faith, feel good projects of every-now-and-then volunteerism. What cannot be questioned, what must go uninterrogated, is the condition of the world that produces this demand of education over and against the open-endness of learning.

Such that what Obama opined about Art History was not an accidental throwaway sentence about the impotence of art history education to acquire employment. Deeper still, he acknowledged – without stating so explicitly – that future job growth will obtain mostly with jobs requiring only a high school diploma. ‪Doug Henwood had to say about jobs in the next ten years: “So according to fresh projections from the [Bureau of Labor Statistics], the 10 most rapidly growing jobs over the next decade, accounting for a quarter of total job growth, require on average no more than a high school diploma, and only one – nursing – pays more than the national median wage.”Like explicit newspaper clippings with NOT A PERFORMANCE written across our bodies, the fact of blackness – through the very inhabitation of our flesh – is political, calling for the various aversive logics that attempt to control us. Rather than lingering with the question of the purpose of learning, the nation-state seeks to quiet the perpetual questioning that we carry in and as our fleshliness, the nation-state seeks to paint over the walls of inequity in the service of keeping us indebted to inequity. Social practices of learning, against schooling education, would have us ask interrogate empire’s desire for a promise of our complicity to the current political economy.

This is a Blues for Mister Charles. Charlie, we all know, is the informal, the non-standard, the familiar and intimate version of Charles. What education does today specifically is move from Charlie to Charles, exploiting the rhetoric of common standard while actually enacting the force and violence of normativity. Rather than the irreducibility of internal differentiation and variation of care and concern that emerges in the local that would yield such intimacies and familiarities, scantrons, rules of law and order orders and rules the school day. Nutrition managers felt compelled to follow rule and order, discarding the food of children, rather than break such ruling in the cause of justice. The children were quite explicitly punished for their parents’ future promises of indebtedness to the anti-sociality and alienation of capitalism. This fact of inequity and debt has been a constitutive force of anti-blackness and we are simply seeing the logics of inequity proliferating. The formal rather than the intimate, the anti-social rather than the zone of sociality, the standard rather than differentiation: all this is what education, through schooling, would produce antithetical to social practices of learning.

As James Baldwin stated, “Mister Charlie” is the non-disruption of white supremacist logic. Such that Blues for Mister Charles would not disorder the logic of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Rather, the formality merely marks the spread of empire’s violence and violation more explicitly felt, known, present. Charles rather than Charlie is an affect of purported post-raciality, a vision of livability wherein differences do not matter, where they are suppressed and discarded in order to have “a more perfect union.”Yet, various movements – the Philadelphia Student Union, Chicago Teacher’s Union, North Carolina’s Moral Monday Movement, as examples – are using their flesh to make promises of bad debt, of black debt, that refuse to take the current model of anti-sociality into the future. These varied movements provide examples of learning that are against education, learning that produces impropriety, learning that is itself a critique of any notion of a common core standards, and a more general critique of the emergence and arrival into citizenship. And this by their walking and display of signs. And this by their angered voices and pleas. They refuse, and thus we should refuse, to sing blues for Mister Charlie, for Mister Charles, that would leave Mister uninterrogated. They recognize that formality and standard are effects of the continual hiding of violence from view. Like how a protest of 80-100 thousand people this past weekend in North Carolina went unnoticed in mainstream media, there is an aversion to our fleshly ways of learning, an aversion for refusing quieting and sitting still allowing the nation-state to enact violence on us without resistance. They, we, refuse. They are, we are, using flesh, as Harney would say, to promise to refuse to take today’s anti-sociality of capitalist debt arrangements into the future. They have, we have, better things to carry.

[1]

My understanding of debt – which will run throughout this piece – is entirely influenced by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s notion of debt and indebtedness. For the important treatment of the topic, please see Harney and Moten,

The Undercommons

[2]

Adrian Piper,

Out of Order, out of Sight

, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).