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The idea and promise of progress, an idea that is connected to values such as recognition, equality, and freedom, has always been a fraught object of discussion and interest for black writers, artists, and thinkers. This is especially the case for the philosopher, social critic, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. In “The Souls of White Folk,” a scathing essay written in the aftermath of World War I, Du Bois radically undercuts the pervasive faith that the world is moving steadily on a path toward increased freedom and equality. In this essay, he suggests that the rhetoric of civilization and progress denies a traumatic underside that consists of slavery, the colonization of people of color, war, and conquest. In an expression that resembles a prayer, Du Bois exclaims: “We have seen—Oh Merciful God! in these wild days and in the name of Civilization, Justice, and Motherhood—what have we not seen, right here in America, of orgy, cruelty, barbarism, and murder done to men and women of Negro descent.”12 While Du Bois underscores the specific struggles of black Americans during the so-called nadir of American race relationships (a post-Reconstruction period marked by the establishment of Jim Crow segregation and the ritualized lynching of black bodies), he is also thinking broadly about the relationship between civilization, progress, and race-inflected domination within modern life. Similar to Karl Marx, Du Bois contends that many of the material freedoms, advancements, and enjoyments that the modern world introduces rely on systems of exploitation and exclusion. As Du Bois puts it, “High wages in the United States and England might be the skillfully manipulated result of slavery in Africa and peonage in Asia.”13 What is important here is that Du Bois can be interpreted in this essay as saying that modern notions of progress and freedom are inherently flawed and problematic because they rely on and are intertwined with practices and conditions— capitalism, colonial expansion, racial hierarchies, endeavors, and incentives to usurp and possess the earth—that are harmful to non-Europeans, working-class bodies, women, and other groups. At the same time, he can be read as suggesting that these notions of freedom and progress are not necessarily flawed or attached to pernicious desires, endeavors, and projects; rather, these ideals have just not been embodied or practiced properly. If the latter position is taken, then progress and the practices and arrangements associated with this ideal should be embraced and simply expanded to include groups, communities, and collective bodies that are presently marginalized.14 This ambivalence haunts Du Bois’s writing and thought. (But, of course, he is not unique; he inherits, and bequeaths, this ambivalence.) As many commentators have noted, Du Bois occasionally identifies with and adopts rather simplistic notions of progress and civilization. Like other black intellectuals and black people more generally, Du Bois articulates a commitment to something like racial progress or uplift. While historical efforts to uplift the race seem necessary and laudatory, these efforts carry troubling implications and consequences, especially when uplifting black people is defined as civilizing the black masses. As Kevin Gaines points out, the proverbial uplift paradigm, adopted by many black intellectuals and activists since the nineteenth century, calls for an educated, elite class of black people to liberate the masses of black folk from imposed conditions of poverty, ignorance, and moral depravity.15 The demand and struggle for recognition has therefore involved the celebration of certain individuals or groups that “embody” and signify progress and advancement; these are figures that have adopted and learned the ideals, values, and practices of the civilized world (Europe and America), middle-class whiteness, enlightened Christianity, and so forth. Du Bois certainly has moments that betray a strong allegiance to progress, to the idea that recognition for black people requires being inducted into the civilizing process. Here we might think about Du Bois’s fascination with charismatic figures like Otto Von Bismarck, a model for black leadership, according to Du Bois, because he embodied a “forward marching spirit” in his endeavor to unite Germany. Or one could cite his enthusiasm during World War I about black soldiers (and black people’s patriotism) being conduits for recognition, assimilation, and advancement. But to reduce the possibilities in Du Bois’s thought to these moments is to foreclose more ambiguous, and more generative, trajectories and lines of flight as indicated in essays like “The Souls of White Folk.” Throughout his corpus, there are fruitful tensions and conflicts around related notions of progress, recognition, and freedom; while he certainly has one foot in the civilizing processes of modernity, he also acknowledges that these processes are pernicious and terrifying for people of color, working-class bodies, and other kinds of subjects. Du Boisian ideas like the color line, the Veil, and double-consciousness, themes that I discuss in chapter1, suggest that modern life is fractured and broken and that the flourishing of some groups and communities relies on the systemic marginalization, alienation, and death of others—in addition to tendencies to bury and conceal these persistent realities. To better understand Du Bois’s equivocal position, it is helpful to remember that he is responding to ideas, philosophies, and narratives that mark people of color as backward and uncivilized or that locate black bodies outside the movement of history. As Shamoon Zamir reminds us, Du Bois is in conversation with philosophers who adopted and articulated these kinds of narratives, most notably Hegel.16 Hegel is significant in part because of his attempt to fuse philosophy and history, to offer a coherent, systematic account of the development of Reason and Spirit within history.17 For Hegel, world Spirit develops in stages and through various conflicts and contradictions, becoming more coherent and mature in the process. Spirit moves from a lower form of consciousness to a higher form, originating in the East and culminating in the West. During this journey, according to Hegel, Spirit “skips over” Africa, meaning that Africa does not participate in the development of reason, truth, and freedom. Africa, in Hegel’s vision, “is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it—that is in its northern part—belong to the Asiatic or European part of the world.”18 Here my intention is not to simply bash Hegel for his individual blind spots, nor is my intention to neglect the more admirable aspects of his thought and 10 Introduction legacy. What is important here is that Hegel’s thought demonstrates how the logic of progress operates to establish and justify racial hierarchies. Because some nations are imagined as more advanced than others (in politics, technology, culture, religion), these advanced nations are able to rationalize and vindicate the violent treatment of inferior nations as part of a civilizing process. Hegel claims, for instance, that civilized nations are entitled to “regard and treat as barbarians other nations which are less advanced than they are.”19 As Hegel indicates, the colonial system, a set of coercive arrangements and policies that heavily shaped current racial formations and hierarchies, was motivated and legitimated by narratives of progress that located Europeans at the forefront of history’s movement and black and brown peoples behind, or forever outside, the vanguard of history.20

The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere. What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our order- specific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “[I] am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)...”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 7 If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity.11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to the White World. White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 8 gratuitous freedom is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism that we don’t talk about...which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world...it wants the death of everyone else in the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through Afro- Pessimism and be who one was on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism.

If we are engaging in a war in which the symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t go”—a form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is death personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by those who are facing globalized White Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to rupture the system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to the “desert of the [Black] Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable the possibility of a radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized onto- epistemic deployment of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life.

Sounds from the Undercommons Frank Ocean’s scream – the sonic event that began this meditation on the voice – is such an expression of this fugitive vocality. It is a noise of excess that cannot be contained, a noise that moves relentlessly toward the edge of that which constitutes subject and object. But Ocean’s scream is also captured as a recording, and as such, is able to be reproduced ad infinitum. Some might say that the technology of sound reproduction performs an operation of abstraction akin to the transformation I have described above of the voice into an ideal object. This argument posits that technologies of mechanical reproduction sever the voice from the body that produces it, transforming it into an ‘acousmatic’ object that can be repeated, as well as bought and sold (Truax, 1984; Schafer, 1994). But the problem with this account is that it relies on a set of a priori assumptions that ‘hold human experience and the human body to be categories outside history’ (Sterne, 2003: 20). Such arguments appeal to a conception of the body as already coherent and whole, and an idea of technology that is abstracted from its embeddedness in the social sphere. Jonathan Sterne, in his deconstruction of the ideological assumptions behind such arguments, writes: [T]hese authors assume that sound-reproduction technologies will have a disorienting effect on the senses that are otherwise grounded in coherent bodily experience. The assumption of sensory coherence requires a notion of a human body that exists outside history. For instance, the claim that sound reproduction has ‘alienated’ the voice from the human body implies that the voice and the body existed in some prior holistic, unalienated, and self-present relation. (2003: 20–21) As we have already established, the performance of Blackness emerges from flesh that precedes the formation of body that is autonomous and whole. When I listen to Ocean’s scream, the hairs on my body prickle to attention and goose bumps form involuntarily on my skin.

I register the scream in my flesh. Flesh reaches out toward flesh, across the technological divide. Ocean’s scream might be better understood, following Moten and Harney, as a ‘call for and from disorder’ (2013: 133). In listening again and again to this irruption of noise, I am learning to attune to a vibrational field that opens toward an alternative order of desire. Here we might follow Sterne in challenging the assumption that ‘sound-reproduction technologies can function as neutral conduits, as instrumental rather than substantive parts of social relationships’ (2003: 21). It may seem an obvious point to make but the reproduction of a recording is never identical; the event of listening is always unique and always coded by the social relationships it is embedded in. Ocean’s scream reverberates differently whether I listen to it by myself at home or surrounded by others at a party. The vibrations of the flesh seek connection and refuse to be stilled by technologies of mechanical reproduction. Of course it is not only in song that we may find voices that operate against the logic of improvement and accumulation.

But here’s why I would say that the things can’t be reconciled and why I’m fascinated with the way high school and college debaters are using it. I think it was—I don’t know what sociologist—Max Weber (you know; I quote all sorts of people except right out fascists)—I believe he said that the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. And the way that the question is posed in the world of debate in January—the question that carries one through the entire twelve months—is posed in a way that cannot be reconciled with the basic lens of interpretation of Afropessimism. The question is always posed on what I call and others call an arch of redemption. In other words, the question assumes an instance of plenitude, say, the free association and the free assembly—the right to free assembly—of citizens, and then it moves from that assumption to a rupture. So it moves from equilibrium to disequilibrium, which is to say the manifestation of the surveillance state. And so the third move in the tripartite arc of narrative is, of course, the move of redemption, which is to say how can the plenitude—whether it’s a historical materialist plenitude, a social formation having its rights and liberties disrupted—how can that be restored. It’s that movement from equilibrium to disequilibrium to equilibrium restored which is precisely at the center of the critique of Afropessimism. Afropessimism is not an offering for historical redemption; it’s not an offering for the restoration of a body in need of redress the way that postcolonialism is, the way that Marxism is, the way that radical feminism is, the way that Indigenism is. It’s a critique of the rhetorical structure of those lenses of interpretation, critiquing them as to a) what they don’t or are unable to say about the violence that subjugates and positions Blacks and b) why it is that they actually need Blackness as slaveness to be outside of their lens of interpretation. So there’s a way in which—to come full circle to where I started—there’s a way in which the rhetorical structure of debate, the demand of debate, the protocols are already ideologically laden. It doesn’t matter what question you pour into those protocols. The protocols, themselves, are all ideological straightjackets which preclude the kind of investigation of suffering. In order for Black suffering to be part of the debate question, it would have to go through a structural adjustment to begin to look like the suffering of some other group. The way Hartman talks about this is by suggesting that what you have in the world of subalterns—degraded humans who suffer—you have narratives of the possibility of real or imagined redemption, which is to say, narratives which are structured around the question of how to relieve the suffering that didn’t happen before the invasion of some sorts. But what she says with respect to Blacks is that you cannot tell the story of before the invasion, before the destruction. So, without being able to do that, she says when you think of narrating Blackness, you have to think of repetition as opposed to redemption. And so when we were off the air, one of the things I said to Marquis and to Josh is that one of the foreseeable problems with the future of Afropessimism is people kind of cherry-picking from it to enhance the explanatory power of their own suffering. And that cherry-picking will actually, inevitably, leave by the wayside the very deliberate absence in Afropessimism, and that is the absence of redemptive theorization, which is present in everything else. Redemptive theorization is theorized through all three volumes of Das Kapital; it’s theorized in the psychoanalytic feminism of Hartman and people like Julia Kristeva; it’s theorized in the work of Ward Churchill and Vine Deloria. It’s not only theorized. I should take a step back. It’s assumed. It’s assumed. And so, these are metacritiques of relationality. What Afropessimism is is a metacritique of the metacritique, to show how pure and simple relations are dependent upon—they’re parasitic—using [black people] as a parasitic host.

The development and transmission of these sonic and bodily scripts is central to my deconstruction of the formation of racial identity and notions of intellectual (performance) property in Blacksound’s emergence out of blackface. The amalgamation of this sonic and embodied legacy in commercial entertainment simultaneously constructs recognizable sounds of popular performance via black(face) aesthetics that are made accessible to and absorbed into the public domain.33 Blacksound also accounts for the legacy of violence that is embedded in the commercialization of popular music out of blackface performance, as black people have experienced, and continue to experience, systemic racism, while white (and other nonblack) people freely express themselves through the consumption and performance of commodified black aesthetics without carrying the burden of being black under white supremacist structures.

Tracing this aesthetic phenomenon provides insight into the way the embodiment and performance of racialized sound figures into the development of property relations and continues to resonate within the complicated, often interracial, and often racist contexts out of which popular music styles emerge. Blacksound as an analytical tool is an attempt to address George Lewis’s call for music historians to develop a nomadic Americanist musicology that challenges the discipline’s “political tendencies toward” rigidity and “fold[s] music into the vast sweep of American historiography.”35 Blacksound reveals how popular performance, from its origins in blackface and its rapid spread throughout the nation, overlaps with multiple aspects of US history, politics, and culture, while being both embodied (in performance and consumption) and commercialized through mass entertainment.

At the End of the World there is blackness doing the (im)possible. This essay con- siders the (im)possibility of debate in our contemporary crisis through an examination of the domestication of potentiality in rhetorical dialectic. Debate, in its presupposition of stasis, parallels sovereignty’s ontologizing operations of antiblack racial terror that suspend contingency. Meanwhile, blackness was already getting it done. The U.S. Civil War serves as a privileged example for thinking through black- ness as the groundless constitutive outside to the possible that yet gestures toward other generative moments found in refusal of the disappointing options that pass for politics offered to us today.

We are haunted by the specter of civil war. Liberal and conservative politicians and commentators openly express anxiety about the possibility of out- right hostilities and the “unravelling [of] our national fabric” (Gambino 2017). Increasing polarization, identity politics that destroys persuasion, an atmosphere of conspiracy regarding the deep state or foreign puppet masters, apparent disenchantment with institutions, general mistrust in electoral politics, a gridlocked and weak congress, and open skirmishes between white nationalist and antifascists are put forth as signs of the end times (see, e.g., Blight 2017; Wright 2017; DeGroot 2018; Smith 2018). The looming crisis of the end of politics that everywhere drives the nostalgic desire for a return to a normalcy and civility invites us to rethink debate and to pose a different question that does not seek to redeem a past that never was and continues to come at too high a cost for the wretched of the earth. Rather than “make debate great again,” I’d like to sit with the vertigo so as to consider debate’s (im)possible outside. Such a quest for a horizon that is before-after-immanent to the End (of politics or history or the world) will require that we rethink the spatiotemporal coordinates of the entire liberal project that secures the parameters of debate as the dialectical and agonis- tic contestation of the possible. My central interlocutor here will be blackness: that (non-)ontological constitutive outside of the modern grammar that is relegated to the realm of absolute necessity, negativity, incapacity, and pathology that subtends the political and the rhetorical. As that which is always already outside the World/History, blackness provides an anoriginary nonplace from which to think crisis and a politics of actualizing the impossible.

In her book Scenes of Subjection, a text that mothers and births the field of Afropessimism, Black feminist literary scholar and historian Saidiya Hartman coins redress as “a re-membering of the social body that occurs precisely in the recognition and articulation of devastation, captivity, and enslavement.” This generation of Atlanta’s rappers embrace the darkness and dwell in the Black hole; many are planted and grown from the ashes of Sherman’s March to Sea, a historical moment that marks a time of transitional failure as the enslaved subject attempts to shapeshift “American citizen” and “Human.” The hoods and projects that rappers like SahBabii and Yung Nudy originate from represent the instability and corruption of ethics relating to American pragmatism and ethics. Many of these homes were promised to Black Americans after fighting in World War II and saving up enough money to escape their racially violent conditions in the South; however, no amount of performance of citizenship could shift an already fixed anti-Black necropolitical system. Eternally, Black matter, living-unliving corpse, rests in a state of fungible ungendered flesh: “the procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory.” Under partus sequitur ventrem, the intimate familial grounds of sexual violence breed the grounds for particular psychoanalytical realities to arise as the father of an enslaved mother’s child was rendered null and void in the court of law. This causes the assimilation into the category of “citizenship” and “Human” to be further complicated as it is defined under the logics of white gender binary. Without recognition of a paternal father figure, how does one easily transition into the “Human” category? The failure to explicitly recognize the intimate and familial nature of sexual violence on the plantation must be read as parallel to the Black American’s exclusion of aspired American citizenship.

Trap music, specifically the genre of Atlanta Trap music, ought to be considered Afropessimissm tradition as it embraces the failure of the “Black Man” to be fully assembled and neatly fitted into the category of the “Human,” in other words, the White Man; rappers curate their image through villain-like imagery, such as Vampires (PlayBoi Carti refers to himself as King Vamp) to represent a psychoanalytic craving for self-esteem and acceptance in the face of oversexualization, criminalization, and failures to assimilate into hegemonic masculinity. Patrick Moynihan's rhetoric is retained through state propaganda that claims the socioeconomic failures of the Black community root from the inability to possess a strong family unit with a male head of the household. In reality, the question is not in relation to the “effectiveness” of Black families but rather its failures to assimilate into a white patriarchal family that owns land and retains its generational wealth through the sexual conquest of the Black womb. Political campaigns and programs, such as the welfare system and criminal justice system, are created to reap profit from “Black pathology” by hyper-surveilling and controlling Black inner life in attempts to “correct” an already “pathologized” community of people who lack a stable family unit. Due to the legacies of partus sequitur ventrem, a white enslaver’s paternal involvement is invisibilized; in contemporary Black urban culture, the narrative often blames Black fathers for leaving their children without contextualizing abusive racial-sexual violence committed against Black families. Subconsciously, Black men in a way attempt to reconcile with the deadbeat enslaver who they were unable to inherit any land or generational wealth as they were assigned to enter as human commodities and not “sons” (heirs to property). The question to be proposed is how does an enslaved Black person, both property and commodity, inherit other properties? The contemporary Atlanta “rockstar” rapper lifestyle of money/sex/drugs and overall apathy and detachment from one’s self can be read as a fusion of an imagined dream-space of Afrosurrealistic expressions in a white, Chaucerian social matrix. In this realm, Black men cosplay as their deadbeat white enslaver fathers who owned land and women as sexual property. The requirement of the stabilizing Black feminine subject in an over-sexualization postured, can perhaps relate to the racial-sexual geographic structures of the auction block. Black men’s gendered performance could be read as a process into the psychoanalytic reckoning of the category non-human’s failure to assimilate white gendered performance. In a failed attempt to disassociate from the traumas associated with the legacies of slavery, the white social matrix is replicated in Black dwellings; it is here where the club represents a memory that “enacts the contradictions and antagonisms of enslavement, the ruptures of history, and the disassociated and dispersed networks of affliction.”

Mumble rap lacks a fixed geographical origin. It emerges slowly, rearing itself in waves across time and space of countless decentralized forces: the most prominent of these being neoliberalism and the internet. Neoliberalism as a guiding economic unfolding in tandem with the prison industrial complex created new geographically dispersed forms of Black-American life. This economic force became an engine for ensuring the continuity or afterlife of slavery, by creating punitive social worlds for Black folks across America. The massive proliferation of prisons in the United States was a form of “policing the crisis” of neoliberalism, which represented a significant departure from the Keynesian macroeconomic policy and labor politics of the early-20th century. Under Keynesians, racism and segregation were rampant, but Black labor was an essential feature of the wartime production of the United States. Black families moved to large, industrialized cities for decent-paying factory, government, and shipyard jobs which briefly marked the emergence of something like a Black middle class. This all changed following World War 2 due to a confluence of factors, including the end of the wartime production, the return of White veterans to the United States, and the meeting of a group of intellectuals called the Mont Pelerin Society. These notable intellectuals, including Frederich Hayek, Karl Popper, and Milton Friedman, advocated against the Keynesian model of central planning and proposed instead a highly unregulated form of capitalism, where the role of the government would instead be to remove all barriers to maximizing private profits. It took a few decades, but when this doctrine of personal responsibility finally became a governing economic policy in the 1970s, the results were disastrous for Black Americans. Where there was once hope for prosperity and sites of brief refuge there were now heavily militarized police forces, government-sanctioned paradigms of resource extraction, and abandoned neighborhoods. Policing was a key feature of this targeted disruption, and from the ’80s until today, incarceration rates have skyrocketed. Without pre-accumulated capital or opportunities to further themselves legitimately through education or business, Black Americans were left with two options: subsistence living through petty wage labor or participation in illegitimate economies. Despite these segregated and unjust conditions, Black life carried on, through various forms of intoxication, through love and the bonds of community.

Mumble rap is connected to what Fred Moten identifies in Duke Ellington, the pursuit and even possible achievement through the aesthetic invocation of a life “beyond category.” [Moten 25] A life beyond subjection, a radical rupture of the now, a break with our pained present condition. Moten continues “black performance has always been the ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism of the surplus.” The surplus identified here is a negation of a racialized subjection that mumble rappers experience as residents of Black bodies, albeit wealthy and culturally powerful. This surplus might be to borrow another Motenism, borrowed from Glissant, “the consent not to be a single being.” Our neoliberal world seeks to reduce Black life into legible, fungible identities: the prisoner, the baby mama, the angry black lady, the rap star, the basketball star, the Obama, the Sambo, the Watermelon eater, the Uncle Tom. What does it mean in the face of this systematic quantification of Black life, to proclaim that one is not just incapable of reducing to a stereotype, not just too much to be quantified, but “never too much” to be quantified or reduced to a coherent, intact whole? This declaration is a powerful situation of Black life as a decadent, charged force, that while made up of excess, and made in excess can never truly be excessive.

Initially, we must ask whether MarCus really stands a chance of registering himself as a human trademark under intellectual property law as courts currently interpret it. MarCus's trademark application describes a persona consisting of both superficial characteristics (e.g., name, image, voice) and more intrinsic attributes of identity (e.g., independence, amorality, "cool"). Not only do some characteristics defy precision, but they continue to raise context-dependent questions to which the answers remain largely subjective.24 That may not be fatal, however, because intellectual property law often creates apparent "certainties" from perspective-based contingencies. Therefore, this part analyzes MarCus's quest in the legal and scholarly context, beginning with the applicable threshold requirements for trademark registration by the PTO and the tempting, but less desirable, route of acquiring aggressive rights of publicity instead. As we shall see, those routes have coalesced as courts have allowed individuals to assert similar claims to commercial self-ownership under section 43(a) of the Lanham Act and state right of publicity laws. After delineating that case law coalescence, I offer some of the salient scholarly criticism of such expansive protection as it relates to general trademark rationales and to the particular complications raised by MarCus's case. Finally, I situate the entire discussion within the larger, enabling context of what Jean Baudrillard called "hyperreality."

A. Registration and Validity

The Cambridge Dictionary (n.d.) defines cultural appropriation as “the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture.” There are three main elements that need to be highlighted here. First, this definition implies that the “appropriator” is not part of the group to which the cultural element itself belongs. Second, this concept implies the act of “taking or using” cultural elements, meaning that whoever is engaging in this process can engage with the culture on their own term, thus indicating that power dynamics are at play. Third, and perhaps most important, the cultural element is taken out of its context in a way that either does not credit its origins or is disrespectful to its meaning.

A good example to illustrate this definition is the wearing of “native headdresses” by nonindigenous folks at events like Coachella. In North America, indigenous people have been made subalterns through settler colonialism and white supremacy (Mann, 2000; Razack, 2002). As a result, there exists at both the macro- and micro-social level a power dynamic between indigenous people and non-indigenous people who live on these lands. In State of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century, Razack et al. (2010) describe those power differentials in the Canadian context as follows:

The copyright regime converts cultural by-products such as art, dance, music, and literature into commodities, labeled generally as intellectual property. In simple societies- often and derogatorily described as primitive- music and other a result, they have tremendous social transformative power. But in modem capitalist culture, songs, books, music, and dance also become items in the supermarket of ideas. In addition to expressing cultural attributes, such as shared mores and popular sentiments, intellectual property provides tremendous economic power.

In the abstract, the notion of protecting intellectual and artistic property seems obvious. Concretely, protection is available only by way of a very specialized area of the law inaccessible to the unschooled. Intellectual property has been worthless where the creator failed to comply with legal requirements. Furthermore, the legal system, including copyright law, generally was created without deference to the interests of large segments of society. The copyright regime is owner-centered, not creator-centered," and 'reflects a possessory attitude best summed up as follows: "That is property to which the following label can be attached: To the world: Keep off unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold."

Fleeing and escaping, second-class servitude in their own “home” countries, refuged white Europeans mimicked their intimate familial class violence to create the New World mercantilist-capitalist system by stratifying themselves into a higher class, enslaving African people and Indigenous people in the process. These white insecurities manifest in laws, literary genres, epistemological constructions, and every facet of American life. One of those is the American romance literary tradition that writer Toni Morrison explicitly names in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Morrison gives us the language to understand America as a white, nationalist, hegemonic world-building project that brands its aesthetic as generative and restorative through the shadow of slavery: “The black population was available for meditations on terror-the terror of European outcasts, their dread of failure, powerlessness, Nature without limits, natal loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed. In other words, this slave population was understood to have offered itself up for reflections on human freedom in terms other than the abstractions of human potential and the rights of man.” Ultimately capitalism derived from feudalism to free the peasants and serfs who were the least powerful in Western Europe and established a new white hierarchy that “freed” them from their poor, oppressive class conditions.

The white reordering of history acquaints us with a narrative of historical progression and controls when the tape stops, plays, and rewinds. I use Black feminist literary scholar Michelle M. Wright’s concept of “linear process narrative” to acknowledge how white linear historiographies play on a loop to place Blackness in constrictive, barricaded time-spaces in which whiteness uses Blackness as a historical causality to map out its regressions. As Black folks attempt to break 37 “free,” they must appeal to and reason with fallacies of white freedom and equality through the same forms of language, mediums, and textiles that are used to hold captive Black matter in its anti-Black world-building projects. Through the destabilization of historical time periods, the Black collective will be better equipped to destroy the machinery of white supremacy that naturalizes anti-Black normative assumptions of gender, sexuality, and reproduction.

Even morality, which is so closely connected with the consciousness of freedom, can attain a high degree of purity before any such consciousness is present; for it may simply enunciate universal duties and rights as objective commandments, or even remain purely negative in character, prescribing a formal elevation of the mind and a renunciation of the sensual and of all sensual motives. Chinese morality, since the Europeans have become acquainted with it and with the writings of Confucius, has received the highest praise and the most flattering tributes to its merits even from those who are familiar with Christian morality; in the same way, men have acknowledged the sublimity with which the religion and poetry of India {or at least the higher kinds of these), and in particular the Indian philosophy, express and enjoin the removal and sacrifice of all sensual things. Yet these two nations are lacking - indeed completely lacking - in the essential self-consciousness of the concept of freedom. The Chinese look on their moral rules as if they were laws of 'nature', positive external commandments, coercive rights and duties, or rules of mutual courtesy. Freedom, through which the substantial determinations of reason can alone be translated into ethical attitudes, is absent; morality is a political matter which is administered by government officials and courts of law. Their writings on the subject are not, however, collections of legal statutes, but are addressed to the subjective will and disposition of the reader. Like the moral writings of the Stoics, they read like a series of commands which purport to be necessary for the attainment of happiness, so that it is left to the individual to adopt and follow such commands or not; in the same way, the idea of an abstract subject, the wise man, is the culmination of such doctrines with both the Chinese and the Stoic moralists.52 And in the Indian doctrine of the renunciation of sensuality, desires, and all earthly interests, positive ethical freedom is not the goal and end, but rather the extinction of consciousness and the suspension of spiritual and even physical life.

子墨子言曰：「仁之事者，必務求興天下之利，除天下之害，將以為法乎天下。利人乎，即為；不利人乎，即止。且夫仁者之為天下度也，非為其目之所美，耳之所樂，口之所甘，身體之所安，以此虧奪民衣食之財，仁者弗為也。」是故子墨子之所以非樂者，非以大鍾、鳴鼓、琴瑟、竽笙之聲，以為不樂也；非以刻鏤華文章之色，以為不美也；非以犓豢煎炙之味，以為不甘也；非以高臺厚榭邃野之居，以為不安也。雖身知其安也，口知其甘也，目知其美也，耳知其樂也，然上考之不中聖王之事，下度之不中萬民之利。是故子墨子曰：「為樂，非也。」

Mozi said: The policy of the magnanimous will pursue what procures benefits of the world and destroy its calamities. If anything, when established as a law, is beneficial to the people it will be done; if not, it will not be done. Moreover, the magnanimous in their care for the world do not think of doing those things which delight the eyes, please the ears, gratify the taste, and ease the body. When these deprive the people of their means of clothing and food, the magnanimous would not undertake them. So the reason why Mozi condemns music is not because that the sounds of the big bell, the sounding drum, the qin and the se and the yu and the sheng are not pleasant, that the carvings and ornaments are not delightful, that the fried and the broiled meats of the grass-fed and the grain-fed animals are not gratifying, or that the high towers, grand arbours, and quiet villas are not comfortable. Although the body knows they are comfortable, the mouth knows they are gratifying, the eyes know they are delightful, and the ears know they are pleasing, yet they are found not to be in accordance with the deeds of the sage-kings of antiquity and not to contribute to the benefits of the people at present. And so Mozi proclaims: To have music is wrong.

Overall, though, the Mohists found the sort of conservative, traditionalist stance embodied in ceremonial propriety an unconvincing moral guide. Customary ceremonial etiquette can function as a standard of conduct only if a rough consensus holds that the norms of ceremonial propriety are right or permissible. Early Ruist thought seems to take such a consensus for granted. Accordingly, the Analects and Mencius devote little attention to formulating an explicit normative theory to articulate and justify moral norms.9 They focus instead on ethical development, on how to lead ourselves and others to follow the dào reliably. The content of the dào is not thematized as requiring articulation and justification. By contrast, in the Mohists’ view, disagreement exists as to whether certain ceremonial practices are right or wrong. To them, elite ceremonial customs such as elaborate funerals, rich burials, prolonged mourning, and extravagant state rituals accompanied by music and dancing were wasteful and detrimental to the general welfare. In the face of wide-reaching social changes and political turmoil, it seemed futile to recommend ceremonial propriety as a basis for returning society to good order. The Zhōu social and political system was unraveling. Guidance by ceremonial propriety was in effect a dào that had been tried and found wanting. Its failure had contributed to the present chaos. Even more important, the Mohists rejected ceremonial propriety as a fundamental moral guideline because, in a momentous philosophical step, they noticed the crucially important distinction between custom and morality. 10 Conceptually, ceremonial propriety simply cannot do the work of a moral code, because the fact that something conforms to the prevailing view of etiquette, ceremony, or propriety simply does not show it is morally righteous. Accepted social customs—in particular, customs such as elite ceremonial rituals, many of which were practiced by only a small, privileged segment of society—can be morally wrong. The Mohists make this point by calling attention—at roughly the same time Herodotus was making a similar point in Greece—to the wide variation in customs across cultures, not all of which can plausibly be taken to be morally right. Now those who uphold rich burials and prolonged mourning state, “If rich burials and prolonged mourning turn out not to be the Way of the sage-kings, then how do we explain why the gentlemen of the Central States perform them without ceasing and maintain them without choosing something else?!” Our Master Mòzǐ said, “This is what’s called deeming their habits convenient and their customs righteous. In the past, east of Yuè there was the country of Gài Shù. When their eldest son was born, they chopped him up and ate him, calling this ‘advantageous to the younger brothers.’ When their grandfather died, they carried off their grandmother and abandoned her, saying, ‘One cannot live with the wife of a ghost.’ These practices superiors took as government policy and subordinates took as custom, performing them without ceasing and maintaining them without choosing something else. Yet how could these really be the dào of benevolence and righteousness?” (Mz 25/74–77) Other cultures may practice customs we find morally abhorrent. There is thus an important distinction between moral concepts such as benevolence or righteousness and mere custom, be it ours or another culture’s. That a practice is traditional or customary, as ceremonial etiquette is, does not show it is morally right, since in other cultures morally deplorable practices such as eating one’s firstborn son or abandoning one’s grandmother—or foot-binding, slavery, or female genital mutilation—may be just as traditional and customary as our most cherished conceptions of ceremonial propriety. Since other cultures’ customs may be morally wrong, our own might too. Ceremonial propriety thus cannot serve as an authoritative guide to morality. Nor, for that matter, does the consensus of a majority make something morally right. As the Lord of Lǔ observes, in response to Mòzǐ’s criticism of gratuitous military aggression, “If I look at it on the basis of what you say, what all the world calls acceptable is not necessarily so” (49/24). We need to find other, objectively justified standards. This search for objective standards to guide action and reform society lies at the heart of the Mohist philosophical and political project.11 A cardinal conviction driving Mohist thought is that in ethics and politics, as in any other practical field, we must find and apply such standards, which the Mohists call “models” (fǎ 法 , also “paradigms” or “standards”). “Models and Standards,” a relatively late summary of Mohist doctrines, explains the role of models as follows: Our Master Mòzǐ said, “Those in the world who perform tasks cannot do without models and standards. There is no one who can accomplish their task without models and standards. Even officers serving as generals or ministers—they all have models; even the hundred artisans performing their tasks—they too all have models. The hundred artisans make squares with the set square, circles with the compass, straight lines with the string, vertical lines with the plumb line, and flat surfaces with the level. Whether skilled artisans or unskilled artisans, all take these five as models. The skilled are able to conform to them; the unskilled, though unable to conform to them, by following them in performing their tasks still surpass what they can do by themselves. Thus the hundred artisans in performing their tasks all have models to measure by “Now for the greatest to order the world and those the next level down to order great states without models to measure by—this is to be less discriminating than the hundred artisans.” (Mz 4/1–5) The Mohists see models as similar to tools used to guide and check the performance of skilled tasks, such as sawing a square corner or drawing a circle. They provide a clear standard against which we can compare things to judge whether they are correct or on the mark, just as we can use a set square or compass to confirm whether something is truly square or round. They are objective, reliable, and easy to use, such that with minimal training anyone can employ them to perform a task or check the results. Models are understood primarily as exemplars, not abstract principles or rules, although these too can be models. They may be role models, prototypes, examples, or analogies, or they may be tools or measuring devices. Any criterion or paradigm that helps us make correct judgments or act correctly can be a model. Models alone do not ensure success, nor do they erase the distinction between the skilled and unskilled—or between the virtuous and those still acquiring virtue—but for most of us they at least ensure that we will do better than we would without them. A primary task in governing or ordering society, then, is to find reliable, objective models to guide our actions, practices, and policies. As with ceremonial propriety, however, the Mohists point out that any model or standard specific to our particular family, education, or community could turn out to be unreliable. “Models and Standards” continues, That being so, then what is acceptable to take as a model [fǎ] for order [zhì]? If all model themselves on their parents, what would that be like? Those in the world who are parents are many, but the benevolent are few. If all model themselves on their parents, this is modeling on the unbenevolent. Modeling on the unbenevolent—it’s unacceptable to take that as a model. (Mz 4/5– 6) Having rejected parents as a fundamental moral model, the passage next rejects “learning” (or “teachers”) and rulers on the same grounds. We cannot be sure that the particular teachers we follow or our particular political leaders are indeed benevolent. The text concludes that “of these three, parents, teachers, and rulers, none is acceptable as a model for order.” A reliable, objective standard is needed, one that is not fallible in the way that any particular role model or tradition of learning might be. The Mohists propose that we can find such a standard by considering the attitudes of an ideally impartial, beneficent, and reliable moral agent:

Since the surge of women’s studies in the 1970s and even as far back as the 1930s, Confucianism in early Western scholarship on the condition of Chinese women has been commonly portrayed as a sexist, patriarchal ideology that is responsible for women’s oppression in China. Most notably, early French feminist Julia Kristeva, in her book About Chinese Women, boldly entitled a chapter “Confucius—An Eater of Women” in 1974.1 And as late as the mid1990s, Confucianism was still by and large characterized by scholars as a patriarchal ideology that should be discarded as irrelevant to the modern and supposedly superior, Western way of life. For instance, Margery Wolf, in her assessment of Tu Wei-ming’s popular reinterpretation of neo-Confucianism, wrote: “The Confucian principles defining the propriety of hierarchical authority structures and the orderliness of the patriarchal family system seem anachronistic in this age of multinational corporations in Fujien, and young people from Shanghai acquiring Stanford MBAs. But to my surprise, books about Confucianism still sell well, and a superb Harvard scholar named Tu Wei-ming writes cogent ‘reinterpretations’ of neo-Confucian thinking that are very close to being ‘guides’ for modern living.”2 The disparaging undertone in Wolf’s perception of Confucianism is clear. For her, Confucianism—a useless ideology of Old China—is synonymous with patriarchy and misogyny. The anti-Confucian sentiment in feminist works is highly inflated. But in some sense the attribution of women’s oppression in premodern China to Confucianism is not without justification, since Confucianism, as scholars generally agree, underwrote the social structure of China and dominated its intellectual traditions, especially after the establishment of Confucian teachings as the orthodox official teaching beginning in the Han dynasty of the second century BCE and lasting until 1905 with the termination of the Confucian text–based civil service examination system in the Qing, the last dynasty. However, Confucianism should not be reduced to a set of hierarchical kinship and rigid gender roles, since in this reductionism one overlooks the dynamic aspect of Confucianism, whose ethical theory of ren 仁 as well as its emphasis on the lifelong project of self-cultivation and maintaining proper relations, at least at the theoretical level, are akin to the feminist ethic of care and its socially constructed self as a web of relations. Keeping in mind this theoretical feminist space within Confucianism, one might argue that a convergence or a confluence between feminism and Confucianism should be possible, along the lines of the contemporary feminist reappropriation of existentialism, liberalism, Kantian deontology, or Aristotle’s virtue ethics as providing basic ethical frameworks for addressing specific feminist concerns. But, in reality the engagement between Confucianism and feminism, as Chenyang Li in his anthology on Confucianism and gender pointed out, has long been one-sided; that is, feminists criticize Confucianism for victimizing Chinese women.3 The feminists’ predominant characterization of Confucianism as a patriarchal ideology through and through not only relegates Confucianism, into an inferior position in comparison with Western moral philosophies, but more importantly it oversimplifies the roots of Chinese women’s oppression. Such a simplification, in turn, constitutes an obstacle to achieving a genuine understanding of the Chinese gender system as well as Confucian ethics.

From the above discussion it is apparent that the tradition of rites and music, which formed the institutional structure of ancient China, reflected the evolution of primitive shamanistic rituals and totemic dances into a non-Dionysian cultural form. Rejecting the intense, fevered emotional expression and sensual pleasure of its predecessors, and instead emphasizing harmony, equanimity, moderation, and temperance, the tradition of rites and music both conformed to and served the contemporary social order—that is, the politics of the time. Rites and music are thus directly related to and intimately connected with politics. As the “Record of Music” of the Li ji puts it, “If these four—rites, music, law and administration—are implemented without fail, then the kingly Way will be complete” (Li ji 19.1/99/6). A very prominent feature of the aesthetic theory of “music entails harmony,” therefore, is that it intimately links art (music) with politics by means of molding the emotions. The main reason music is needed is because it can “improve people’s minds, move people deeply, cause customs to change; it is for this reason that the former kings taught it” (Li ji 19.10/100/25). This view suggests, on the one hand, that different types of music reflect different political attitudes and social moods. Quoting again from the “Record of Music”: “When the world is well-ruled, its music is peaceful and joyous, and its government harmonious; when the world is in chaos, its music is plaintive and indignant, and its government perverse; the music of a lost state is mournful and nostalgic, and its people weary. The Way of music is one with that of government” (Li ji 19.1/98/19). On the other hand, different types of music, or even the sounds of different musical instruments, can also arouse varieties of political consciousness, as another passage from the “Record of Music” will illustrate: Bells produce a clanging sound, the clanging acts as a signal, the signal arouses all and produces martial feelings; when the ruler hears bells, he thinks of his ministers of war. The chime-stones produce a ringing sound that is moving, and may move one to think of death; when the ruler hears chime-stones, he thinks of his officers who have died defending his borders. Stringed instruments produce a mournful sound, mourning arouses purity, and purity awakens the intent; when the ruler hears the sound of zither and lute, he thinks of his ministers committed to uprightness. Wind instruments produce a sound like flowing waters, which suggests an assembly and can draw multitudes; when the ruler hears flutes and pipes, he thinks of his officials who are able to lead the multitudes. The sound of drums and tambourines is joyful, and arouses one to action, as the advancing of the armies; when the ruler hears it, he thinks of generals and commanders. Thus when the ruler listens to music, he hears more than just their sounds, but also what is associated with them. (Li ji 19.25/103/9) This simplistic insistence on the direct connection between art (here music) and politics confuses a number of different issues. Because of its intimate relationship with the emotions, music can reflect variations in the life of the people as well as in the sociopolitical situation; in a certain sense this goes without saying. That different musical instruments can arouse different emotional responses or types of ethical consciousness is also true. But to so concretely connect music and musical sounds with specific political content, political requirements, and political concepts is obviously to go too far. In ancient Chinese aesthetics, this exaggeration of the political content and function of art has a long history. Just as in Aristotle we can find similarities with the Chinese notion of the “mean,” so ancient Greek thought also drew direct connections between music and morality. Aristotle thought that music was similar to morality in both its rhythm and its combination of high and low tones. Every tune was accorded an ethical, moral character; every tune was either gentle, courageous, mournful, or indolent and could arouse the corresponding response or character in its hearers.78 This is quite close to the Chinese theory discussed above. But in China, this view prevailed over a long period of time. Confucians fixed this notion and made it part of their fundamental doctrine. Even more important, since it formed a part of the already long-standing historical phenomenon of the tradition of rites and music, it was not just another theory or concept, but acquired the continuing force of habit. According to the rites and music tradition, music, along with the rites, was a tool for the consolidation of the sociopolitical order and had a political function and character at its very heart. Even later, when different types of art were distinguished, this traditional quality was always a basic requirement of all of them. The expectations of music, of literature, even later of painting, were that they “perfect education and serve human relationships.” The government of China is a government of ethics, in which the unity or identity of the good and the beautiful is a perennial feature. In the ancient documents of many peoples, the interchangeable use of the words “beauty” and “goodness” is quite a common phenomenon. But in China, this phenomenon persists to the present day, for example in the so-called Five Essentials of Behavior, and Four Points of Beauty.79 Relatively speaking, Chinese aesthetics places a remarkable emphasis on this connection. Western philosophers (for example, Plato) also have emphasized the close relationship between beauty and goodness, but its conspicuousness in China is due to the same long-standing historical tradition of rites and music. How does this play out in different artistic genres? If we compare the “Record of Music” with the “Great Preface” to the Book of Songs, we find that the theory in the former which requires “music” to serve ethical education is carried on and plainly evident in the “Great Preface”: Poetry is where the intent arrives. In the heart it is intent; when expressed in words it is a poem. The emotions are moved within, and take shape in words. Where words are inadequate, one sighs; where sighs are inadequate, one sings; where song is inadequate, unconsciously one begins to clap, dance, and tap the feet. Feelings are expressed in sound, and sound, when patterned, is called music. The music of a well-governed world is peaceful, rejoicing in its harmonious administration; the music of a chaotic world is plaintive, reflecting dissatisfaction with its perverse administration; the music of a lost state is mournful, meditating on the difficulties of its people. Thus, in setting right achievements and failures, moving heaven and earth, and influencing the spiritual world, poetry has no equal.80 Although the “Great Preface” appeared quite late,81 the fact that its language and thought are nearly identical to that of the Li ji demonstrates that the two texts are products of roughly the same period, or that one is slightly later. The concept that “poetry gives voice to the intent” first appeared in the Book of Documents (2/3/18); it is the earliest and most well-known definition of poetry. The “Preface” is simply an explanation or exposition of the ancient statement. It has sometimes been thought to be the work of Confucius or his disciple, Zi Xia; I prefer to view it as a product of the Mencian school;82 but in any case it certainly reflects Confucian aesthetics. But what is the actual meaning of “poetry gives voice to the intent”? There are always a variety of explanations. Some say that the “intent” in question is that of the author. Others hold that “poetry gives voice to the intent” refers to the expression of the intent through the poem, that the “intent” is neither that of the author nor that of the original poem, but that of the reader (or the one using or quoting the poem). For example, many citations of the Book of Songs in the Analects, Zuo zhuan, and Mencius demonstrate that “poetry” was used to “give voice to the intent” of diplomatic speech, in which it was common practice to buttress one’s argument by apposite quotation from this classic. This view is supported by such statements from the Analects as “unless one has studied the Songs, one has nothing to say” (Analects 16.13) and “when sent as an envoy, one will not have the apposite response” (Analects 13.5). Others believe that the phrase refers to individual interests and feelings. Still others think that “intent” refers to the achievements, instructions, history, or requirements of the community—in other words, that the phrase refers to the passing on of philosophical or ethical principles. As far as the origin or original meaning of the term is concerned, I would advocate the last interpretation, particularly if we keep in mind the interconnectedness of shi (poetry) and yue (music). The word “poetry” probably first referred to the incantations of shamans and was intimately connected with sacrificial activities. Later, it would gradually develop into the eulogizing of ancestors and the recording of tribal history, military victories, and sacrificial ritual. This is most likely the earliest implication of zhi (intent). Of course, this “intent” is very difficult to divorce from politics. The historical traces inherent in the notion of “expressing intent” are apparent in many examples from the Odes and Hymns sections of the Book of Songs.83 The close connection to governmental ethics is also found in the (probably later) practice of “collecting ballads,” which included “the laborer singing of his work, the hungry of his food” and aimed to “correct” the “wrongs” of the government. This essentially mirrors the function of music discussed above. Even the Tang dynasty commentator Kong Yingda remarks, in his commentary on the Book of Songs: What one expresses in a poem is but one’s own personal heart; yet this “personal” heart is actually the heart of the whole people. The poet encompasses the opinion of the whole people within his own, so that the affairs of the people can be voiced by this one person. . . . This is why they are called Airs [feng]. . . . In what he expresses, the poet unites the hearts of all under heaven, and the ways of the four corners of the earth. . . . This is why they are called Odes [ya].84 Thus, the phrase “poetry gives voice to the intent” referred to a national, political intent that included the “hearts of all under heaven” and the “ways of the four corners of the earth.” But the most remarkable thing is the way in which Han Confucians used poetry as a means of “beautiful criticism,” or veiled satire. This is the concretization of the idea put forward in the Great Preface of “setting right achievements and failures . . . enriching human relations, improving moral education, and reforming customs.”86 This view of poetry requires it to be a sort of tool for gently satirizing or admonishing the emperor in order to fulfill its purely political function. The ideal of “gentleness and sincerity” (wenrou dunhou) follows the same aesthetic principle. This tradition, fundamental to orthodox Confucian aesthetics, continues unbroken through Bo Juyi’s (772–846) time (in his famous statement that “an essay should conform to the times, and a poem should address current affairs”) and through the Ming and Qing dynasties, all the way up to the modern period. It is a kind of political literature, or political literary interpretation. According to this school of interpretation, “the music of a wellgoverned world is gentle and easy, as its government is peaceful; the music of a chaotic world is mournful and plaintive, as its government is perverse. The way of poetry is the same.”87 Clearly, this is the same view as is expressed in the “Record of Music,” and also has its origins in the rites and music tradition. This was the basis for the Han Confucian practice of using politico-moral education to explicate poetry, insisting, for example, on reading the first poem of the Book of Songs, “Guan ju” (The Ospreys), as extolling the virtues of the imperial consort, and so forth.

As representatives of post-Enlightenment theories, the liberalist and positivist principles of morality propagate a universalist set of rules and regulations to judge moral matters that set out to be value-free and universal (Curchin, 2007;Hsiung, 2021; Smith, 2021). This difference-ignoring approach is criticised for appearing as justice on the surface while in reality, it reflects the positioning of the white Western male and the alienation and belittling of non-Western cultures and domestic minorities (Xu, 2012). Therefore, liberalist and positivist principles actually are a form of particularism disguised as moral universalism, a covert endeavour to practice cultural hegemonic power. The very concepts of human being, freedom, humanity, and individuality are considered as Euro-centric mechanisms of repression (Beck & Sznaider, 2011). It is apparent that both moral universalism and cultural particularism (or cultural pluralism), advocated by some Foucauldian theorists, have their limitations. An ontological clarification away from both post-Enlightenment moral universalism and cultural particularism (or cultural pluralism) is perhaps needed. First, cultural particularism presumes all cultures have equal value—which is not to say that all artistic and creative elements within a culture have equal realistic value (Mead, 1934). Moreover, to be considered a ‘culture’, its elements and practices must nurture a complete society for an extended period of time, and every culture goes through peaks and troughs. This dynamic conceptualization of culture does not suppose any simplistic equality between cultures. Therefore, I argue that the specific matter of morality must be verified through targeted research and intercultural dialogue (Taylor, 2003). If it is decided, without thorough research and dialogue, that all cultures hold equal realistic value, cultural differences are predetermined and hardly worth acknowledging. A culture needs to be treated with meaningful respect instead of condescension, and therefore notions of cultural equality should be more nuanced and thought through, rather than be shaped by blindly following the liberalist approach. The second clarification, just as Foucauldian theorists advocated, is that the rational and reasonable individual, on which liberalism (or at least, procedural liberalism) and positivism are based, cannot exist prior to the social; indeed, the individual is embedded within the social (Xu, 2012). If Foucault’s perspective on disciplinary power is applied to the self in its cultural context, ‘the self’ ceases to be defined as an object of respect but rather as a member or representative of cliques and factions. This definition derails the discussion of morality and ethics; according to Foucault (1979: 135), all value judgements that are imposed on the individual through disciplinary power share the aim of producing human beings that could be regarded as ‘docile bodies’. As Taylor (1991) suggested, the self is formed within social inter-action and thereby is inevitably shaped by cultural and linguistic contexts that include the exertion of disciplinary power. However, this does not mean that an individual merely obeys cultural norms and traditional practices (Butleret al., 2018). Although they cannot escape the influence of social context, an individual has the capability of reflecting on moral matters (Callero, 2003).

The difficulty for the Mohists and other consequentialists lies in establishing that consequences are the only such relevant factor. Consider an example the Mohists themselves touch on: slavery. 42 They argue that, along with other aspects of military conquest, enslaving the people of a defeated state is immoral. Their official explanation is that this and other consequences of war benefit neither Heaven, the ghosts, nor people.43 But is slavery wrong merely because it harms its victims? Suppose the enslaved prisoners were from an impoverished, crime-ridden state, and after their capture they lived comfortably as servants in a wealthy, orderly state. By the Mohists’ criteria, one might argue that enslavement had benefited them. Still, most of us—probably including the Mohists—would deny that this benefit justifies their enslavement. The challenge for the Mohists is to explain why not. NonMohists can suggest that slavery is wrong not just because it is usually harmful but because it contravenes other crucial values, such as people’s autonomy, dignity, or exercise of their characteristic capabilities. A Mohist might rejoin that trampling on such values amounts to harming people, and so Mohist ethics can indeed explain why benevolent slavery is wrong. However, subsuming such values under the concepts of benefit and harm seems redundant and gratuitous, a Procrustean attempt to assimilate into consequentialism reasons that are fundamentally not consequentialist.44 Indeed, this redundancy sometimes emerges even in the Mohists’ own explanations of immoral conduct. One passage explains that theft is wrong because the stolen items are the product of others’ labor and thus not the thief’s property (Mz 28/57). According to their ethical theory, the Mohists’ official explanation of why theft is wrong must be that the practice of appropriating what is not one’s own is harmful to all. To a critic of consequentialism, however, this explanation will seem redundant. Other things being equal, that thieves take what is not theirs is already a sufficient explanation of the wrong. Indeed, it is not obvious that theft actually is harmful to all, nor that, were it beneficial, it would thereby be right. Without purporting to offer a knockdown critique of Mohist-style consequentialism, then, I suggest that a more persuasive ethical theory would acknowledge different types of moral value rather than subsuming all moral value under the single label of benefits to be promoted. A third respect in which the Mohist conception of value seems too narrow is that the Mohists tend to assume that moral value is the only kind there is, or at least the only kind that matters. As I have remarked, they disregard aesthetic value and devote little attention to personal happiness or fulfillment or to a conception of well-rounded human excellence. For them, the best sort of life—for a committed Mohist—is that of the benevolent person or the sage, a life of total devotion to morality and to promoting the benefit of all, construed as material welfare, sufficient population, and social order. Their texts hint at recognition of other values, as when they point out that ancestral sacrifices offer an occasion for an enjoyable gathering (Mz 31/102) or enthusiastically describe dialectics as a path to knowledge of the myriad things (45/1). However, their texts, especially the “Dialogues,” give the impression that morality is all that really counts. The problem with this stance is that morality may not be all that matters, and a life of total devotion to it may not be the best sort of life. Many goods that enrich our lives are morally neutral; examples might include beauty, knowledge, humor, and excellence in various activities. A flourishing, wellrounded life may be one that makes a significant place for the pursuit or appreciation of such nonmoral goods.45 Mohist ethics thus contrasts with the dominant orientation of classical Greek ethics and that of classical Chinese texts as diverse as the Ruist Xúnzǐ and the Daoist Zhuāngzǐ. Much ancient ethical thought, in both Greece and China, is concerned with the good or flourishing life of the individual. A widely shared assumption is that leading a morally good life is in the individual’s own interest, since such a life is the most excellent or happiest for us as individuals. The morally good and prudentially good life converge: what is morally best turns out to be what is also prudentially best for us as persons.

Alternatively, one might think of groups as associations. Associations, such as clubs, churches, political parties, or teams, are formally organized institutions (Young 1990: 44). But these rely on a voluntary, contractual model of relations, where individuals exist as complete persons prior to group membership. If car owners were to organize as a group in need of political representation or social accommodation, they might form such an association. As with the aggregate model, this model for group identity is unable to adequately account for those group memberships I am identifying here as sociopolitically constitutive of the self. If an oppressed identity is a voluntary association (as many antiqueer spokespeople in fact assert with the use of terms like “lifestyle”), then one’s oppression is one’s own fault; one’s identity is supposedly a choice. Neither aggregates nor associations adequately capture the experience of group oppression, nor do they capture the constitutive nature of social groups (Young 1990: 43). A social group is defined instead by a sense of identity—a self-identification with a social status and its common history—that is not exclusively the product of one’s volition (Young 1990: 44). Young writes that group identification is a matter of encountering another collectivity whose cultural forms, practices, and way of life differ from one’s own and where one’s own are shared with some others. One will share a sense of identity with those who share one’s way of life because of similar experiences, such as coming out, homophobia, racism, xenophobia, erasure, misogyny, and so on (Young 1990: 43). Social groups, therefore, are neither arbitrary nor voluntary. Moreover, insofar as a social group’s relationships to other groups and the individual experiences constituting the shared sense of identity of its members constitute that social group’s identity, any given social group is defined contextually and provisionally. The description Young offers mirrors the notion of role-relational constitution from earlier. First, there is no preexisting core self who then adopts these social group identities. Instead, one’s process of individuation is partially shaped by these social groups. Second and third, just as one is born into a matrix of unchosen familial relations, one is born into a constellation of unchosen group identities (e.g., ablebodied, Chinese, cisgender, bisexual, and so on). Thus one’s individuated person is a unique focal integration of these various different group identities. Fourth, these social groups are relationally defined. Just as what it means to be a parent depends on what it means to be a child, a grandparent, and so on, what it means to be cisgender depends on what it means to be transgender, gender nonconforming, and so on. Finally, these social group identities are underdetermined. What it means to be Chinese today continues to evolve, just as what it means to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, pansexual, and so on continues to evolve with each generation. In these ways, Young’s ontology of social groups is analogous to the role-relational ontology in Confucian role ethics in that both see identities as unique, multifaceted, in-process, and contextually forged. Moreover, both see the ideal society as one that appreciates the differences among these various identities. This conception of social groups explains the phenomenon of chosen families detailed above. If elements of one’s identity are cocreated with others insofar as one needs others to affirm that identity and also to educate one in the history, cultural forms, practices, and ways of life of that identity, then finding and developing kin relations to do just that is a matter not just of flourishing but of survival itself. This is particularly interesting for Confucian ethics because the Confucian focus on family relations as the root of personhood (as necessary for survival and flourishing) is in a sense affirmed by the queer construction of chosen families. These are not simply circles of friends, predominantly queer neighborhoods, or online forums. Queer persons are often forming kin relations to establish themselves and to flourish as members of their social group, a social phenomenon that is consistent with the role-relational ontology of Confucianism but thus far not discussed by Confucian scholars. Moreover, the particular example of contemporary queer life in the United States requires both models of social constitution for a complete explanation.