Refuse “symbolic terrorism”---it’s commodified, fails, and causes worse violence.

The questions that Blanchot raises with respect to death's possibilities only multiply as one addresses works of literature that equate commodification with death. In Beatty's novel, the difficulties of that risky proposition are nowhere more apparent than in the novel's evocation of suicide as a national poetics. Frustrated simultaneously by the absence of viable political alternatives for black Americans and his own inability to slip the noose of commodification, Gunnar inadvertendy posits black suicide as an option. This prospect comes about at Boston University where Gunnar serves double duty as poet and basketball celebrity. After being asked to give a speech at a divestment rally, Gunnar laments, "today's black leadership isn't worth shit." These "telegenic negroes not willing to die. Back in the old days, if someone spoke up against the white man, he or she was willing to die" (200). Retooling one of Martin Luther King's civil rights era maxims, Gunnar pronounces, "I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live. In other words, I'm just ready to die" (200). In this articulation Gunnar acknowledges the impossibility of reviving the modes of bodily sacrifice that civil rights activists forged, and begins to articulate suicide as an alternative. Gunnar eventually proposes to consolidate human agency and autonomy by determining his own death. He articulates this logic in a conversation with his friend Psycho Loco who sees suicide as "taking the easy way out" (226). Viewing America's treatment of black men as inevitably lethal, Gunnar retorts, "Might as well kill myself, right? Why give you the satisfaction" (226). To take away the nation's capacity to issue death is thus to reclaim the autonomy of the subject by rendering morbidity a possession that can be reclaimed. It is this very instrumental notion of death that might lead readers to interpret the novel as one that holds a lingering nostalgia for the wholeness of civil rights activism or black nationalism. The text elaborates this interpretive prospect when blacks across the nation become utterly seduced by the idea of national suicide. Gunnar's speech inspires a black nationalist named Dexter Waverly to abandon his superficial rhetoric and kill himself in protest against Boston University's financial support of a corrupt African leader. The fact that this suicide actually forces the university to rescind its financial commitment to the African nation seems to confirm the instrumental use of death and makes Gunnar a national celebrity. Reports "of black people killing themselves indiscriminately across the United States" soon emerge in the national media (201). Additionally, at Gunnar's request, masses of people begin forwarding him their suicide poems. In a world in which all blackness has been thoroughly commodified Gunnar recommends a poetics and politics that seeks to reassert black national agency by rewriting death as a possibility. Or to frame this challenge to commodification somewhat differently, black suicide offers an intriguing twist on Baudrillard's vision of agency within capital. In his formulation, late capital achieves its hegemony through a symbolic substitution of labor for death. The "equivalence of wages and labour power presupposes the death of the worker," for a "man must die to become labour power. He converts this death into a wage" (Symbolic 39). In this sense, then, the wage labor system is always a curious commutation of an execution that capital itself has already performed. Capital's "gift" is the sleight of hand whereby it induces the worker's symbolic death by making him a wage earner and then allows that worker the "gift" of buying his own resurrection through labor. This is the unilateral nature of the gift that sustains capital's dominance. But if "domination comes from the system's retention of the exclusivity of the gift without countergift . . . then the only solution is to turn the principle of its power back against the system itself: the impossibility of responding or retorting. To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death" (Symbolic 36-37; original italics). Following a parallel logic, national suicide in Beatty's novel draws its power from its simulation of capital's own unilateral gift, the production of black death as that which refuses exchange. Despite the allure of death's possibility, the novel ultimately negates this gambit. Gunnar consistently refuses his role as the messianic leader of the masses. His rise to eminence brings increased surveillance by the police and almost constant media scrutiny. After returning to Hillside, the scopophilia becomes so acute that Gunnar and his pregnant wife leave their apartment to take up residence at the La Ciénega Motor Lodge and Laundromat. In his exile, he hopes that he can find a more authentic mode of expression. He subsequently founds the Bacchanalian MiseryFest, an open-mike poetry session that takes place under the "simple but effective" stage lighting provided by orbiting LAPD helicopters (219). While the events do allow for a communal experience of artistic expression - "neighborhood players read poetry, held car shows, sang, danced" - the political and aesthetic integrity of the events seem compromised by their very spectacular nature (219). One night, in commemoration of Nick Scoby's suicide, Gunnar reads a poem and stages an act of self-mutilation that underscores the limits of death as a paradigm of symbolic resistance. The poem articulates the model of suicide as resistance that asserts death as a unilateral gift. The piece submits that the most potent effects of slave rebellion lie not in the effects of infanticide on the "consciousness / of a murderous parent" but "in the slave owner's anguished cries / upon discovering / his property permanently damaged." After the master "calculates his losses / fore casts the impact on this year's crop," he "will notice the textual eyes of murder/ suicide / read 'caveat emptor' / let the buyer beware" (222). In one sense, this seems a perfect allegory for death as that which refuses exchange; the poem thus reads as a Baudrillardian offensive against capitalism. But Gunnar's subsequent mutilation of himself - his cutting off of his own finger - complicates this politics considerably: "I reeled for a moment, then meticulously wrapped the speckled red and-white handkerchief around the severed finger, exactly as I'd seen Robert Mitchum do in some American yakuza movie. Staring at the space where my finger used to be, I held my hand high above my head" (223). His audience of "distraught minions interpreted my masochistic act as sincerity, the media as lunacy. The more I tried to deny my ascendency, the more beloved I became" (223). The spectacle of mutilation must be seen as the enactment of the masochism that underwrites the poem's strategy of resistance. Both depend on a vulgar display of black self-mutilation. Gunnar's cynical response also confirms the ultimate bankruptcy of these strategies. Prisoner of both the police and the media at the moment in which he is most resistant to the system, his rebellion is being recycled as part of the dominant order's simulative strategies. He cannot imagine a form of agency without deriving it from a Hollywood film. In this respect, the reclamation of death as a radical subversion of capital is itself vulnerable to the social order that the strategy seeks to challenge. In short-circuiting the Utopian potential of revolt, the novel foregrounds the absoluteness of the system's dominance, the inescapability of its atomizing effects. The core contradiction of Beatty's novel, then, does not reside in a vexed nostalgia for coherent community, but in the fact that the text draws euphorically on the abstractions of commodification while foregrounding its insinuation into every sphere of contemporary African American life. By refusing an equation between death and political agency the novel not only works contrary to Baudrillard's Marxism but also in contradistinction to a seminal current in black cultural theory. Influential works by Sharon Holland and Paul Gilroy imagine that dwelling among and even "resurrecting" the dead serves as both a means to confirm the agency of the individual subject and the racial com munity. Holland's reading of Morrison's Beloved construes the novel as a labor to resurrect "the 'ghost' of slavery in order to let the dead speak to the living, in order to allow silence to manifest itself in language" (40). By opening up the possibility of communion between the dead child and the living black subjects in the novel, Beloved brings "about the repair of the psychic damage of slavery and serves as an antidote to the beleaguered status of black women in contemporary America" (52). The dead thus make possible a series of reversals, from silence to speech, from damaged to recovered, and from beleaguered to unburdened. Along the same lines, Gilroy's account of transatlantic performances that commemorate the dead also serve to consolidate at once the subjectivity of the black performer and a racial community as such. As he phrases it, the "turn towards death" also "points to the ways in which black cultural forms have hosted and even cultivated a dynamic rap port with the presence of death and suffering" (198). Gilroy interprets musical forms like the blues and jazz as "mnemonic" devices that "preserve and cultivate . . . the distinctive rapport with the presence of death which derives from slavery ..." (198, 203). Cultural practices thereby facilitate the reproduction of the death and negativity that attended the African's bondage in New World slavery. It is in this remembrance that Gilroy locates the grounds for a black "racial counterculture" and thus political agency (200). By contrast, in Beatty's work death provides no Utopian opposition against late capitalism. Even as Beatty evokes the legacy of death in slavery, he insists that the fantasy of black agency must also be subject to the limits of late capitalist hegemony. The result of the strategy is that it insists on the primacy of the problematic that attends contemporary political economy. This approach contains an implicit charge that insisting on the Utopian possibility of the slave's death is in some sense to evade the quandaries of contemporary political economy. An ambivalence about the achievement of agency through death surfaces in James's Negrophobia in very different terms. A passage featuring a character named Talking Dreads develops a scenario that parallels James's evocation of Voodoo. Whereas Maid fails to use Voodoo effectively because she does not understand the power of simulation to reproduce every act of resistance as part of itself, Talking Dreads overcomes that liability. This being from another planet appears to Bubbles Brazil at times as a "disembodied, dreadlocked head" and at others as an "empty white linen suit" (123). He recounts the story of how he was used by a Scottish female author as the inspiration for a text with the title Ul' Black Zambo. Of course, the title and authorial biography point to Helen Bannerman's notoriously racist chil dren's story Uttle Black Sambo. Therefore, when readers learn that UV Black Zambo is a text based on its author's inability to see Talking Dreads as anything but the racist caricatures in her imagination, the novel implicates Bannerman's text in the same process of misrecognition. Moreover, as the linguistic blend of "zombie" and "Sambo" in the title suggests, the text of Uly Black Zambo can be read as a represen tation in which James's investment in Voodoo and the commodity converge. That is, the orthographic changes invoking Voodoo zombies also underscore the text's play with the dead signifiers of racial representation. The text recodes the commodified blackness in Bannerman's original text in order to produce a simulation that takes the original to task. The strategy is evident in the first lines of the simulated text. IiP Black Zambo was a little nigger boy. Or Pickaninny. Or jigaboo. Or any number of names we have for little colored children - shine, smoke, snowball, dinge, dust, inky, egg plant, and chocolate moonpie. And since IiT Black Zambo lived with his mammy in a one room hut made of mud and leaves near a croc-infested swamp in the Jungle, we can call him 'gator bait, too. (124-25) The incongruity between the dulcet rhetoric of the children's tale and the crude abjection of Zambo in this stockpiling of racial epithets places the concealed vio lence of Bannerman's text at the forefront of its simulation. And in this way occu pying the dead form of the commodity allows Negrophobia to make the kind of instrumental counter to racism that James imagines as "subverting the perversion." Still, despite James's claim regarding Voodoo, it is Bannerman's commodified repre sentation that allows him to make such a maneuver. The invocation of Voodoo mystifies a set of social relations that have more to do with capital than Haitian reli gion as such. Moreover, the rebellion that Talking Dreads engages in is more accu rately described as simulation than Voodoo. This becomes all the more apparent when he shows Bubbles a secret project to defeat white racism. It involves a simu lated town called Garvey's Corner in which all of the citizens appear to be white Americans but are in fact blacks "trained to look, act and think white" (139). These simulated whites are reproduced to "undermine all the rights and freedoms American society has to offer the white race without the slightest detection" (139). In a sense then, the tactic here is to undermine white supremacy by becoming as adept in simulation as the dominant culture. Ever consistent in its disintegrative aesthetic, however, the novel upsets the utopia that Talking Dreads endorses. In a parallel episode the narrative focuses on the Zombie Master, a self-styled "revolutionary" character. He aims to overthrow white supremacy by building an army of zombies out of the bodies of dead celebrities. JFK and Elvis are among the corpses that he reconstructs in his laboratory. The chief manifestation of the white supremacy that the Zombie Master aims to destroy is Walt Disney. In a brilliant parody of white supremacist ideology, Walt Disney uses all of his mass-culture resources to foment the rage of white Americans and thereby destroy the black race. Giving a speech modeled on the Gettysburg Address, he asks the white Nation to embrace his enduring nativist creed: "Hang the nigger and burn the Jew!" (99). The Zombie Master counters this nationalist plot when he sends hordes of his zombies in to destroy Walt Disney and his theme park, the Disney Magic Mall. As the assault on the park unfolds, the Zombie Master and his favorite Zombie, Elvis, discover Disney asleep in his sub basement casket. Zombie Master begins to drive "the stake into Walt's heart" when he realizes that Disney is literally a robot and therefore "a puppet in his own mad design!" (111). The scene anatomizes a chief problem with investing in the radical insurgency of the dead. A political battle between simulations could turn out to be just that, an empty symbolic endeavor with no consequential stakes. The culture of simulation may have the effect of rendering even symbolic gestures of resistance obsolete; it is this dystopian possibility that the radical visions of Talking Dreads and Baudrillard fail to address. For both James and Beatty then, the tensions between the aesthetic possibilities of simulated blackness and the fraught prospects of political agency in a world inundated by simulation pose the problem of black postmodernity in terms that exceed the discourse of crisis. One cannot read these texts exclusively as indexes of a crisis in belonging, for they begin with the premise that whatever made older forms of communion possible now only exists as spectral reproduction. And if there is no returning to the past, then these are novels inordinately concerned with the cartography of the present. They probe the possibilities and limits of literature and politics within late capitalism. While they traffic in the recombination made available by simulated blackness, they are also shrewdly aware that these same mechanisms install new forms of racial domination. The timely genius of the novels is that they are neither seduced entirely by the prospect of a radically recoding simulation in the manner of poststructuralists like Baudrillard and Foster, nor held prisoner by Blanchot's suggestion that death makes available only a set of dubious performative operations. Employing the archive of dead signifiers that produce racial difference as mediating terms between death's erasure and possibility, these texts insist on our reconsideration of existing frameworks for reading contemporary black culture. Indeed, the refusal to invest in a politics of authenticity militates against the persistent critical desire to find racial affirmation in black art. It is this longing that shapes the ongoing controversies surrounding not only Darius James but also die visual art of Michael Ray Charles and Kara Walker.10 Critics take issue with this work because in their minds it reproduces the denigrating minstrel representations of the past. What such commentaries have not addressed is how the art itself challenges the very foundations of this critique by undermining the concept of a Utopian black expressive culture that transcends or inverts capital. As I have argued, a useful alternative to indicting the work for its complicity in racist representation is to interpret it as an aesthetic tendency that both grapples with the difficulties posed by late capitalist political economy and formalizes its own ideological implication in the contra dictions produced by that system. To wish that this art were like that of another time is to evade a present not adequately examined and perhaps to refuse the potentially unreal future of race.