Distinctions between types and degrees of antiblack violence exist and matter. Theorizing antiblackness ontologically flattens those distinctions and defuses resistance.

The leveling of distinctions characteristic of immediacy theory often broaches a dissolutionist nihilism that absolutizes and dematerializes states, laws, and power relations, and abnegates alternative formations or alternative affordances of political-institutional forms. When that kind of argumentation prevails, its ambition is indistinction: harm-seeking laser vision sees particular injustices impugn the notion of justice; turtles all the way down. A brilliant and much-laureled example of this indistinction is the discourse of "university abolition" in the work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten and their students/followers. Rather than distinguish between the institutional operations and effects of the university and the prison system, Harney and Moten recurrently assimilate the one to the other. In their essay "The University (Last Words)," for instance, they directly liken a research fellowship to one of the cruelest of carceral practices, solitary confinement:

The university is a fortress whose various appearances—refuge and refugee camp, writer's colony and colony betray its deep, various, nefarious functions . only in the university can winning a fellowship mean access to solitude . . a set of fantasies, ranging from transparency to blackening, held in relational solitary confinement that mistakes the restricted (re)forms of the academy's general population for the 49 revolutionary force of a general intellectual metaeconomy.

A lecture and teach-in on this essay takes the point even farther: in the middle of the largest protest movement ever to transpire in this country, a movement explicitly against police violence, they observe "so much of our work is about how the vast majority of the policing that gets done in the university is done by administrators and faculty and not by the police 50 forces." And a manifesto authored by their students in their name further blends the concerted right-wing campaign to defund higher education into a radically flashy movement to "abolish" college. While there are countless critical pedagogy critiques and studies of the school-to-prison-pipeline that would substantiate more subtle versions of these imbrications, juxtaposed against the fact that the University of Chicago and Temple University have the largest private police forces in the country—and they actually shoot people—such flattening associations actively disarm the specific project of disarming and defunding campus cops, by generalizing everything on campus into acts of policing. Harney and Moten furthermore discard the vast differences among institutions and outcomes in higher education in favor of this monolith of domination, "the university," conveniently eliding that the majority of university instruction happens in small public places or that the enormous earnings gap between degree holders and those with less education continues to widen, and rankly allying with Republican efforts to tar higher education as an elite playground. Ecological theorist Andreas Malm decries this indistinction for the incapacity it begets; the point of such flattening is "to ruin as much analytic equipment as possible." 51 A vision that paints every human formation since the beginning of Western inscription with the same condemnatory brush can have as its only outcome the aggrandizing of the critic. In perpetrating these indistinctions, criticism forswears its task of cutting, instead rhapsodizing dismantling when it could be honing the mantle of emancipatory structuration. Such theologies of the negative foreshadow and refract activist practice in the present omnicrisis, where insurgencies repudiate value assertions, anarchic rhizomes reject organization, apathetic floods refuse voting, and visions of total destruction decline positive constructions.

In unhistorical dematerialized nihilism, horrors of the present are chained to horrors of the past in continuous current, overflowing the record of struggle for freedom and of contingent events with the oceans of domination. The identity of past and present ("It has always been this way") poses to capture the essence of the social order in its unchanging stone, a revelation of truth that endures unscathed. Similarly does the disposition away from change and toward essence involve a frequent ontologization of contingent social processes, so that "racialization" becomes "ontological anti-Blackness" and "patriarchy" becomes "the logic of misogyny."52 There are frequently spiritual or theological overtones to these epics of "original sin," and their rhetorical and epistemological effect, as historian Matt Karp and others have observed, is the keenness of 53 immutability. By the light of the category of immediacy, we can see how this eternity of immanence, this ineluctable total everythingness, mirrors the motifs of timeless instantaneity and frictionless flow that organize the culture of circulation.

The appeal of these “poetheories” and nihilisms is undeniable, and inarguability is baked into their ethos. Therefore, it is crucial to appreciate the critiques and counterpositions offered by more materialist and dialectical thinkers of racialization, such as Angela Davis, Achille Mbembe, Olúfemi Táíwò, or Anthony Reed, who, in turn, find inspiration in the internationalist anti-imperialism of Frantz Fanon or Gayatri Spivak.

Davis explicitly criticizes the “nationalism” and idealism of the paradigm of “anti-Blackness,” because the “center on pain and injury … can create barriers to developing solidarity” and because “the importance of black people’s histories in the Americas resides precisely in the fact that there has been an ongoing freedom struggle for many centuries, the centrality of black struggles is much more about freedom than it is about blackness.” Mbembe concurs that the “absolutization” operates in the realm of the ideal, reifying contingencies and eclipsing freedom and solidarity: “Afro-pessimism is also premised on the idea of a categorial antagonism that cannot be transcended.” Drawing upon the work of Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola, Mbembe argues for heterogeneity and contradiction as the contrasts to absolutism and nihilism:

The most efficient logic of action is not flight and escape or fugitivity (but) clearing the pathways of composition. This is not about fugitivity; it is about the capacity to assemble and compose… it is a different way of inhabitation of the world … Freedom consists in the full inhabitation of the world, an embrace of its contradictions.

Táíwò, in stark contrast to Yusoff’s demolition, takes the concept of the Anthropocene as an opportunity to advocate for “constructive” reparations: since “the connection between climate crisis, slavery, and colonialism flows from distributions of wealth and vulnerability created by centuries of global politics and its ecological consequences, layered with more recent histories of pollution in the Global North and corporate fossil fuel interests,” it is necessary for there to be centralized restitution that anticipates future suffering. Reed powerfully argues that “the turn to theorizing (anti)Blackness as ontology, and the (re)turn to theorizing the inner life/subjective experience are two sides of one anticollective ultimately anti-utopian coin.” The obverse of immediacy’s immutability and spiritualization is this embrace of construction, contradiction, contingency—of struggle and solidarity. Mediations are many-textured compositions that sustain inconsistencies and de-complete or de-immanentize, holding open the possibilities of practical connection in and through action to build.

The magnetism of immediacy theory, however, can repose in closing these possibilities. If nothing is changeable, if solidarity fails, if it is too late, the obligation to act dissipates. In its place arise valiant theories of the undesirability of action itself, along with entire lexicons for recriminating the instrumentalism and compromise of politics, and recasting politics as ontologization. An eloquent idiolect of this resignation is “antipolitics,” a “beyond of politics” in which alterity and negation disrupt and undo the ordinary order of things, including its ordinary prescriptions for organization and struggle. Theory perpetually relativizes itself vis-à-vis practice and has historically wrestled with the problem of immediacy in questions about the imminence of revolution, the immanence of the general will, spontaneity, and party-planning—a swath of thinkers from Thomas Hobbes and Gustave Le Bon to Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, from Sigmund Freud to Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, from Angela Davis to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, have recurrently asked whether the mass or class is identical to itself and on a trajectory of becoming conscious of itself, what intellectuals do to facilitate or impede mass action, and whether political theory is inherently descriptive and belated, or possibly projective and electrifying. But now, in the present theoretical landscape, the questions seem decided and the match seems won; antipolitics renounces the mediation of organization, antitheory renounces the mediation of theory, and immediacy autonomizes.

Assessing not only the known world but also available paths out of it as “inherently unfixable and beyond resuscitation, reform, or rescue” (as one self-proclaimed “insurgent” journal declares), contemporary antipolitics absolutizes a transhistorical, dematerialized ether of abjection while infinitely dispersing resistances that thwart amalgamation. While an “anarchist sublime” has long piqued theory-savvy politics, in its latest iterations the algorithmic imprint is undeniable: again, that pattern of infinitization paired with a succession of singularities. Immanence evacuates politics: “Power is no longer concentrated in one point in the world; it is the world itself, its flows and avenues”, the Invisible Committee intones, and thus any action expedites flow. Philosopher Roberto Esposito outlines the restless negativity of antipolitics vis-à-vis official exercises of power with his notion of the “impolitical”: “Politics cannot be conceptualized in positive form but only on the basis of that which draws its contours at its outer margin and which determines it negatively, constituting both its ground and its reverse side.” Negativity as end in itself animates gender theorist Jack Halberstam’s “anti-political project of unmaking.” And, most influentially, Harney and Moten conceive flight from collective power as “fugitivity”:

We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything. An abdication of political responsibility? OK. Whatever. We’re just anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life. We aren’t responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicize, every imposition of self-governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home.