Figuring Blackness as ontologically atemporal “undermines material analysis despite claims to radicalness.”

This essay is a preliminary attempt to analyze varieties of disappointment, disillusionment, and exhaustion in contemporary Black critical theory, which I argue is linked to an ongoing crisis of temporality. By “crisis,” I mean a theoretical and affective discrepancy between temporality and history, an experience of time lived and theorized as an accretion of exhausted past possibilities and foreclosed futures. I argue that the experience of living in the aftermath of subverted, annulled, or still unfulfilled freedom dreams across the diaspora has intensified the feeling of disordered time, distorting or displacing an impulse toward engaging what Hortense Spillers calls the “total perspective against which the work of the intellectual unfolds” into ontology, which tends to obscure material conditions and the complexities of Black living (431, italics in original). A “crisis of temporality” has as its flipside a crisis of history, a conceptual blockage on navigating unresolved antagonisms and attachments to outmoded forms of thinking and desiring even as those antagonisms now assume new forms. I offer “Black situation” as a critical and theoretical framework through which to link the experience of time with historical analysis and engage such a perspective toward the end of theorizing what Lauren Berlant has called our “stretched-out present” (5).

The crisis of temporality, as a sense of temporal stuckness, manifests in some prominent strands of contemporary Black critical theory that rely on the sense of a static, quasi-ontological antinomy rather than antagonism or dialectical struggle to account for Blackness. I write more than a year following George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent uprising, a month after his murderer’s unlikely conviction in a Minnesota court, and as the COVID-19 pandemic exhaustingly continues. Ian Baucom’s claim in Specters of the Atlantic (2005) resonates: “Time does not pass or progress, it accumulates.” Time accumulates, he continues, “even in the work of forgetting or ending, even in the immense labor it takes to surrender what-has-been, or to make reparation on it, or to address its ill effects” (330–331). A critique of progress narratives becomes method. He is not alone. We can read him alongside Saidiya Hartman’s 2008 analysis of the “afterlife of slavery”—“skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (6). To a similar effect, Christina Sharpe, invoking Maurice Blanchot, has described the ongoing “wake” of chattel slavery as a “disaster”: at once historical and “deeply atemporal” (5).

“Crisis of temporality” names a structure of “deeply atemporal” feeling for those living in the wake of long- and shortterm disasters, a feeling of being cut off from transformative possibilities, or even livable futures. This crisis is organic to a historical conjuncture whose rhythms of attachment and sociality David Scott, discussing “the ethical-political experience of the temporal ‘afterness’ of our postcolonial, postsocialist time” (21), links to the problem of “living on in the wake of past political time,” what I would thematize as ambivalence (2). Answering Rinaldo Walcott’s call for “a theory of post-civil rights black disappointment,” this essay takes Black Nationalism—especially its insistence on a common transhistorical “Black experience”—to be one such temporal horizon, navigated as the “ruins” of what yesterday seemed like possibilities (118).

One cause of the current crisis for Black critical theory is the serial collapse, co-optation, or depoliticization of the most meaningful spaces within which Black people nurtured substantive alternatives to the present order. Moreover, as Black intellectuals have gained toeholds in previously barred institutions, the fates of Black lifeworlds have worsened globally. The tendency to individualize— through pathology or exception—makes it more difficult to conceive substantive forms of collectivity or solidarity. One result, as I will take up, is Black critical theory’s increasing tendency to invoke Blackness as fundamentally figural, as inhering in rhetorical, grammatical, and tropological configurations that are definitionally prior to any history. The figural easily slides into the ontological, which predetermines any possible “meaning” of Blackness and, moreover, undermines material analysis despite claims to radicalness. To be clear, chattel slavery—using the term as a shorthand for the array of ideologies, statutes, customs, stories, myths, and cultural logics that normalize enslavement—unsettles the myths and narratives of capitalist modernity; its legacies inform both institutions and concepts such as liberty and humanity without which thinking about our social world is difficult. When we mistake our shorthand for the contradictory practices that shaped the practices of slavery in different contexts, we enter into the play of tropes and grammars that shape contemporary self-understanding even as we adapt a posture of critique. In short, I worry about the ways a narrative thematization of slavery as coextensive with contemporary racially distributed violence obscures other ways of conceiving Black living.

One symptom of the crisis of temporality at issue here is a turn to ontology, which is also a tendency toward the figural. For some strands of critical theory, “Blackness” stands as a figure of some thing that stands outside of Western universalisms, which are always more specific than they might appear. For some, Blackness also figures as antithesis and therefore critique of the Western categories whose very capaciousness at once depends upon and disavows it. Staged in that way, a certain “Blackness” motivates a critique of systems of thought and social organization historically shaped by or juxtaposed with the formation of Western modernity. Presenting Blackness as a thing rather than a process requires abstracting a whatness (not to say “essence”) from concrete forms of Black life. In other words, Blackness becomes nominal. As such, critical intuition connects irreducibly unique events and practices into an intelligible form, a name, which can then be treated as natural or general. Presenting the generality of the concept as “historical” (meaning only that some past event or conceptual matrix is said to determine the present form of what usually appears as an antinomy) obscures the conceptual labor that (re)produces it. Theories proceeding in this mode, such as Afropessimism, often struggle to articulate a relationship between the singular and the exemplary. Afropessimism abstracts Blackness from more general histories of colonial modernity or racial capitalism so that it seems to be cause rather than effect. Afropessimists’ trenchant critiques of the social order target conceptual logics and theoretical formations that depend on unacknowledged but constitutive exclusions that its authors—linked more by a common way of posing questions than their answers— gather under the sign of “anti-Blackness” (as distinct from “antiBlack racism”).

Although he expressly rejects the Afropessimist label, Fred Moten’s early work is instructive for the ways he reframes historical struggles as conceptual, even ontological, abstracting those struggles from specific contexts. In the Break (2003) develops Moten’s concept of “objection,” the ongoing processes by which Black people refuse objectification and commodification. Objection can be literal, conceptual, or both. Isolating the moment in Karl Marx’s discussion of commodity fetishism where prosopopoeia endows the commodity with fictive, impossible speech, Moten observes the consequences of Marx’s ignoring enslaved people—commodities who did speak, scream, and otherwise object. Moten’s procedure thus avoids simply opposing Blackness and Western modernity in order to demonstrate the degree to which philosophers often rely on an implicit account of Blackness that they disavow. Few working in Black critical theory have emphasized Black social life more or done so to more bracing effect. Yet continually foregrounding the white supremacist logics that Blackness subverts can make Blackness seem merely reactive. More concerning is it that figuring Blackness as a matter of discursive positioning suggests that solutions are within philosophy, which makes the ultimate effect of objection ambiguous. Moreover, as we will see, objection is always present .

Both Moten and the Afropessimists take up Hartman’s work, but their respective ways of navigating the “ruins” of an older, outward-looking Black Nationalism ultimately dulls the critical edge of their work. Where Hartman insists on “terror of the mundane and the quotidian . . . the diffusion of terror” and violence in places critics generally had not looked—“pleasure, paternalism, and property”—(Scenes 4), Moten attunes us to a “terrible beauty” in scenes of subjection that seeds rebellions past and to come. Black aesthetics thus express an “[e]xhaustive celebration of and in and through our [Black] suffering” (Black and Blur xiii). Drawing on Cedric Robinson, Moten conceives “the performative essence of blackness” (Black and Blur 16) as fidelity to “the ontological totality, granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses” (Robinson 168). The relative absence of temporality as a theme in this work—the relative privilege of mediated performance rather than the performers and their publics—indicates a more general problem in contemporary criticism related to theories of Blackness and Black politics that miss the complexities of those performers and audiences comprise the aesthetic event.

A notion of tradition corresponding to “the ontological totality”—which resonates with earlier Black Nationalist critical procedures—grants a form of aesthetic autonomy that ultimately alienates artworks from communities. The artists, meanwhile, correspond with a community that appears on no map (a fantasy that media such as print, film, and sound recording often invite), and thus this mode of analysis need not concern itself with historical transformations of those communities. Ironing out historical differences, his work leaves the impression that Black aesthetics develop according to an atemporal logic that allows discrete moments—a representation of Aunt Hester in Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative and Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997) and a Marvin Gaye recording from 1976—to appear both simultaneous with one another and unmediated.3 Moten’s refusal to draw lines between historical periods, genres, and mediums enables such startling connections—what he might term the ante-historical aspects of Blackness. The drawback is that it becomes difficult within such an analysis—perhaps even beside the point—to inquire about specific historical processes, the networks of performance and publication that materially reproduce both Black aesthetics and counterpublics. Rather, to make a very small distinction, his sensibility is deeply historical, even as his analysis proceeds by way of astonishing montages of moments and details whose connections are forged in and through his critical practice.

One notes that Moten’s engagement with aesthetic objects, framed by Black feminist thought and Derridean deconstruction, tends to serve a larger critique of Western phenomenology. Black texts, functionally identical with Black performances, become iterations of an underlying Blackness, discussed above, which they imperfectly embody. That framework allows for a notion of tradition that unites disparate performances, textual and otherwise, across time. His claim that “[c]elebration is the essence of black thought, the animation of black operations, which are, in the first instance, our undercommon, underground, submarine sociality” leaves us at something of an impasse when our project is to move between Blackness and Black people, Black life and Black lives (Machine 197, my italics). These are roughly analogous to the relationship between poetry and poems, music and songs.

The strangely out-of-time aspect of his approach to aesthetics also informs Moten’s articulation of Blackness. In the opening pages of his pathbreaking In the Break, Moten defines Blackness in three ways: it is “the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges [sic] every line”; “a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity”; and “always a disruptive surprise moving in the rich nonfullness of every term it modifies” (1, 255n1). Movement, upheaval, irruption, disruption, surprise—Blackness apparently acts of its own volition. As Moten has subsequently written, there are important distinctions between Blackness and (individual) Black people: to “say that Blackness is intrinsically experimental is not the same thing as to say that Black folk are intrinsically experimental” (“Forum” 130). Moten’s textual metaphors are therefore symptomatic of the degree to which Blackness for him is abstracted from the quotidian and historical contingencies of social life. Akin to Derridean differance , Blackness differs/defers meaning, prevents conceptual closure, inhabits those fields of thought from which it seems excluded. The misfit—indeed, the indistinction—between the general and the specific makes Blackness nominal. Moten elevates the idea that Black performance, rooted in colonial slavery, carries secret meanings opaque to the white disciplinary gaze to the place of the West’s selfreproduction as self-identical and modern. Doing so makes Blackness a proxy for philosophical problems, which in turn confers on it a curious form of autonomy: every potential example is true; plus, the heuristic value of any example is already subsumed by the concept’s generality. From within this theoretical frame, it is difficult to see how Blackness can be anything other than a position in discourse.