The alt gets coopted by white hyperreality.

Gunnar's growing engagement with mortality is indicative of the complex interplay between death and commodification in The White Boy Shuffle and Negrophobia. These works provide distinctive meditations on the problems that attend speculation about what Maurice Blanchot aptly terms "death as possibility." Blanchot coins this phrase in part to interrogate the commonplace notion that one's death can provide a mode of agency. He traces such assumptions in matters ranging from authors who assert their enduring legacy in death to the veneration of suicide as an affirmation of being. For any number of thinkers, the "decision to be without being is possibility itself: die possibility of death" (96). In this sense the recourse to death, having "death within reach, docile and reliable, makes life possible, for it is exactly what provides air, space, free and joyful movement: it is possibility" (97). Thus, Blanchot rewrites evocations of death as discursive operations that concretize the autonomy of the subject. He punctures this mystification by asking, "Do I myself die, or do I not rather die always other from myself, so that I would have to say that properly speaking, I do not die?" (98; original italics). He questions the assertion of the subject's autonomy in death precisely because mortality insures no agency for the subject but rather erases the "I." Or as he writes in relation to suicide, "Whoever wants to die does not die, he loses the will to die. He enters the noctur- nal realm of fascination wherein he dies in a passion bereft of will" (105). For death is "never a relation to a determined moment any more than it bears any determined relation to myself" (104). It is therefore the endeavor to commute the unknowable into a concrete determination of the subject that Blanchot so powerfully demystifies.

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 simulta- neously by the absence of viable political alternatives for black Americans and his own inability to slip the noose of commodification, Gunnar inadvertently 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 instru- mental use of death and makes Gunnar a national celebrity. Reports "of black peo- ple killing themselves indiscriminately across the United States" soon emerge in the national media (201). Additionally, at Gunnar's request, masses of people begin for- warding 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 commu- tation 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 die gift that sustains capital's domi- nance. 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 die 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 community. 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.