Battle Fatigue DA- Their frame of the political economy brackets out privatized coercive touch – black and queer people can’t access it.

The weekend after your death, everyone converges at your apartment. I get the call, but wait a day to catch my bearings before catching a flight from Chicago to New York. A cab through the Village to your building where your doorman doesn’t stop us and we walk right in. When the elevator hits your floor, the familiar sound of a party pouring through the opening doors and into the empty space beside us where you used to be. I don’t know why it surprised me that it would be a party. Even though, or maybe because it belonged to your employer, your apartment was our party’s headquarters. It was something you stole back to give to those who didn’t have a home. Now, in the wake of your death, every room is full of people who are full with the loss of you. Someone puts a drink in my hand. This is just the first of an endless string of parties. Our party was the formation of a new communist party. The party: an organic entity, a living, breathing being, a gathering together of the multiple in the one, an obscure order, a whole which is not one, a many that is singular, a kind of provisional “we” at difference with itself from the inside out. The party, writes Fred Moten, “could be called the house party but don’t let that mislead you into thinking that house implies ownership; this house party is of and for the dispossessed, the ones who disavow possession, the ones who, in having been possessed of the spirit of dispossession, disrupt themselves.” The party is as much a site of refuge as it is the site of revolutionary planning, but “even though the party is, and takes place in, and takes place as, a kind of refuge, refuge still indicates that those who take it are refugees and people tend not to want to have to live like that.” The party, as refuge, is a place to catch one’s breath when you can’t breathe. It is a way of staying alive and of keeping each other alive. In your case, it was a way of sustaining your life after your death. And it was akin to what you called the punk rock commons or the “commons of the incommensurate.” Our parties go on for days, for years. They would begin around ten a.m., when the hangover was starting to wear off and we’d roll from one gathering to the next: cocktails, a memorial, breakfast with drinks, lunch with drinks, a family dinner, an impromptu gathering at some­ one’s house, a joint on the balcony, a talk in the hallway. Repeat. After your first memorial, we pick up drinks to take to a friend’s apartment and converge with an endless flood of smiling faces smiling sometimes. They verge, fall, pull toward and apart from each other. All the wars are briefly suspended and for a few flickering moments, as Wallace Stevens might have said, “We collect ourselves, out of all the indifferences, into one thing.” Though we were collected out of indifference by the shock of your death, we remain in difference from each other, which is to say that were not quite one thing but instead a singular being made up of the many, or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls being-singular-plural: “Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.” So rather than the coercive “we” that dominated the communist parties of historical communism, we became a “we” in difference from itself, gathered together in the wake of your death. I’ll be honest, I was kind of devastated. After your death I spent a lot of time trying to find you in the places you used to hide and especially the songs you used to listen to. The first thing I put on was the Germs (you loved Darby Crash) but that didn’t last long. I never shared your attachment to punk. Being manifestly uncool, my relationship to punk was pretty much Siouxsie Sioux, to whom I cathected around the age of twelve. There was something about her rejection of the domestic, suburban, and normal that made sense to teenage me—a queer black, brown, and blue boy adrift and alone in Northern Colorado. I don’t think you had strong feelings for Siouxsie one way or the other, but there is more than a passing resemblance between my teenage attachment to Siouxsie and yours to Crash. Both began as bad objects in their scenes: Crash in Los Angeles and Siouxsie in London. They were unlikely figures for two queer of color kids to identify with, least of all because both attempted (and failed) to appropriate (ironically or otherwise) the symbols of white supremacy by employing the swastika in their early acts. The swastika was something Siouxsie tried to atone for and that Crash refused to atone for and didn’t have time to do anyway because he, like you, died too young. Siouxsies name was itself an appropriation of the tribal name of the Sioux people, another chapter in the ongoing dispossession of the already dispossessed. We shouldn’t forget these transgressions, their unnerving entanglements with the violence of whiteness and white supremacy, but something about them nonetheless helped us sustain life in spite of the odds stacked against us. And the odds are stacked against queer teen­ agers of color in these United States. Darby’s and Siouxsie’s performances became the stage for what you described as the punk rock commons, “a being with, in which various disaffected, antisocial actants found networks of affiliation and belonging that allowed them to think and act otherwise, together, in a social field that was mostly interested in dismantling their desire for different relations within the social.’” In this punk essay, you cited Tavia Nyong’o, who argues that the word “punk” owes a debt to blackness, queerness, and the violent measures through which a phobic world responds to both. Siouxsie acknowledged a part of that debt when describing the queerness of the parties that gave birth to Londons early punk scene: It was a club for misfits, almost. Anyone that didn’t conform. There was male gays, female gays, bisexuals, non-sexuals, everything. No-one was criticized for their sexual preferences. The only thing that was looked down on was being plain boring, that reminded them of suburbia. Notice here how Siouxsie’s party resonates with the one described by Moten: “This is the party of the ones who are not self-possessed, the non-self-possessive anindividuals. This is the party of the ones in whom the trace of having been possessed keeps turning into this obsessive compulsive drive for the total disorder that is continually given in continually giving themselves away.” Which is a way of saying that our party owes a debt to the black radical tradition as much as to the radical tradition of black and brown queer house parties on Chicago s South and West sides. Unlike Crash, Siouxsie survived the early 1980s and with her survival came the emergence of a new sound characterized by thick, textured melodies, lush orchestration, and heavily processed vocals. Some people described it as post-punk and others described it as goth, but everyone seemed to agree that it lingered in the darkness—perhaps an unacknowledged way of acknowledging her debt to blackness. Like blackness, Siouxsie’s darkness wasn’t merely negative space. Her dark­ ness was from the underside, the B-Side, the upside-down world of the normative, retrenched, dystopian, suburban, white, neoliberal hell that took hold in Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s United States. Siouxsie’s darkness was a pharmakon to the annihilating “light” cast by the shining city on the hill. It was dense, dark negation as the negation of the negation. Darkness, for the members of Siouxsie’s party, was a place where the freaks could gather, take cover, and keep each other alive as the “light” tried to burn them out of their holes and snuff them out of existence. If their party was increasingly imperiled by the normative regimes of social comportment demanded by Thatcher and Reagan, the 1986 song “Party’s Fall” tells the story of the breakdown and falling apart as a condition of possibility. In the song, the collapse of each party becomes the condition for the emergence of something new the next night: “Your parties fall around you Another night beckons to you Your parties fall around you Another night beckons to you” That the party falls apart only to come back another night is why, following Moten, “the party I’m announcing is serially announced.” In “Party’s Fall” the present is always returning to itself, as Siouxsie points us toward a future in which the very thing that has fallen apart (the party) reconstitutes itself. Which is a good thing, it turns out, because the party is the one thing standing between the subject of her address and annihilating loneliness. About a year after your death, a friend and I are talking about you in a bar. He looks at his drink and says, “I used to be alone. And then I met him and I wasn’t alone. Now he’s gone and I’m alone again.” The party is a way of ameliorating loneliness, and the endlessly renewable capacity to throw another party becomes Siouxsie’s condition for a practice of being with in which the misfit’s loneliness becomes the conditions for a relation of being together in difference and discord with other misfits that are lonely and (un)like her. I suspect that this is why we threw so many parties after you died. They were a way of bringing you back to us, of making us a little less alone again. Ours was not a political party, like The Communist Party. Political parties endure, but they often endure through coercion, violence, and force. Instead, I mean our communist party as a name for what Siouxsie describes as the endlessly renewable chain of events performed into being by a plurality of broken people who are trying to keep each other alive. For you. Crash’s performances were an antidote to (but not a denial of) loneliness. Loneliness is common, and it is often crushing for queers and trans people of color. But it can also be a condition for the emergence of queer sociality and the undercommons. While it would be easy to assume that your punk essays are about the white boys in them (Crash in particular), it would be more accurate to say that they are about the work to which queers of color put these performances while struggling to stay alive, get free, and open up other ways of being (and surviving) in the world together. “Through my deep friendships with other disaffected Cuban queer teens who rejected both Cuban exile culture and local mainstream gringo popular culture,” you wrote in Cruising Utopia, “and through what I call the utopia critique function of punk rock, I was able to imagine a time and a place that was not yet there, a place where I tried to live.”” Today, we place an emphasis on “tried.” Near the end of Siouxsie’s song, she utters the phrase “maybe you’re alone,” breathlessly as if it were an aside. But this is the kind of aside that matters so she repeats it again, supporting the voice with the fullness of a wail. As she sings this bridge to nowhere, you would have noticed that the lyrics reach melodic resolution, which has been otherwise absent in a song that lingers in the minor key. Siouxsies wail stretches across the lyric, her voice breaking on the word happiness : My happiness depends on knowing / this friend is never alone / on your own.” I can’t help but imagine that as she begs her friend not to cry, applying her signature wail to the lyric and promising “a party on our own,” that she’s singing to a much younger version of you or me or some other teenage queer and trans black and brown boy and girl perched on the precipice of self-obliteration. Her wanting for a commons (to be with and take care of a friend in need) is Siouxsie’s precondition for a life in happiness. It was yours as well. If I follow you, Siouxsie, and Moten in suggesting that the party has some kind of relationship to the making of the (under)commons, I am also following Nancy when he writes that it is death that gives birth to community. After all, our communist party was formed in the wake of your death. “It is death—but if one is permitted to say so it is not a tragic death, or else, if it is more accurate to say it this way, it is not mythic death, or death followed by a resurrection, or the death that plunges into a pure abyss; it is death as sharing and as exposure,” he writes, “it is death as the unworking that unites us.” Our party was born from your death. So in the wake of your death we threw parties to resurrect you. Though yours was a death without resurrection, performance and parties were a way of sustaining you, bringing you back, and keeping you alive. Your death was tragic, brutal in its suddenness. But in spite of what people might think, there was nothing mythic about it. It was mundane. You were another gay brown man dead before fifty. To say that queer and trans of color death is mundane is not to diminish their horror, but on the contrary to name the shocking fact of this kind of deaths everydayness. Trans and queer of color life is lived in constant and close proximity to death. “In any major North American city,” writes Rinaldo Walcott, the numerous missing black women (presumed murdered), the many ‘missing’ and murdered trans-women, the violent verbal and physical conditions of black life often leading to the deaths of gay men, lesbian women, and trans people remain a significant component of how black life is lived in the constant intimacy of violence on the road to death. Death is not ahead of blackness as a future shared with others; death is our life, lived in the present.” For similar reasons Christina Sharpe describes black life thus: "I want... to declare that we are Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black death.” If I think of your death in relation to the forms of black life and death named by Walcott and Sharpe, it is not to suggest that they are commensurable. This would distract us from the way the history of black death in the Americas from the Middle Passage forward produces a present in which, as Walcott insists, “Black people die differently.” But what I could see clearly in the wake of your departure is that black and brown queer and trans death, like the deaths of women of color, produced by different yet overlapping histories of colonialism, capital accumulation, white supremacy, and cis-heteropatriarchy, share something with each other not in spite of but because of their difference. I want to suggest that black and brown people’s emancipation from these conditions are mutually implicated, not in spite of but in relation to our incommensurability. What we share is that under such conditions, which are far beyond our ability to control them, survival can be hard. So, if I call your death mundane, it’s not to underplay the importance of your life. It’s only meant to serve as a bitter acknowledgment of the ubiquitous and disproportionate distribution of death toward queers, women, and trans people of color. Dying for different reasons, often dying before really living, but dying nonetheless. It can be as hard to survive as it is to live on in the wake of those who didn’t. But you taught me that performance is imbued with a weak power of resurrection, or at least the power to sustain some fragment of lost life in the presence of a collective present. Performance, you wrote, is what allows minoritarian subjects to “take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names. And performance is also a way of drawing people together. Throwing parties was a way of resurrecting you and keeping you alive. Being with each other was a way of being with you. In the wake of your death we became common to each other. We became communists.