Blackness is not stateless

To say that we have something (only insofar as we relinquish it) is to say that we come from somewhere (only insofar as we leave that place behind). Genesis is dispersion; somewhere is everywhere and nowhere as the radical dislocation we enact, where we stay and keep on going, before the beginning, before every beginning, and all belonging, in undercommon variance, in arrivance and propulsion, in the flexed load of an evangelical bridge, passed on this surrepetitious vamp, here. If you need some, come on, get some. We come from nothing, which is something misunderstood. It’s not that blackness is not statelessness; it’s just that statelessness is an open set of social lives whose animaterialized exhaustion remains as irreducible chance. Statelessness is our terribly beautiful open secret, the unnatural habitat, and habitus of analytic engines with synthetic capacities. Preservation is conditional branching, undone computation (tuned, forked, tongued), improvisation and, what it forges, digital speculation beyond the analogical or representational or calculative reserve. Critique – for example, the deciphering of the fundamental discursive structures that (de)form Western civilization – is part of its repertoire but it must always be kept in mind that cryptanalytic assertion has a cryptographic condition of possibility. Robinson’s movement within and elucidation of the open secret has been a kind of open secret all its own. For a long time, before its republication in 2000, Black Marxism circulated underground, as a recurrent seismic event on the edge or over the edge of the university, for those of us who valorized being on or over that edge even if we had been relegated to it. There, at least, we could get together and talk about the bomb that had gone off in our heads. Otherwise we carried around its out, dispersive potenza as contraband, buried under the goods that legitimate parties to exchange can value, until we could get it to the black market, where (the) license has no weight, and hand it around out of a suitcase or over a kitchen table or from behind a makeshift counter. Like Pryor (1994) said: ‘I got some shit, too . . . you respect my shit and I’ll respect yours’. Maybe there is some shit in the back of our cars that we don’t even know about. Certainly, this smuggled cargo would be cause for optimism, even against the grain of our constant, clear-eyed vigilance, even against the general interdiction – the intellectual state of emergency – enforced when we emphysemically authorize ourselves to speak of the spirit of the age. That spirit marks the scene in which the etiolation of black studies in the name of critique is carried out by way of our serial flirtation with forgetting our own animation, the collective being that is more precisely understood as being-in-collection insofar as the latter term denotes a debt that is not only incalculable but also subprime. Therefore, by way of the brilliant black light in Frank B. Wilderson’s Afro-pessimistic sound – which materializes, in an investigation of black being, the most rigorous instance of this fatal but necessary proximity to oblivion – I’d like to consider what it is (again and again) to lose a home. This is Wilderson (2007): Slavery is the great leveler of the black subject’s positionality. The black American subject does not generate historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are ‘off the map’ with respect to the cartography that charts civil society’s semiotics; we have a past but not a heritage. To the data-generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khosian presented to the Anthropological Axis. This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because – and this is key – our presence works back on the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject – even the most massacred among them, Indians – is required to have analogs within the nation’s structuring narrative, and the experience of one subject on whom the nation’s order of wealth was built is without analog, then that subject’s presence destabilizes all other analogs (p. 31). Fanon writes, ‘Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder’. If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magenitizing of bullets the black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible – namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog – a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for ‘whoever says “rape” says Black’ (Fanon), whoever says ‘prison’ says black (Sexton), and whoever says ‘AIDS’ says black – the negro is a ‘phobogenic object’ (Wilderson, 2007, pp. 31–32). In the United States, whoever says ‘subprime debtor’ says black as well, a fact that leads, without too much turning, to the question of what a program of complete disorder would be. In any case, it is difficult to see how, in the impossibility that marks its ‘positionality’, the negation that is always already negated would carry out such a program. In conversation with the equally brilliant Saidiya Hartman, Wilderson takes care to point out that ‘obviously I’m not saying that in this space of negation, which is blackness, there is no life. We have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous to those touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together’ (Hartman and Wilderson 2003, p. 187). What remains is some exploration of the nature of this antianalog, which is more accurately characterized as an ante-analog, an anticipatory project of celebration that pessimism must always disavow. Of course, celebration of what exceeds any analogy with the antisocial hostilities that comprise civil society is, by definition, antithetical to any agenda seeking integration in a civil society that, in any case, will have never survived such integration. On the other hand, precisely in the ongoing, undercommon instantiation of an already given, already integrated totality, celebration is an antiontological claim, an anteontological affiliation, a social and historical paraontology theorized in performance; it gives criticism breath while also being that to which criticism aspires. If ‘the tremendous life’ we have is nothing other than intermittent respite in what Hartman accurately calls the ravages and brutality of the last centuries, then feeling good about ourselves might very well be obscene. But what if there is something other than the phantasmatic object-home of inclusionist desire – which is rightly seen by Hartman simply to be the extension of those ravages and that brutality – to which we can appeal, to which we have always been appealing, in flight or, deeper still, in movement? Again, the question concerns the open secret, the kinetic refuge, of the ones who consent not to be a single being. The corollary question is how to see it and how to enjoy it. This is a question concerning resistance, which is not only prior to power but also, like power, is everywhere – as the mutual constitution of a double ubiquity that places the question of hegemony somewhere beside the point. The dark, mobile materiality of this ruptural, execonomic generality is a violence in the archive that only shows up by way of violence to the archive. Because I don’t want to kill anybody, because I want us to enjoy ourselves past the point of excess, I am violent in the archive. Because I am a thing seeing things, I am violence in the archive.