#afro-pessimism

Against Afro-Pessimism

Privilege theory’s emphasis on liberal forms of consciousness-raising activism, often bound up in the largely-symbolic disavowal of accrued social benefits, presents a vision of anti-racist struggle that inadvertently centres the agency of benevolent white people, while tending to treat questions of racism as issuing above all from psychological sources. Too-often subscribing to idealist theories of power, these approaches prioritise practices aimed at increasing cultural hegemony or positive symbolic representation of marginal groups, rather than seeing race as reproduced through differential regimes of ballistic and carceral material violence like police and prisons and strategising on this basis. Where they do acknowledge the central role of material violence and the consequent inevitability of anti-State revolt, they are often lead into embarrassing efforts to ‘shelter’ homogeneously-understood ‘communities of colour’ from State violence, erasing the ongoing histories of Black autonomous revolt and replacing it with a vision of struggle that looks more like a voluntary disavowal of privilege by White leftists and ‘people-of-colour-allies’. Finally, in addition to its being burdened by either unstrategic and/or simply liberal ‘nonviolent’ leftist tendencies, privilege theory also grossly underestimates the depth and scale of racism in the US.”

Subjective vertigo...:a dizzying sense that one is moving or spinning in an otherwise stationary world, a vertigo brought on by a clash of grossly asymmetrical forces. There are suitable analogies, for this kind of vertigo must have also seized Native Americans who launched the AIM's occupation of Wounded Knee, and FALN insurgents who battled the FBI. Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the sensation that one is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable environment, that one's environment is perpetually unhinged stems from a relationship to violence that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation. This is structural as opposed to performative violence. Black subjectivity is a crossroads where vertigoes meet, the intersection of performative and structural violence...Human revolutionaries (workers, women, gays and lesbians, post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective vertigo when they meet the state's disciplinary violence with the revolutionary violence of the subaltern; but they are spared objective vertigo. This is because the most disorientating aspects of their lives are induced by the struggles that arise from intra-Human conflicts over competing conceptual frameworks and disputed cognitive maps, such as the American Indian Movement's demand for the return of Turtle Island vs. the U.S.'s desire to maintain territorial integrity, or the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional's (FALN) demand for Puerto Rican independence vs. the U.S.'s desire to maintain Puerto Rico as a territory. But for the black, as for the slave, there are no cognitive maps, no conceptual frameworks of suffering and dispossession which are analogic with the myriad maps and frameworks which explain the dispossession of Human subalterns.

Anyone who is interested in abolishing structures of oppression should know the difference between a metaphysics of presence and a metaphysics of absence. When we talk about structural positions, we tend to think in positive terms: the presence of an oppressor group, and the presence of an oppressed group. It seldom occurs to folks that anti-black violence does not orient around the principle of presence - it orients around absence. Social systems are often likened to architecture. Many people think that the entirety of a building is supported by its foundation. This view is embodied in the words of Jesus Christ (and later, Abraham Lincoln) when He declared that "a house divided against itself will not stand." From this perspective, two antagonistic groups or agendas cannot be present at the same time. While this view makes sense at first pass, it completely misses the fact that a hole had to be excavated in the ground BEFORE the foundation of the house could be laid. That primary absence or lack is a precondition for the foundation of the house - because it makes room for the entire structure. That hole is what makes the whole of the house possible. Assuming that the foundation is what supports the house is a metaphysics of presence. Realizing that the absence is what supports the foundation is a metaphysics of absence. Blackness is the hole that makes the whole of humanity coherent. The questions become: how and why is blackness positioned as the hole? The question of 'how' is answered straight-forwardly by the phenomena of VIOLENCE - physical and metaphysical. The violence is physical insofar as bodies are reduced to commodities, to mere flesh. A metaphysics of presence cannot account for the fact that our bodies have been stolen, and we are positioned as fugitives, as runaways. The violence is metaphysical insofar as we are robbed of our names, language, family, culture, etc. It is also important to note that blackness is a consequence of racialized slavery. Blackness did not exist before the Transatlantic Slave Trade. As Frank Wilderson argues "Africans went into the ships and came out as blacks." For this reason, there is no untainted version of blackness (like the Garden of Eden before The Fall) that can be restored or returned to. Blackness is always-already the outcome of violence; and it exists within the context of violence. Any analysis of racism that does not center on violence has missed the point entirely. The question of 'why' is answered with a discussion of coherence. Anti-blackness is what gives the system its semblance of order. Anti-blackness has always been America's favorite pastime. No matter how downtrodden and disenfranchised a non-black group is, they can always say "well, at least I'm not black." This is part of the reason Malcolm X argued that the first thing immigrants learn when they come to America is the N-word. Simply not being black is the glue that binds non-blacks as a collective people. Since blackness is positioned as an absence or lack, it can be used in any way imaginable by anyone who is not black. The uses of blackness are both physical and psychological. Black suffering gives non-blacks an opportunity to reflect upon how fortunate they really are (Hartmann, 1997). Blackness functions as what Toni Morrison calls a "surrogate self" : a ready-to-use standpoint and persona from where non-blacks can safely think/fantasize about the world and themselves. In other words, blackness is an "empty vessel" - which means we cannot tackle anti-blackness with a metaphysics of presence. We have to assume an absence. Private property is the cornerstone of global capitalism - and its abolition is the foundation for many revolutionaries. But unbeknownst to many devout communists and others on the Left who want to socialize the means of production is the fact that blackness is a form of public property already. This is why black culture is continuously appropriated; and this is why black movements are routinely co-opted. Collectivizing private property in public hands does not address the vested interest of non-blacks in maintaining blackness as their community possession. Switching to a metaphysics of absence will rid our minds of this error - because it shifts away from assuming the presence of the proleteriat toward realizing the absence of the slave.

But it is the beauty...of Afro-pessimism that allows and compels one to move past that contradictory impulse to affirm in the interest of negation and to begin to consider what nothing is, not from its own standpoint or from any standpoint but from the absoluteness of its generative dispersion of a general antagonism that blackness holds and protects in as critical celebration and degenerative and regenerative preservation.