#worldlessness

So, do white people get racially disoriented?...It’s a case of racializing them. Calling them white. When they perceive their world slipping or their character being maligned at a time when they don’t expect it, they become disoriented. You’ve heard of the diversity workshop exercise of separating a room by eye colour, then treating the people with blue eyes harshly, relocating them to a corner, ignoring them. This exercise successfully makes a point about the arbitrariness of race and discrimination because of the disorientation it produces in people who are not used to being disadvantaged arbitrarily, people who are not accustomed to being unlucky… Our present moment—of pandemic, of racial justice protests—is a collective disorientation that challenges our prior assumptions about normalcy, safety, and the status quo. White people are finally disoriented by the ubiquity of evidence and cases of violence against Black people. These cases proliferate. But white people are also disoriented by how rapidly things seem to be changing. A white person had a job, said something racist, and poof, the job was gone. That kind of disorientation is the crumbling of dominance, a kind of earthquake that leads to vertigo and collapse.

Afropessimism isn’t a church to pray at, or a party to be voted in and out of office. Afropessimism is Black people at their best. ‘Mad at the world’ is Black folks at their best. Afropessimism gives us the freedom to say out loud what we would otherwise whisper or deny: that no Blacks are in the world, but, by the same token, there is no world without Blacks. The violence perpetrated against us is not a form of discrimination; it is a necessary violence; a health tonic for everyone who is not Black; an ensemble of sadistic rituals and captivity that could only happen to people who are not Black if they broke this or that ‘law.’ This kind of violence can happen to a sentient being in one of two circumstances: a person has broken the law, which is to say, cracked out of turn given the rules that govern; or the person is a slave, which is to say, no prerequisites are required for an act of brutality to be incurred. There is no antagonism like the antagonism between Black people and the world. This antagonism is the essence of what Orlando Patterson calls ‘social death,’ or ‘deathliness’ in the words of David Marriott. It is the knowledge and experience of day-to-day events in which the world tells you you are needed, needed as the destination for its aggressivity and renewal. The antagonism between the postcolonial subject and the settler (the Sand Creek massacre, or the Palestinian Nakba) cannot—and should not—be analogized with the violence of social death: that is the violence of slavery, which did not end in 1865 for the simple reason that slavery did not end in 1865. Slavery is a relational dynamic—not an event and certainly not a place in space like the South; just as colonialism is a relational dynamic—and that relational dynamic can continue to exist once the settler has left or ceded governmental power. And these two relations are secured by radically different structures of violence. Afropessimism offers an analytic lens that labors as a corrective to Humanist assumptive logics. It provides a theoretical apparatus that allows Black people to not have to be burdened by the ruse of analogy— because analogy mystifies, rather than clarifies, Black suffering. Analogy mystifies Black peoples’ relationship to other people of color. Afropessimism labors to throw this mystification into relief—without fear of the faults and fissures that are revealed in the process.

Yes, the whole world is haunted! --Only is haunted? --No, it itself haunts, it is eerie through and through, it is the changing apparent- body of a spirit; it is a phantasm. What else is a ghost but an apparent body, but an actual spirit? Now the world is 'vain;' is 'empty;' is only dazzling 'appearance'; its truth is solely the spirit; it is the apparent-body of a spirit. Look around near or far, a ghostly world surrounds you everywhere; you always have 'apparitions' or visions. Everything that appears to you is only the appearance of an indwelling spirit, is a ghostly 'phenomenon'; the world is to you only a 'phenomenal world' behind which the spirit moves its essence. You 'see spirits.' Are you perhaps thinking of comparing yourself to the ancients who saw gods everywhere ? Gods, my dear modern, are not spirits; gods do not reduce the world to an appearance and do not spiritualize it. But to you the whole world is spiritualized and has become a mysterious ghost; so don't be surprised if you also find nothing but a phantasm in yourself. Doesn't your spirit haunt your body, and isn't the former alone the true and the real, the latter only the 'transitory, empty' or an 'appearance'? Aren't we all ghosts, eerie essences, who await 'deliverance' --that is to say, 'spirits'?

It is only natural that the new generation should live with greater awareness of the possibility of doomsday than those ‘over thirty,’ not because they are younger but because this was their first decisive experience in the world. (What are ‘problems’ to us ‘are built into the flesh and blood of the young.’) If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: ‘How do you want the world to be in fifty years?’ and ‘What do you want your life to be like five years from now?’ the answers are quite often preceded by ‘Provided there is still a world,’ And ‘Provided I am still alive.’ In George Wald's words, ‘what we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future.’ For the future, as Spender puts it, is ‘like a time-bomb buried, but ticking away, in the present.’ To the often-heard question Who are they, this new generation? one is tempted to answer, Those who hear the ticking. And to the other question, Who are they who utterly deny them? the answer may well be, Those who do not know, or refuse to face, things as they really are.

The failure of standards in the modern world – the impossibility of judging anew what has happened and daily happens, on the basis of firm standards recognized by everyone, and of subsuming those events as cases of some well-known general principle, as well as the closely linked difficulty of providing principles of action for what should now happen – has often been described as a nihilism inherent in our age, as a devaluation of values, a sort of twilight of the gods, a catastrophe in the world’s moral order. All such interpretations tacitly assume that human beings can be expected to render judgements only if they possess standards, that the faculty of judgement is thus nothing more than the ability to assign individual cases to their correct and proper places within the general principles which are applicable to them and about which everyone is in agreement…standards are based on the same limited evidence inherent in a judgement upon which we all have agreed and no longer need to dispute or argue about. The only compulsory proof comes as the result of our categorizing, of our measuring and applying standards, of our method of ordering the individual and concrete, which, by the very nature of the enterprise, presumes the validity of our standard…The loss of standards, which does indeed define the modern world in its facticity and cannot be reversed by any sort of return to the good old days or by some arbitrary promulgation of new standards and values, is therefore a catastrophe in the moral world only if one assumes that people are actually incapable of judging things per se, that their faculty of judgement is inadequate for making original judgements, and that the most we can demand of it is the correct application of familiar rules derived from already established standards. If this were so, if human thinking were of such a nature that it could judge only if it had cut-and-dried standards in hand, then indeed it would be correct to say, as seems to be generally assumed , that in the crisis of the modern world it is not so much the world as it is man himself who has come unhinged…Even more significant than this argument…is a similar shift of interest away from the world and toward man…there is not a moment’s doubt that it is man who has lost his bearings or is in danger of doing so, or who, at any rate, is what we need to change. Regardless of how people respond to the question of whether it is man or the world that is in jeopardy in the present crisis, one thing is certain: any response that places man in the center of our current worries and suggests he must be changed before any relief is to be found is profoundly unpolitical. For at the center of politics lies concern for the world, not for man – a concern, in fact, for a world, however constituted, without which those who are both concerned and political wold not find life worth living. And we can no more change a world by changing the people in it – quite apart from the practical impossibility of such an enterprise – than we can change an organization or a club by attempting to influence its members in one way or another… This is so because, wherever human beings come together – be it in private or socially, be it in public or politically – a space is generated that simultaneously gathers them into it and separates them from one another. Every such space has its own structure that changes over time and reveals itself in a private context as custom, in a social context as convention, and in a public context as laws, constitutions, statutes, and the like. Wherever people come together, the world thrusts itself between them, and it is in this in-between space that all human affairs are conducted. The space between men, which is the world, cannot, of course, exist without them, and a world without human beings, as over against a universe without human beings or nature without human beings, would be a contradiction in terms. But this does not mean that the world and the catastrophes that occur in it should be regarded as a purely human occurrence, much less that they should be reduced to something that happens to man or to the nature of man. For the world and the things of this world, in the midst of which human affairs take place, are not the expression of human nature, that is, the imprint of human nature turned outward, but, on the contrary, are the result of the fact that human beings produce what they themselves are not – that is, things – and that even the so-called psychological or intellectual realms become permanent realities in which people can live and move only to the extent that these realms are present as things, as a world of things. It is within this world of things that human beings act and are themselves conditioned, and because they are conditioned by it, every catastrophe that occurs within it strikes back at them, affects them. We can conceive of a catastrophe so monstrous, so world-destroying, that it would likewise affect man’s ability to produce his world and its things, and leave him as worldless as any animal. We can even conceive that such catastrophes have occurred in the prehistoric past, and that certain so-called primitive peoples are their residue, their worldless vestiges. We can also imagine that nuclear war, if it leaves any human life at all in its wake, could precipitate such a catastrophe by destroying the entire world. The reason human beings will then perish, however, is not themselves, but, as always, the world, or better, the course of the world over which they no longer have mastery, from which they are so alienated that the automatic forces inherent in every process can proceed unchecked. And the aforementioned modern concern about man does not even address such possibilities. The awful and frightening thing about that concern, rather, that it is not the least worried about such ‘externalities’ and this about ultimate real dangers, but escapes into an interior where at best reflection is possible, but not action or change.

if the world returns amidst the wreckage, it returns only in fragments. And it’s in them that forms of association can again be established. There is only a kaleidoscope of worlds to be composed. We are engaged in overcoming all the limits of the totalized world, with its metaphysical divisions. So let’s call our situation cataphoric (David Lapoujade). The catastrophe is what carries us, drags us down from the heights, from the sky of ideas to the ground that we need to inhabit. It is from below, through a radicalization of earthbound experience that we must break through the limit of representation, its toxic groupings, if we are to contribute to a return of the infinite variation of worlds. Step by step, little by little, we must abandon the obsession with the dividing lines that gather us into deadly abstractions. The coupling of construction and destitution spells the end of the reign of politics. Nothing, no urgency, can relieve us of the necessity of destitution as antipolitical experience. We must begin by destituting the representational language that has sneakily lodged itself in every crook and cranny.