Whiteness Supreme: Towson University and Liberal Ironists

A few theses, none too controversial or not said before: Whiteness is a property, a possession, one unevenly distributed across the social terrain. White supremacists tend to have diminished access to the supreme property of whiteness. White supremacy is thus an aspirational politics, one that attempts sticking close to what it imperfectly is in order to become what it should be. It’s an evil, vile reaction to the maldistribution of a mode of social power that cannot not be maldistributed. The effect of the unevenly distributed racial property, white supremacist politics will remain a possibility (and a violently aspirational actuality) so long as whiteness continues to be a possible mode of being social.

I’m offering these theses as a corrective to the dominant ways in which writers and news outlets have been approaching the White Student Union at Towson University. For those who do not know, the WSU (a student group unrecognized by the administration) announced that it would conduct nighttime patrols to protect white people (and, in particular, the “virtue of white Christian womanhood”) from “black predators.” One writer at AlterNet has commented, “It’s like they watched the Birth of the Nation and thought it was a PBS documentary.” Another, at Jezebel, writes, “The Towson University White Student Union (WSU), an allegiance formed of supremely ignorant and bigoted college students, has officially transgressed the border of deeply offensive and trundled into the realm of completely batshit with its decision to form an all-white campus patrol to defend their innocent (white) peers from the threatening threat of black people.” Irony, then, is one of the dominant modes through which the WSU has been presented to, and critiqued for, the public.

Irony has never been a very effective mode of redressing fascism. (Think Charlie Chaplin tossing that globe in the air, and his later regrets over the film.) As I see it, the capacity to be merely ironic about white supremacy derives from two linked causes—or, really, one cause viewed through two lenses. Irony regarding racial supremacist politics requires the distance from the scene that race affords; it requires, in other words, being properly white. Being white here has two vectors, negative and positive. The first condition of possibility for being merely flip with fascism is not being a PoC, one who might be physically attacked by these assholes or subjected to the psychic violence their bile might occasion. The second condition of possibility is the maintenance of an unproblematic relation to whiteness. It seems to me—based on tone and forum; I don’t know their bios—that the writers of the pieces cited above are both geographically and existentially distanced from scenes wherein they would experience a deficit of whiteness. The pieces are enunciated from a position in and around proper whiteness, where a white college-educated person’s access to whiteness goes unquestioned—the urban Northeast. To even begin to analyze white supremacist politics, we need to account for the striations of whiteness, the ways in which a host of social levers—space, class, gender, sexuality—distribute whiteness across the social.

A merely ironic disposition toward white supremacist politics is only available to those who possess whiteness supreme. The desire for whiteness does not make sense to those who have it. Consider Jezebel’s description of the WSU:

This belief [in white superiority] epitomizes a ridiculously antiquated racial hierarchy, in which white men alone are constitutive of civil society — which exists solely for their benefit — and African-Americans are perpetual outsiders who can only benefit the white society from which they are excluded by having their labor exploited, otherwise they're merely a menace to the established order.

White supremacy is here coded as an ideology, a belief. What’s astonishing to me is that the writer’s reduction of white supremacy to ideology actually results in her describing, with some realism, the material structure of a society in which whites (and white men) do reign supreme, do have power concentrated in their hands. Weeks after the murder of Kimani Gray, after which black protestors excoriated police for materializing black exclusion from the social, can one possibly say that blacks—especially in New York—are not outsiders vis-à-vis the white-dominated social? Desirous of patrolling a Baltimore burb with “nonlethal” weapons, the WSU really just wants what white liberals in Bloomberg’s New York already possess—it’s merely that New Yorkers’ property in whiteness is more or less unconsciously embodied, a possession assumed and assured. White supremacists’ desire for the very denegated structure of racial-rule possessed by Northeastern urban whites exposes this structure, and this exposure is managed by irony. This irony doesn’t offer a critique of whiteness, still less a radical attempt to undo it. Rather, such irony merely reinscribes the distance between zones of aspirational whiteness and zones of achieved and non-problematic whiteness, between zones of white supremacy and zones of whiteness supreme. Liberal irony reproduces the structural conditions for white supremacist politics.

My aim here isn’t to pile on this writer; still less (and this should be obvious, but you never know) is it to apologize for white supremacists. It’s rather to say that we cannot treat white supremacist politics in a merely ironic mode without a) reinscribing but denegating whiteness and b) failing to attend to the actual gravity of white supremacist organizing. Sure, the WSU appears clownish, “ignorant,” and silly, “antiquated” and not hep to our post-racial times. They wouldn’t fit in in white Brooklyn. To treat such politics as merely silly, however, is itself a position derived from racial privilege (like it or not, laugh at it or not, white libs, the WSU is out to protect you). Moreover, there is no white supremacist group that does not appear silly, ignorant, or clownish. I promise. Read their websites (I won’t link to them), check out updates on white supremacist actions from your local antifa or ARA group’s blog. They seem ridiculous, vile, and inept. The problem, though, is that three boneheads gathered together do not require much in the way of brains or organizational chops to beat the shit out of the next PoC they happen across. Wade Michael Page (the Sikh temple shooter), for instance, was a white supremacist who travelled with groups as ridiculous and dinky as the WSU. Fascism starts small. White supremacy thrives in the comedic social zone assigned to it by the liberal-dominant, but it takes very little for the farce of white robes, shaved heads, and bad angry music to convert to tragedy. Whether gathering to ineptly organize a political rally, going to a white power punk show, or just having a beer, any gathering of white supremacists poses an immediate threat to people of color. Antifa and ARA direct action people know this, some act on it, and some languish in prison for having so acted.

It’s simple, really: White supremacy isn’t funny, and it can’t be counteracted with irony. Such irony is enabled by the very social structure to which not-quite-white white supremacists aspire. If you’re committed to eradicating white supremacist politics, work toward eradicating whiteness. (That, of course, is less simple.) And, if you’re in Baltimore, stand up to the boneheads.

Solidarity.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Baltimore-ANTIFA/188753696848

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Baltimore-Bloc/436997373037153

[Edit: White supremacist comments will be deleted. If you wish to spew nonsense at me, you can email me at chtaylor@uchicago.edu. Or come by my office hours. I know, I know, emailing is less anonymous than commenting anonymously. My apologies. And (for those interested) I'll have a reading list of good whiteness / critical race studies stuff up soon.] 

Dr Franklin, Meet Shri Modi: Right-Wing Transnationalism and the Limits of Postcolonial Critique

Dr Franklin, meet Shri Modi
Photo from The Daily Pennsylvanian

On Saturday, the group “Americans for Free Speech” joined up with diasporic segments of the Indian right to protest the Wharton India Economic Forum’s disinviation of Narendra Modi from participating in the event. Modi had been disinvited due to a protest raised by various segments of a U.S. and South Asian left (myself included) who did not want the Islamaphobic Chief Magistrate of Gujarat, culpable in some manner for a 2002 pogrom against Gujarati Muslims, to purify his personal record and legitimate his Hindutva-plus-neoliberal-technocratic development policies under the sign of “Wharton.” And so the protestors marched, claiming that we denied Modi his right to free speech (I write about the absurdity of that claim here), chanting, “We want Modi,” and holding signs that put the Indian CM into a common ideological space with Ben Franklin.

The iconographic juxtaposition is striking, and one imagines that Modites walking on 34th Street revelled in the comparison. Modi is, like Franklin was, invested in technology, in science; the latter tied keys to kites and developed communication technologies and networks, the former offers stunning, Thomas-Friedman-esque formulas like “IT+IT=IT.” More importantly, Modi is, like Franklin was, acutely aware that nations are formed out of and through a manipulation of a global/international fabric of institutions, ideologies, and materialities. Franklin went to England and France to constitute the outline of a nation that had not yet been formed; Modi desires to go to the U.S. to naturalize and legitimate a Hindu-supremacist image of a nation-to-come. Indeed, it is in the U.S. that Modi’s Hindu nation can be pawned off as a nearly accomplished reality.  The signs that his supporters carried read “Narendra Modi | Future P.M. | India”; the mood is indicative, not subjunctive, as if his rise is ineluctable. The sign functions as a request that local Philly audiences treat the transnational collectivity of U.S-Indian right-wingers as proleptically representative of the Indian nation and so deserving of the international recognition such a representative deserves. The sign—and, more broadly, Modi’s invitation to Wharton in the first place—isn’t merely proleptic; it attempts to produce the reality it can now only project. The Indian right hopes to use transnational circuits to secure the patterns of recognition facilitating international relations so that Modi can turn to his national electorate and pass himself off as having already been recognized, by the global polis, as India’s ruler. It’s simple scale-jumping: you leap from the local (Modi’s Gujarat, say) to the international so as to back-form the national.  (That somewhat obscure senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, did something similar with his trip to Europe during his first campaign.) The key to such scale-jumping is that sites of transnational connection (Modi at Wharton in Philly, Obama in Berlin) need to be coded and re-figured as scenes of incipient international recognition. Otherwise, Modi would simply appear as another rando addressing a foreign crowd with platitudes about India, the internet, and what he calls democracy.

What has astonished me is the extent to which Modi is successful in this operation. It is partially a problem of the nearly non-existent transnational competencies possessed by your average Yankee. Students at Penn—particularly, those running the student paper—can’t wrap their heads around the idea that, in this case, Penn and Wharton are not local sites embedded within the U.S. but are rather scenes of a transnational struggle with potentially extraordinary ramifications for India. But the provincialism of Yankees is exacerbated by a certain form of liberal-postcolonial normativity. Consider this counter-factual case: the Penn students, professors, and administrators who support protests against Modi’s disinvitation in the name of “free speech” would (I think) be unwilling to support, say, a propagandistic presentation from a member of the Greek Golden Dawn on campus. I think that they would be able to see that allowing such a presentation would be tantamount to legitimating and supporting Greek fascism. But the BJP is no less vicious than Golden Dawn. How, then, to account for this discrepancy between (possible) receptions? Aside from the BJP’s possession of a better propaganda machine, aside from the fact that BJP supporters are enrolled at and teach at Penn, I want to suggest that a certain form of postcolonial normativity inhibits U.S. liberals from protesting and preventing their manipulation by Modi. The soft postcolonial normativity of the U.S.’s liberal public sphere enables India’s diasporic right to achieve incipiently international recognition for its racial-nationalist aims.

We can see this dynamic at work in Rajiv Malhotra’s article, “The Hijacking of Wharton.” A crazy conservative, Malhotra is syndicated on the supposedly progressive Huffington Post. To be blunt, Malhotra is a moron, and he has a made a career of deploying postcolonial critique for crazy Hindu-right ends. Malhotra is just outraged that “Indian professors specialize in scholarship criticizing colonialism” (he’s talking about my teachers and friends) could be complicit in “serving…American policies on interventions in India.” Malhotra calls my teachers and friends “sepoys,” a term he helpfully glosses in parentheses: “(The sepoys were Indian soldiers serving the British army to fight against other Indians.)” A few things are happening here. First and foremost, Malhotra assumes an audience entirely unfamiliar with South Asian history; anyone with the barest modicum of knowledge would not need “sepoy” glossed (or, indeed, would accept so inadequate a gloss). Malhotra hopes to capitalize on the ignorance of the average HuffPo reader. Second, Malhotra abstracts what was a transnational dispute between a transnational South Asian left (with Yankee allies) and a transnational Indian right (with Yankee allies) into the international field, coding the dispute over Modi speaking at Wharton as having taken place “in India” and as a struggle between the Indian nation and Yankee imperialists. Third, Malhotra uses anti- and postcolonial symbolics to transform race into the bedrock of the nation and so as a regulative principle for international relations. Think about how Malhotra defines and uses the figure of the sepoy. Given the uneven and complex political cartography of 18^th and 19^th century South Asia, it’s difficult to understand how a sepoy could recognize himself as an “Indian” conscripted to “fight against other Indians.” But that’s no problem for Malhotra, for whom Indianness functions as a racial essence; it’s there even when it isn’t or could not be. In yesteryear, British colonialism prevented this racial nation from achieving full institutional positivity; today, it is race-traitorish “sepoys” like my friends and teachers who inhibit India’s ability to become a fully sovereign India (which means an India in which non-Hindus know, or are put in, their place). By returning to the cathected symbolics of colonialism, Malhotra can code the Hindu right’s blockage from circuits of transnational power (Modi's disinvitation) as an international and imperialist denial of Indian sovereignty. Malhotra’s message to a liberal Yankee public is clear: Keep your hands off India, let it “be different” (as one of his book title’s has it), or else you’re supporting a racist neo-colonialism.

This soft postcoloniality poses the moral and political borders of the international as ethically impregnable (e.g., I, a white Yankee, can’t offer a critique of Modi without being coded as an EIC operative) in order to provide cover for an Indian right eager to deploy transnational economic and political resources for racial-nationalist ends. Of course, every single postcolonialist ever knows that Malhotra is perverting the legacy of anticolonial revolution and the ever-necessary practice of postcolonial critique. If postcolonial critique begins with anticolonial resistance to Eurocentric forms of power—political, economic, cultural, epistemic, and so on—it’s very next step is to critique those elites who, seizing upon the affective and ideological rush of anticipated sovereignty, transform anticolonial revolt and access to global capital into a process of inegalitarian nation-state-building. Malhotra holds onto the first, necessary moment, using anticolonial negation as a means to assert a multicultural right to hard-right difference. He seizes upon aspects of 90s poco/multiculti theory, a theory that valued the difference of dispersed particularities, in order to justify the will-to-power of a phobic, violent particularism. He’s doing it consciously, poisonously, making a mockery of the very real necessity to confront the structures of racial power that he supports.

But it works. For a U.S. public sphere, for well-intentioned liberals and college students who don’t want to be racist or colonialist and love the right to free speech, such claims are convincing. (I refer again to his early millennial—and ongoing—critique of South Asian religious studies, which [I think] knotted U.S.-based scholars up in fear that this racist asshole was going to accuse them of being colonialist racists because their scholarship could not be made to jive with a racial-nationalism organized by a transhistorical image of Hinduism.) The effect is that, in the name of postcolonial difference, in the name of the right of colonized peoples to sovereign statehood, U.S. liberals are willing to tolerate the intolerable, to provide institutional spaces and pseudo-constitutional cover for a Hindutva technocrat with blood on his hands. It’s not a question of “intervention,” as Malhotra puts it; this shit is happening in West Philly. The soft normativity of postcolonial respect transforms transnational interactions into scenes of international recognition. Thus, the claim, “the U.S. needs to respect India’s sovereignty” becomes, by a conservative poco sleight of hand, “Penn needs to welcome Modi.” By legitimating Modi and assisting in the purification of his bloody record, such welcome might end up producing the reality it assumes: enhanced by a positive reception in the U.S., Modi might end up personifying India on the international stage as its PM.

We desperately need to update postcoloniality for transnational times. Not in theory (it’s already there) but in our pedagogy, whether in classrooms or in the public sphere. This is a boots-on-the-ground question: soft postcolonial normativity calcifies the political and ethical purchase of international borders, producing what the arch-conservative Burke called a “moral geography” utterly out of sync with the transnational political exigencies of our times, and so inhibiting potential allies from helping out. Indeed, those of us who organized against Modi’s coming to Wharton were a little saddened by the lack of reception that we expected from our friends and colleagues—people who, just last year, were out and about for Occupy. I’m also saddened that anti-racist and anti-fascist organizers are not more invested (invested at all?) in preventing the BJP from using U.S. localities to gain enhanced power for anti-Muslim ends—they certainly go after Golden Dawn. We need, then, to develop a public political language for relating the necessity of challenging this pernicious form of transnational right-wing organization. I’m not sure if the rhetoric of “fascism” that some of us have been using—myself included—is useful, no matter how accurately it describes either the existent phenomenon or anticipated project of Modism. I say this because the sign “fascism,” in the U.S. public sphere, invokes an event so horrendous as to be removed from politics and so (except for antifa people) from politicization. The horrific grandeur of the term might turn some off (“That’s an exaggeration”) or reduce others to quietism (“What can I do?”). In the U.S., fascism is (for better or worse) in a museum, but Modism is on the streets.  It walked across 34^th Street yesterday, arm in arm with the U.S. right, carrying posters of Franklin and Modi and racist caricatures of my teachers and friends. College liberals clapped their hands, congratulating them on defending their rights.

The Fact of Whiteness; or, Philly Mag's Ersatz Fanon

How does it feel to be a problem? Du Bois’ great question—the one that, for Dubois, goes unasked or cannot be asked directly—haunts Robert Huber’s recent article, “Being White in Philly: Whites, race, class, and the things that never get said.” Many have already offered their own critical commentaries on Huber’s, well, racist nonsense, and many of them are fantastic. Here, I want to track how Huber implicitly draws upon currents of black Atlantic 20^th century social theory in order to construct whiteness as a kind of public disability. Huber’s piece tries (journalistically) tacking between the sociological and the phenomenological, between an appreciation of the structuring of social reality and the modalities by which social reality comes to appearance. Huber’s piece should be located, then, in a genealogy of black thought that might go from Douglass to Du Bois to Fanon. Black thought is repurposed to construct an aggrieved white subjectivity. How does it feel to be a problem? A white guy from the Mount Airy is going to let you know.

Indeed, the rhetoric of the problem is set to work both in Huber’s piece and in the justification for running the article offered by Philly Mag’s editor. Tom McGrath gives two reasons for publishing Huber’s article. First, black people have kind of monopolized discussions of race, and, you see, “to pretend that white people don’t also have thoughts and feelings about the issue is dishonest.” So, Huber offers to readers a kind of Cugoano-esque Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Race. As a second reason for publishing the article, McGrath offers that “not to do this story would be to declare that the problems of Philadelphia’s underclass are theirs and theirs alone.” Apparently, the Philly poors are so poor that they can no longer claim possession of their problems. If failing to publish the story would be to cede possession of these “problems” wholesale to Philly’s underclass, publishing the story functions as a declaration of proprietorship, of property. These problems affect white people, too—particularly when these “problems” become embodied and personified in people bearing black skins.  For McGrath and Huber, the primary problem affecting white people is that “being white” disqualifies white people from assuming some form of public proprietorship over the public discourse of race and racism. “Being white” means that you don’t get to articulate all of those “thoughts and feelings” welling up in your white breast. “Being white” means that the moment you try to articulate those thoughts and feelings, you become a problem, you risk being racist. What McGrath and Huber are after, quite simply, is a way of “being white” that is not “being racist.” They want a public discussion where people with white skin can speak as white, as “being white,” and to have this racialized knowledge accepted as a meaningful and valid contribution to the public. But, alas, to be white is to be a problem.

So, how does it feel to be a problem? After telling us that he lives on a “mostly African-American block” in Mount Airy, Huber confesses:

Yet there’s a dance I do when I go to the Wawa on Germantown Avenue. I find myself being overly polite. Each time I hold the door a little too long for a person of color, I laugh at myself, both for being so self-consciously courteous and for knowing that I’m measuring the thank-you’s.

One can hear, in this quotidian staging of racial awareness, of becoming raced, echoes of Du Bois, echoes of Fanon. One can hear the opening lines of the chapter “The Facts of Blackness” from Black Skin, White Masks, the lines that resound throughout Fanon’s meditation on what being black is: “Look, a Negro!” Huber feels a duplication of consciousness, he feels the awareness that another’s eyes are running over his body, that his skin conveys certain meanings. “Look, a white guy! Being liberal!” He feels awkward, he laughs at himself. But this awkwardness conveys a deep anxiety: Huber knows that all of his actions are scripted, that he’s performing a certain kind of liberal whiteness, and he knows that the black people for whom he holds doors know it too. When he “measure[es] the thank-you’s,” he’s not simply disciplining potentially discourteous black people with his judging eyes; he is, first and foremost, trying to ascertain whether or not he properly pulled off the performances that being a liberal white guy entails. Huber, in essence, is non-sovereign: to be a good liberal white he has to act in a certain way but—and here’s the kicker—he is himself not allowed to judge the felicity of his own performance.  Non-sovereignty marks the quotidian phenomenology of being-white-around-black-people. To feel white is to feel compelled to perform a set of actions whose success white people are constitutively prevented from measuring.

Huber, in effect, suddenly feels what it is to feel racially marked, to feel that one’s existence is a problem for reasons derived from a source beyond one’s immediate control. He recognizes that the black guy passing through the door that he holds open has him pegged, that his capacity for free and spontaneous action has been constricted—so temporarily—by the fact that this black guy has a kind of knowledge of the generic forms Huber’s actions can take. (That Huber has a special kind of racial mobility, that he can drive through the ghetto and get out quickly, that he can ask his son to move from his gentrifying but “dangerous” neighborhood—this raced/classed ability to avoid encounters is ignored.) The problem is that Huber wants to convert this felt recognition of extremely temporary non-sovereignty into the basis of a plea for racial sovereignty. He doesn’t want to destroy whiteness; rather, he wants whiteness to be something more than the awkward embodiment of a structural entitlement. He wants whiteness to signify a special claim to a special knowledge. He wants whiteness to be a substantive identity in the public sphere, one that can claim some kind of knowledge, some kind of property in the common problem of race. He wants to transform the fact of passively being white into an active identity: To fix the “problems” of race, white people have to start being white. Moreover, they have to be allowed to be white in the public sphere, to speak as white. As Huber relates, white dudes are already speaking privately about race, anyhow (pooling knowledge on how to say hi to people with black skins, for instance); this knowledge simply needs to be made public. At stake, McGrath claims, is the future of the future, of progress itself: “To not talk about race is to admit that we can never move forward.”

The fantasy underpinning all of this horseshit is that “we can…move forward” without the “we” undergoing a qualitative alteration, that racism can be ended without whiteness being eradicated. Let’s be clear: Whiteness has no future. Huber knows this: being white, holding open a door in Germantown, suspended on the threshold, he knows that his capacity for action is limited, that he can’t move forward or backward, that whiteness can only maintain itself so long as it preserves a suspended present. And note all the space-thinking in his article: all synchrony, no diachrony: whiteness can only preserve itself by eliding open time from the equation and distributing temporality throughout contained spaces. Huber wants to think of “being white” as identical to being any other race (although, as many have pointed out, he elides the multi-racial composition of Philly). Indeed, as I’m suggesting, he deploys classic moves of black social critique in order to code whiteness as a tragic form of epidermalization, a terrible denial of his full range of human potential. He wants white to be (like) black, as if race-thinking and the horizontal, non-hierarchical thinking of democratic publicness were in any way compatible. They aren’t. Race is always already a discourse and material practice of stratification, with White Guy sitting at the top of the heap. The problem of race is the fact of whiteness.

This means, well, being white contains no special insights into race, it doesn’t offer a program for progress into an anti-racist future. “Being white” in a publically active sense or claiming whiteness as a viable identity will never yield an anti-racist politics. Anti-racism is the dialectical negation of whiteness. There is quite simply no way of achieving an anti-racist society and preserving whiteness. Negating whiteness isn’t/won’t be easy; it necessitates a wholesale structural transformation, from reconstitutions of ordinary language and social ritual to massive politico-economic revolutions. It also necessitates that white liberals like Huber take seriously the fact that “being white” offers no insight into how these transformations will come about, that racialized people have knowledges (like, say, a knowledge of Huber’s scripted performance) that people committed to “being white” do not possess, and that people with white skins need to listen, learn, and follow—not preach. The negation of whiteness does not begin from within whiteness. It never has.

Huber is not alone in possessing these thoughts and feelings, of course. The intimate public of middle-aged well-off white dudes he writes for is pretty broad. I hate this fucking article so much because he wants to conscript me, a white Philly-born well-ff guy, into his public; he wants me to say, I hear ya, man, shit’s fucked up when a field of being is marked as constitutively beyond the range of the social-managerial authority constitutive of being white. The article will no doubt be met with quiet nods of assent from readers in Center City, Bucks County, the Main Line…a group of already privileged people will have learned that being white entails even more privileges than they knew about: White people should be allowed to speak with untrammelled authority about black people, once again—that’s what racial equality is all about. The article will be discussed at dinner parties, a reasonably priced bottle of wine in; it will be introduced in a conspiratorial tone, as one white dude hopes another feels, like he does, the burden of having a white skin. They will learn, together, that the problem of being white is not whiteness but their not being allowed to be white. But a tremor of anxiety will inflect the conversation, an anxiety produced by the only knowledge that comes with being white—that whiteness has no future, that it cannot last. And maybe one of their kids, home for the weekend from Villanova, having just read Fanon and Du Bois, will tell them why that is so.

Antebellism: The Neoliberal Compromise of the Political

Someone—at least a copy editor—must have read Emory University president James Wagner’s recent “From the President” piece in the Emory magazine. Entitled “As American as…Compromise,” someone must have made sure that everything was spelled properly, that there were no grammatical solecisms, and so on. Someone read this piece before it was published, a someone who probably didn’t say, “Hey, maybe it’s not a good idea to derive a political ethos of compromise from the U.S. constitutional compromise that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person in apportioning state representatives. Maybe this history can in no way justify your desire to defund the liberal arts.” Maybe he or she couldn’t speak up—an editor or employee at a university PR office doesn’t have quite the same amount of power or clout as the president, of course. Or maybe he or she didn’t have any problems with Wagner’s choice of examples. Maybe he or she thought Wagner’s piece showed the serviceability of U.S. history for our political present—a time when money is scarce, after all, and decisions about value have to be made. Whatever the case, we know that Wagner’s zany, crazy use of a fraught example did not leap immediately and transparently from his brain to the page. Rather, Wagner’s piece was the product of multiple forms of collaboration, of socialized symbolic production—from the Emory homecoming panel wherein an anonymously and indirectly cited “distinguished” alum first suggests the exemplarity of the three-fifths compromise to the less distinguished, less-well-paid editor or PR employee whose eyes scanned the release for errors and did not note the most glaring error on the page.  We too are now Wagner’s collaborators, debating the merits of his choice of examples, snarking about him on Facebook and Twitter, and writing fantastic blog posts about the ideological blockages structuring the compromise in historical fact and as contemporary example. We too now participate in the social production of the exemplary. Exemplarity, then, is not a status objectively present in historical events, persons, or things. “So far no chemist,” Marx writes, “has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond.” Neither will the chemist—or historian, for that matter—discover the “example value” of an historical object in the object itself. Such value is produced by and circulates through diffuse social networks of institutions and discourses.  

It’s the diffuse and social nature of the production of the exemplary that accounts for the rapid and voluminous responses to Wagner’s comments. Over the past few years, but reaching a fever pitch in 2012/13, Yankees have increasingly dedicated themselves to the proposition that the antebellum period possesses unique explanatory power for the political dynamics of our present. We shouldn’t be misled into thinking that the antebellum period always and naturally exists as a symbolic repertoire for getting a handle on our present. Bush-era U.S.A. was not so invested in the exemplarity and symbolic power of the antebellum. Certainly Bush paid the requisite homage to Lincoln and whatever, but the symbolic dominant and the primary axis of allegoresis was theological in orientation. Indeed, Bruce Holsinger argues that Bush-era symbolics amounted to a form of “neomedievalism,” wherein the present became legible through cultural codes derived from some imagined medieval world (“crusades,” for instance, or the emergent interest in feudal sovereignty as a mode of thinking states in a globalized world). Just a few years later, we have come to inhabit a new symbolic and discursive formation, one that we might call “antebellism.” Antebellism equips its advocates—from Barack Obama to Steven Spielberg to your uncle who is currently wading through Team of Rivals—with an allegory with which to map the political constellation of the present. My point here is that if Wagner’s choice of example was in some fashion inevitable (and I’ll make this case indirectly), so too was a quick and voluminous response. We’re all keyed into the antebellist register. We have all—right and left—formed a discursive compromise to think the present through the examples and symbols afforded by antebellum history.

Antebellism is a product of, and a hermeneutic for, the U.S.’s political present. For this reason, antebellism is less fascinating for the historical analogy it assembles—an analogy that is, as Wagner exemplarily demonstrates, of dubious historiographical merit—than for how it symptomatizes the way that subjects today think and feel their relationship to the political. Let’s stick with Wagner’s example: the morbidly humorous thing about the history of the compromise is that, well, it did not really work. (It couldn’t, of course, and not for parliamentary or constitutional reasons; the slaves themselves would see to it that every compromise with their own power would fail.) The compromise didn’t contain the antagonism that forced it into existence; rather, the inaugural compromise only ensured that more compromises would come, each more ineffective than the last until, ultimately, the social exploded into war. Any invocation of compromise invokes the haunting fact of its failure, just as, and more broadly, the discursive formation of antebellism situates us in a moment just prior to a war that cannot but arrive. So, how is the world so structured that subjects come to know and feel themselves as political only within the horizon of total catastrophe? What kind of work does this affectively charged imaginary perform?

Antebellism finds its conditions of possibility in the routinized crisis marked by the intertwined processes of neoliberalism and globalization. It provides a dramatic existential hermeneutic by which U.S. subjects can come to grips with the permanent, low intensity, non-dramatic crises of everyday life in a world abandoned to market rationality. Think about Wagner: he invokes the compromise so as to invest the market-based rationale for defunding the humanities with a gleaming symbolic value. Fair enough: you might object that that’s just ideological obfuscation. But why have we—a non-presidential we, rulers of neither universities nor nation-states—come to counter-invest in these symbolics? I want to suggest that, through the antebellist allegory, U.S. subjects can imagine their accumulating, low intensity misery as turning into something—a punctual, cataclysmic, dramatic crisis. The alternative—that is, this world, the real world, the one wherein the accumulation of misery has not transmuted into qualitative transformation, the one wherein the permanent crisis of neoliberalism is lived non-dramatically—is too much to bear. Antebellism confronts the crisis of living without a dramatic crisis, of surviving life subsumed into the biopolitical calculations of neoliberal accountancy, of inhabiting a hum-drum world where accountants rule the roost and wherein politics consists in choosing the best bean counter. In so doing, antebellism transmutes everything being fought over into something worth fighting for: voting for Obama becomes electing another Lincoln, cutting funding becomes a constitutional compromise. The extraterrestrial world of high governance is brought down to earth, a battlefield, and each man must do his part. Politics becomes a felt, tactile, intimate experience at the moment that it is imagined before the war, in the horizon of possible bodily undoing, of death. By routing contemporary politics through an affectively charged (if vaguely grasped) historical grid, antebellism domesticates—even as it aggrandizes—the arcane antagonisms structuring contemporary political disputation. Backdoor deals between congressional leaders, gentlemen’s agreements between Wall Street and the White House, the defunding of the humanities…the messy, ignoble stuff of neoliberal governance comes to light and comes to order in the clearing of antebellism’s projected battlefield. Everything gleams with a significant simplicity. Antebellism amounts to a kind of vernacular Schmittianism: it resituates the apolitical world of neoliberal governance in an antagonistic field constituted by the properly political distinction of “friend” and “enemy.” Line drawn, we’re poised just moments before the inauguration of hostilities. But, alas, we’re never supposed to fight it out. The specter of civil war simply drives us back into the arms of collapsing institutions and a state whose democratic deficit tracks its budgetary shortfalls. Antebellism produced that bizarre discursive world wherein neosecessionists tried separating from the U.S. by petitioning Obama…

Ultimately, antebellism gears us up for political war only to tell us that the battle has already been decided—there’s no longer any politics, no longer any open struggle through which the future will be decided. Instead, we’re invited to invest political meaning in the technologies of neoliberal governance, in what Wagner calls “the rich tools of compromise.” We need to read Wagner’s choice of example, then, as the end result of an attempt to derive a political feeling from the withdrawal of the political. Ultimately, that’s what all antebellism does: it allows us to feel political even as we abandon the political—or, rather, even as the political abandons us. “Compromise” both names this withdrawal of the political and invests our acquiescence to it with a pseudo-political affect. It does not so much describe a peaceful, pacifying working relationship between willful and opposed political subjects (Republicans and Democrats, say, or partisans of the humanities and the sciences) as it does the conformation of varied and antagonistic political wills to an exorbitant, apolitical logic (i.e., neoliberal capitalism). We don’t compromise so much as our possibility for political action has been compromised. It is our recognition of the compromised nature of any political action that is supposed to subtend all contemporary politics—indeed, it’s supposed to pass as politics. [Edit: please note that in Wagner's non-apology, he writes, "Inevitably, our existence as human beings is a compromised existence, never pure." Yep.] 

How, then, to respond? Almost any form of response to Wagner’s example will amount to a form of collaboration—a (re)production and circulation of the cultural logic through which neoliberalism attempts securing acquiescence to the withdrawal of the political. No doubt this circulation cannot be stopped by fiat or through simple demystification. No doubt antebellism is an ideology, one that imagines our relation to the real in mystified and mystifying ways, but this imaginary is secured by an intensely felt sincerity that sutures subjects to its terms, and I’m not sure that ideology critique is adequate to undoing this suturing. We might be left with antebellism as a cultural allegory until some event displaces it and induces the production of new forms of pop political sense-making. I think that the minimum that we can do—and this might be a maximal minimum—is to de-naturalize the use of antebellum examples and symbols in the name of a tactical de-dramatization. We need to insistently demonstrate that it isn’t necessary to turn to the antebellum to think our present, show that other symbolic resources are available, and so produce a self-consciousness about the motivations that lead us to think and experience according to a given protocol. The question “Is this exemplary history really adequate to this contemporary case?” can be usefully deflationary. And we need to deflate the symbolics through which neoliberal governance attempts dramatizing and inducing particular felt relations to the non-drama of governed life. We need to be able to say, “Um, hey, prez, you’re talking about budget cuts for university departments—not founding a state and collaborating in the eventual enslavement of millions of people. Drama much? Chill out.” Why? On one hand, and as I’ve suggested, this conduction of affect to the flattish world of budgets and accountancy allows us to feel as political something that is being structured as apolitical.  On the other hand, over-dramatizing aspects of governance like budgets allows us to ignore the lower grade but very real dramas that can flare up around these ways of making and remaking our worlds. Neoliberal life is filled with plenty of crises, low grade as they are, that have a density particular to themselves—a liberal arts grad student at Emory not getting a sixth year of funding, for instance, or a post-doc not turning into a job line because of fiscal cuts. Not as important or dramatic as nations being formed, slavery legitimated, or Africans dehumanized, but certainly crises possessing a drama and import of their own. Let’s just talk about those dramas. 

Radical Neglect; Or, Did Dorner have an Addressee?

I stop somewhere waiting for you

--Whitman

We stop somewhere, waiting for one another, on the lookout for someone whom we will recognize as one of us. Sometimes we encounter one another and, in twos or threes but rarely more, read Marx or Kropotkin or whatever together. We hope and despair together about utterly fantastic things. More frequently, our encounters are fleeting: eye meets eye on a train over a copy of Tiqqun, and we share a recognition that we are less alone than we thought—a fact that only intensifies our loneliness when we disembark and head back to our jobs and wonder why we can’t spend all of our time around people with opinions on European insurrectionists. We know that there are more of us than we could know. We scan the world for signs that we are coming, and we tweet and blog in the hopes of finding one another. We hope that someone out there will have said, “I stop somewhere, I’m waiting for you,” that our address will have reached her, and that she’ll write back—leave some trace, some sign, that we’re out there. We know that most of our addresses will never find an addressee, that our writing is an unwriting, that our radicalism will never have taken root in the world. But we write—lonely and alone—within the horizon of a sublime vista of a democracy to come, one to be peopled by people like us. And so we keep writing. And reading.

We are told that Christopher Dorner was killed while hiding out from police. Sure, no doubt he was doing that, but something more, too: Looking out from his mountain cabin upon a fucked up democratic vista, Dorner had stopped somewhere, waiting for us, for we who might arrive, who might resonate to and with his manifesto. No doubt he wrote while he waited; the conflagration that consumed the cabin equally consumed an archive. The fugitive words of a fugitive that will never take root. Dorner killed to gain an audience. To secure an addressee. To become an addressor.

Dorner’s act is not an action that we—the vague we that we are, the inchoate dispersed multitude that fleetingly assembles itself in moments of ephemeral recognition—perform, or even contemplate. I don’t kill to gain an audience for my posts; I write, I leave traces, I let you, whoever you are, know that I’m waiting for you, for us, and I have faith that sometimes you will leave traces, too. I don’t kill to gain an addressee because I have access to an imagined super-addressee, the you that will have arrived, perhaps. It keeps me sane, it keeps me going, it transforms the holding pattern of my political despair into something more like a hopeful vigil, a waiting for our spectral multiplicity to materialize in the world. I want to ask: Did Dorner have access to this imaginary, to imagine his becoming-manifest in the horizon opened by a thought of a radical super-addressee? I’ll rephrase by citing some tweets from Project Cambio from February 13^th (@ProjectCambio): “Sad that all these internet radicals are throwing #Dorner to the wolves for his lack of impeccable radical politics.” “Would you have let #Dorner into your radical spaces? Would you have shown #solidarity with a confused and angry ex-cop?” “#Dorner most likely had ZERO access to space to discuss any of the subjects that radicals hold so dear.” The “spaces” cited by Project Cambio are not simply material spaces—bookstores and infoshops, kitchens or apartments. These “spaces” include the imaginative spaces and spacings of our utterances and addresses. Is the imagined ambit of our address wide enough—perhaps even Whitman-esque enough—to have included Dorner as a possible addressee? Would Dorner ever have resonated to a radical text as if it were addressed to him, to him in his particularity? Prior to killing cops, could Dorner have imagined himself as occupying a position as and within the inchoate and dispersed “we” that we—you, me, and everyone we do not yet know—inhabit when we try to become manifest to one another?

I don’t think so. And that’s the lesson that we need to take from the brief public life of Christopher Dorner. Those radicals that aren’t critiquing non-radical aspects of Dorner’s politics applaud his burst of violence with infantile Tiqqun-lite phrases. I’m not against political violence at all, but we need to question the conditions of possibility that made Dorner’s solitary and isolated acts of violence necessary. On one hand, sure, Dorner’s violence testifies to the shrinking space of political legibility accorded to people (and certainly black men in LA) in a neoliberal world. In brief, neoliberal governance names the organization of a social formation wherein the speech of most can never become publically meaningful action. I call it neglect (etymologically, “to not read”): we write and speak knowing that our words will do nothing, that know one is reading them. No institutional mechanisms exist to make our speech acts felicitous. In such conditions, one’s speech only becomes efficacious through contingency or violence; violence becomes a perfectly rational mode of acceding to the airy world of communicative rationality. Dorner knew this; he realized it through his engagement with the LAPD. And so Dorner killed to gain an addressee, to gain a hearing, to become manifest in a world where the words of most do not come to light, where they have no phenomenality, where they are always already ash and cinders.

But, on the other hand, Dorner’s violence testifies to the non-availability of alternative sources of political legibility and alternative modalities of generating meaningful speech. It might be that you, me, and everyone that we do not yet know do not use violence to produce an addressee because we know that there are alternative sites of address, other forms and sources of attention to solicit. We stop somewhere, we wait for one another, and sometimes we connect in university reading groups and in infoshops, in groups writing letters to prisoners and in marches. We are imaginable to one another as an other world, and it’s this imaginary that allows us, jaunty and happy, to ironize the dominant as a source of political legibility, to say Fuck the State, Fuck Capitalism, Fuck the Police. I could be wrong, perhaps I can’t see the other words he inhabited, but I don’t think that Dorner understood himself as living in a world where some waited—even if he did not know them, even if he could not name them—to receive and resonate with his words. We need to ask why. Maybe our addresses can’t gain any traction in the lifeworlds of someone like Dorner, a former cop/naval officer invested in a certain notion of honor. Maybe our addresses never reached him, blocked off by the lines of race, class, and habitus. Maybe our addresses did reach him, but not in a meaningful genre of address. Maybe they reached him and he became resonant with them and he showed up, say, to Occupy, but we were not prepared to receive him; perhaps we turned him away, we said that we wouldn’t wait for him. And, finally, maybe our addresses did reach him and he just didn’t give a fuck about us, whoever we are, whatever we think we’re doing. The fact is, though, that Dorner’s addresses would not have reached us had he not killed. And when the conditions of possibility for legibility within a radical world are identical to the conditions of possibility for legibility within a neoliberal public, well—we’re fucked, people. We need to find a way to find the words not obviously intended for us, to encounter genres and lifeworlds that don’t come packaged in some bullshit Semiotext(e) “intervention,” that aren’t addressed to the U.S.’s radical milieu. We need a radical hermeneutics, one that always reads for whom it fails to read, and in this fashion incorporate into our imagined scenes of address those subjects anxiously bereft of an addressee. We need to stop and wait and see who comes and be prepared to be surprised by who appears.

This isn’t simply a liberal bid for inclusion. To the contrary: Redressing neglect is the minimal demand that we can make of radical politics. Indeed, proliferating sites of political legibility is the positive, constructive work of anarchy. We undertake the negative labor of anarchy—fucking up the “state,” which is nothing more than a catachresis for any form of hierarchized sociality—in order to free up the possibility of proliferating worlds. CLR James excelled at this, at finding new genres to transform the desperate lifeworlds of workers, sharecroppers, colonial peoples into something glowing with political import. The radical possibilities of Occupy inhered in its formation of a space wherein the quotidian, desperate worlds of people could come into contact, wherein complaint—about banks, about debt, about the racism and sexism of the movement itself—could become politically legible speech. At encampments we stopped and waited for one another…and waited and waited, and the speeches got too long, yes, and the GAs became shit-shows, yes, but for a while we waited and listened and, addressed and addressing, we fell into a new world of care. It’s indeed surprising that, after the police destroyed our world, there have not been more Dorners, more subjects craving to feel once more the glow of another’s attention. They are no doubt out there, speaking in genres and idioms and modes of address that we do not know we don’t know. We desperately need to proliferate sites of address for these missives, to incorporate neglected subjects into our not-yet-inclusive democratic vistas.

Dorner stopped and waited. Perhaps he had waited before—not in cabins, no, but in the knowledge that his political speech had meant nothing to the LAPD, in the loneliness of governed urban space, in the racialized castle of his skin. Back then, Dorner did not know that we were waiting for him. We didn’t, either. As Dorner lammed it, as Dorner hid in his cabin, I like to think that he was writing, that he was preparing a new text to manifest himself. This time, though, he wrote knowing full well that his text had an addressee, that people stopped and waited for his words. And did we not all stop and wait as the helicopters circled the cabin, as the pigs closed in, as they burned the cabin down? Archived in the ash, archived as ash, are the only words Dorner wrote with the certitude that someone would read them. Too late, we waited for his words to arrive. Missing him in one place, it remains for us to search another.

*

To all of you who will have read this address—and, above all, to you whom I will have always neglected to intend.