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Stuff
AT: Framework? Our Performance is the Resistance of the Object – You can tell us what we cant do but
that’s anti black. Our performance is fact. It has happened we are resisting.
Moten ??? [In the Break]
The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.1 Blackness—the
extended movedment of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line—is a
strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity. While
subjectivity is defined by the subject’s possession of itself and its objects, it is troubled by a
dispossessive force objects exert such that the subject seems to be possessed—infused,
deformed—by the object it possesses. I’m interested in what happens when we consider the
phonic materiality of such propriative exertion. Or, to invoke and diverge from Saidiya Hartman’s
fundamental work and phrasing, I’m interested in the convergence of blackness and the
irreducible sound of necessarily visual performance at the scene of objection.
Between looking and being looked at, spectacle and spectatorship, enjoyment and being enjoyed,
lies and moves the economy of what Hartman calls hypervisibility. She allows and demands an
investigation of this hypervisibility in its relation to a certain musical obscurity and opens us to the
problematics of everyday ritual, the stagedness of the violently (and sometimes amelioratively)
quotidian, the essential drama of black life, as Zora Neale Hurston might say. Hartman shows how
narrative always echoes and redoubles the dramatic interenactment of “contentment and
abjection,” and she explores the massive discourse of the cut, of rememberment and redress, that
we always hear in narratives where blackness marks simultaneously both the performance of the
object and the performance of humanity. She allows us to ask: what have objectification and
humanization, both of which we can think in relation to a certain notion of subjection, to do with the
essential historicity, the quintessential modernity, of black performance? Whatever runs off us, a
certain offense runs through us. This is a double ambivalence that requires analyses of looking
and being looked at; such game requires, above all, some thinking about the opposition of
spectacle and routine, violence and pleasure. This thinking is Hartman’s domain.
A critique of the subject animates Hartman’s work. It bears the trace, therefore, of a movement
exemplified by an aspect of Judith Butler’s massive theoretical contribution wherein the call to
subjectivity is understood also as a call to subjection and subjugation and appeals for redress or
protection to the state or to the structure or idea of citizenship— as well as modes of radical
performativity or subversive impersonation— are always already embedded in the structure they
would escape.2 But if Hartman moves in this field she also moves in another tradition that forces
another kind of questioning. Consulting Frederick Douglass on all of this is mandatory and the best
place to consult him is in the moments when he describes and reproduces black performance. But
this is to move in the tradition of a mode of reading Douglass that conflates his story (and its
graphic and emblematic primal scene) with the story of slavery and freedom; this is to risk an
uncritical covering of the assertion of Douglass’s originarity; this is to approach the natal occasion
that our musico-political tradition must evade. In order to sidestep this problematic, Hartman has
both to avoid and to arrive at Douglass, must both repress and return to him.
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Everything moves, for Hartman, after an opening decision regarding these questions of
comportment:
The “terrible spectacle” that introduced Frederick Douglass to slavery was the beating of his Aunt Hester. . . .
By locating this “horrible exhibition” in the Wrst chapter of his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
Douglass establishes the centrality of violence to the making of the slave and identifies it as an original
generative act equivalent to the statement “I was born.” The passage through the blood-stained gate is an
inaugural moment in the formation of the enslaved. In this regard, it is a primal scene. By this I mean that the
terrible spectacle dramatizes the origin of the subject and demonstrates that to be a slave is to be under the
brutal power and authority of another; this is confirmed by the event’s placement in the opening chapter on
genealogy. I have chosen not to reproduce Douglass’s account of the beating of Aunt Hester in order to call
attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are
circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the slave’s ravaged body. Rather than inciting
indignation, too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity—the oft-repeated or restored
character of these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical language usually
resorted to in describing these instances—and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of
black suffering. What interests me are the ways we are called upon to participate in such scenes. . . . At issue
here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator. Only more
obscene than the brutality unleashed at the whipping post is the demand that this suffering be materialized
and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and terrible. In light of
this, how does one give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is
the consequence of the benumbing spectacle or contend with the narcissistic identification that obliterates the
other or the prurience that too often is the response to such displays? This was the challenge faced by
Douglass and the other foes of slavery, and this is the task I take up here. Therefore, rather than try to convey
the routinized violence of slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have
chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned. . . . By
defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the
shocking spectacle. What concerns me here is the diffusion of terror and the violence perpetrated under the
rubric of pleasure, paternalism and property.3
The decision not to reproduce the account of Aunt Hester’s beating is, in some sense, illusory. First, it is reproduced in her reference to
and refusal of it; second, the beating is reproduced in every scene of subjection the book goes on to read—in both the ritual
performances combining terror and enjoyment in slavery and the fashionings and assertions of citizenship and “free” subjectivity after
emancipation. The question here concerns the inevitability of such reproduction even in the denial of it. This is the question
of whether the performance of subjectivity—and the subjectivity that Hartman is interested in here is definitely
performed—always and everywhere reproduces what lies before it; it is also the question of whether
performance in general is ever outside the economy of reproduction.4 This is not to say that Hartman tries but
cannot make disappear the originary performance of the violent subjection of the slave’s body. Indeed, Hartman’s considerable,
formidable, and rare brilliance is present in the space she leaves for the ongoing (re)production of that performance in all its guises
and for a critical awareness of how each of those guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originarity of that
primal scene. What are the politics of this unavoidably reproducible and reproductive performance?
What is held in the ongoing disruption of its primality? What shape must a culture take when it is
so (un)grounded? What does this disturbance of capture and genesis give to black
performance?
Douglass’s is a primal scene for complex reasons that have to do with the connectedness of
desire, identification, and castration that Hartman displaces onto the field of the mundane and the
quotidian, where pain is alloyed with pleasure. However, this displacement somehow both acknowledges and avoids
the vexed question of the possibility of pain and pleasure mixing in the scene and in its originary and subsequent recountings. For
Hartman the very specter of enjoyment is reason enough to repress the encounter. So lingering in the
psychoanalytic break is crucial in the interest of a certain set of complexities that cannot be overlooked but must be traced back to this
origin precisely in the interest of destabilizing its originarity and originarity in general, a destabilization Douglass founds in his original
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recitation, which is also an originary repression. It’s the ongoing repression of the primal scene of subjection that one wants to guard
against and linger in. Douglass passes on a repression that Hartman’s critical suppression extends.
Such transfer demands that one ask if every recitation is a repression and if every reproduction
of a performance is its disappearance. Douglass and Hartman confront us with the fact that the
conjunction of reproduction and disappearance is performance’s condition of possibility, its
ontology and its mode of production. The recitation of Douglass’s repression, the repression embedded in his recitation,
is there in Hartman as well. Like Douglass, she transposes all that is unspeakable in the scene to later, ritualized, “soulfully” mundane
and quotidian performances. All that’s missing is the originary recitation of the beating, which she reproduces in her reference to it.
This is to say that there is an intense dialogue with Douglass that structures Scenes of Subjection. The
dialogue is opened by a refusal of recitation that reproduces what it refuses. Hartman swerves away
from Douglass and thereby runs right back to him. She also runs through him into territory he could not have recognized, territory no
one has charted as thoroughly and as convincingly as she has done. Still, this turn away from Douglass that is also a
turn to and through Douglass is a disturbance that is neither unfamiliar nor unfamilial. In the Break
addresses such resemblance by way of the following questions: Is there a way to disrupt the totalizing force of the primality Douglass
represents? Is there a way to subject this unavoidable model of subjection to a radical breakdown?
***The Commodity That Speaks – Black performances are performances by property that challenge
Eurocentric notions of the relationship between speech capacity and freedom. Slave performance is the
possibility of impossibility written out of the Negatives Notion of what counts as economic and what counts
as speech.
What counts as economic and what counts as human is the determination that writes the Slave out of
Humanity.
Moten ??? [In the Break]
My attempt to address these questions will, I hope, justify another engagement with the terribly beautiful music of Douglass’s
recitations of the beating of his Aunt Hester. The engagement moves initially through and against Karl Marx, by way of Abbey Lincoln
and Max Roach. I want to show the interarticulation of the resistance of the object with Marx’s subjunctive figure of the commodity
who speaks. According to Marx, the speaking commodity is an impossibility invoked only to militate against
mystifying notions of the commodity’s essential value. My argument starts with the historical reality of
commodities who spoke—of laborers who were commodities before, as it were, the abstraction
of labor power from their bodies and who continue to pass on this material heritage across the
divide that separates slavery and “freedom.” But I am interested, Finally, in the implications of the breaking of such
speech, the elevating disruptions of the verbal that take the rich content of the object’s/commodity’s aurality outside the confines of
meaning precisely by way of this material trace. More specifically with regard to Douglass’s prefatory scene and its subsequent
restagings, I’m interested in establishing some procedures for discovering the relationship between the “heart-rending shrieks” of
Aunt Hester in the face of the master’s violent assault, the discourse on music that Douglass initiates a few pages after the recitation of
that vicious encounter, and the incorporation or recording of a sound figured as external both to music and to speech in black music
and speech.
In his critical deployment of such music and speech, Douglass discovers a hermeneutic that is simultaneously
broken and expanded by an operation akin to what Jacques Derrida refers to as “invagination.”5 This cut and
augmented hermeneutic circle is structured by a double movement. The first element is the
transference of a radically exterior aurality that disrupts and resists certain formations of identity
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and interpretation by challenging the reducibility of phonic matter to verbal meaning or conventional
musical form. The second is the assertion of what Nathaniel Mackey calls “‘broken’ claim(s) to connection”6
between Africa and African America that seek to suture corollary, asymptotically divergent ruptures—
maternal estrangement and the thwarted romance of the sexes—that he refers to as “wounded
kinship” and the “the sexual ‘cut.’”7 This assertion marks an engagement with a more attenuated, more internally
determined, exteriority and a courtship with an always already unavailable and substitutive origin. It would work by way of
an imaginative restoration of the Figure of the mother to a realm determined not only by verbal
meaning and conventional musical form but by a nostalgic specularity and a necessarily endogamous,
simultaneously virginal and reproductive sexuality. These twin impulses animate a forceful
operation in Douglass’s work, something like a revaluation of that revaluation of value that was
set in motion by four of Douglass’s “contemporaries”— Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Saussure.
Above all, they open the possibility of a critique of the valuation of meaning over content and the reduction of phonic matter and
syntactic “degeneracy” in the early modern search for a universal language and the late modern search for a universal science of
language. This disruption of the Enlightenment linguistic project is of fundamental importance
since it allows a rearrangement of the relationship between notions of human freedom and
notions of human essence. More specifically, the emergence from political, economic, and
sexual objection of the radical materiality and syntax that animates black performances indicates
a freedom drive that is expressed always and everywhere throughout their graphic
(re)production.
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1AC - The demand of the black for freedom is a gratuitous freedom which demands nothing less than the
end of the world.
Wilderson 2010 [Frank B. Red White and Black , p. 33-36]
Though the idea of “taxation without representation” may have spoken concretely to the idiom of
power that marked the British/American relation as being structurally unethical, it did not provide
metaphors powerful and fungible enough for Whites to meditate and move on when resisting the
structure of their own subordination at the hands of “unchecked political power” (354). The most
salient feature of Dorsey’s findings is not his understanding of the way Blackness, as a crucial
and fungible conceptual possession of civil society, impacts and destabilizes previously
accepted categories of intra-White thought, but rather his contribution to the evidence that, even
when Blackness is deployed to stretch the elasticity of civil society to the point of civil war, that
expansion is never elastic enough to embrace the very Black who catalyzed the expansion. In
fact, Dorsey, building on Patricia Bradley’s historical research, asserts that just the opposite is
true. The more the political imagination of civil society is enabled by the fungibility of the slave
metaphor, the less legible the condition of the slave becomes: “Focusing primarily on colonial
newspapers…Bradley finds that the slavery metaphor ‘served to distance the patriot agenda from
the antislavery movement.’ If anything, Bradley states, widespread use of the metaphor ‘gave first
evidence that the issue of real slavery was not to have a part in the revolutionary messages’”
(359). And David Eltis believes that this philosophical incongruity between the image of the Slave
and freedom for the Slave begins in Europe and pre-dates the American Revolution by at least
one hundred years:
The [European] countries least likely to enslave their own had the harshest and most sophisticated system
of exploiting enslaved non-Europeans. Overall, the English and Dutch conception of the role of the
individual in metropolitan society ensured the accelerated development of African chattel slavery in the
Americas…because their own subjects could not become chattel slaves or even convicts for life…(1423)
Furthermore, the circulation of Blackness as metaphor and image at the most politically volatile
and progressive moments in history (e.g. the French, English, and American Revolutions),
produces dreams of liberation which are more inessential to and more parasitic on the Black, and
more emphatic in their guarantee of Black suffering, than any dream of human liberation in any
era heretofore. Black slavery is foundational to modern Humanism’s ontics because “freedom”
is the hub of Humanism’s infinite conceptual trajectories. But these trajectories only appear to be
infinite. They are finite in the sense that they are predicated on the idea of freedom from… some
contingency that can be named, or at least conceptualized. The contingent rider could be freedom
from patriarchy, freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from political tyranny (for
example, taxation without representation), freedom from heteronormativity, and so on. What I
am suggesting is that first, political discourse recognizes freedom as a structuring ontologic and
then it works to disavow this recognition by imagining freedom not through political ontology—
where it rightfully began—but through political experience (and practice); whereupon it
immediately loses its ontological foundations. Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone
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start off with, quite literally, an earth-shattering ontologic and, in the process of meditating on it
and acting through it, reduce it to an earth reforming experience? Why do Humans take such
pride in self-adjustment, in diminishing, rather than intensifying, the project of liberation (how
did we get from ’68 to the present)? Because, I contend, in allowing the notion of freedom to
attain the ethical purity of its ontological status, one would have to lose one’s Human
coordinates and become Black. Which is to say one would have to die. For the Black, freedom is
an ontological, rather than experiential, question. There is no philosophically credible way to
attach an experiential, a contingent, rider onto the notion of freedom when one considers the
Black—such as freedom from gender or economic oppression, the kind of contingent riders
rightfully placed on the non-Black when thinking freedom. Rather, the riders that one could place
on Black freedom would be hyperbolic—though no less true—and ultimately untenable: i.e.,
freedom from the world, freedom from humanity, freedom from everyone (including one’s Black
self). Given the reigning episteme, what are the chances of elaborating a comprehensive, much
less translatable and communicable, political project out of the necessity of freedom as an
absolute? Gratuitous freedom has never been a trajectory of Humanist thought, which is why the
infinite trajectories of freedom that emanate from Humanism’s hub are anything but infinite—for
they have no line of flight leading to the Slave.
2AC AT – What about other shit?!?! - The demand for flesh reparation of the Slave is in relation of structural
antagonism to the Settler/Master demand for expansion. This antagonism forms the basis upon which all
other conflicts are articulated. Returning the body to the Slave is a first step in resolving other conflicts.
(Root Cause!)
Wilderson 2010 [Frank B. Red White and Black , p. 33-36]
The three structuring positionalities of the U.S. (Whites, Indians, Blacks) are elaborated by a
rubric of three demands: the (White) demand for expansion, the (Indian) demand for return of the
land, the (Black) demand for “flesh” reparation (Spillers). The relation between these
positionalities demarcate antagonisms and not conflicts because, as I have argued, they are the
embodiments of opposing and irreconcilable principles/forces that hold out no hope for
dialectical synthesis; and because they are relations that form the foundation upon which all
subsequent conflicts in the Western hemisphere are possible. In other words, the originary, or
ontological, violence that elaborates the Settler/Master, the “Savage,” and the Slave positions is
foundational to the violence of class warfare, ethnic conflicts, immigrant battles, and the
women’s liberation struggles of Settler/Masters. It is these antagonisms—whether acknowledged
through the conscious and empirical machinations of political economy, or painstakingly
disavowed through the “imaginative labor” (Sexton, “The Consequences of Race Mixture…”) of
libidinal economy—which render all other disputes as conflicts, or what Haunani Kay- Trask calls
“intra-settler discussions.”
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Social Death – The Black is the Non Human upon which all human ethical dillemas are based.
Wilderson 2010 [Frank B. Red White and Black , p. 47-50]
Fanon has no truck with all of this. He dismisses the presumed antagonism between Germans and
Jews by calling the Holocaust “little family quarrels” (115), recasting with this single stroke the
German/Jew encounter as a conflict rather than an antagonism. Fanon returns the Jew to his/her
rightful position—a position within civil society animated by an ensemble of Human discontents.
The Muselmann, then, can be seen as a provisional moment within existential Whiteness, when
Jews were subjected to Blackness and Redness—and the explanatory power of the Muselmann
can find its way back to sociology, history, or political science where it more rightfully belongs.
This is one of several moments in Black Skin, White Masks when Fanon splits the hair between
social oppression and structural suffering, making it possible to theorize the impossibility of a
Black ontology (thus allowing us to meditate on how the Black suffers) without being chained to
the philosophical and rhetorical demands of analogy, demands which the evidentiary register of
social oppression (i.e., how many Jews died in the ovens, how many Blacks were lost in the
Middle Passage) normally imposes upon such meditations. The ruse of analogy erroneously
locates the Black in the world—a place where s/he has not been since the dawning of Blackness.
This attempt to position the Black in the world by way of analogy is not only a mystification, and
often erasure, of Blackness’s grammar of suffering (accumulation and fungibility or the status of
being non-Human) but simultaneously also a provision for civil society, promising an enabling
modality for Human ethical dilemmas. It is a mystification and an erasure because, whereas
Masters may share the same fantasies as Slaves, and Slaves can speak as though they have the
same interests as Masters, their respective grammars of suffering are irreconcilable. In dragging
his interlocutors kicking and screaming through “Fact of Blackness,” or what Ronald Judy has
translated more pointedly as “The Lived Experience of the Black,” Fanon is not attempting to play
“oppression Olympics” and thus draw conclusions that Blacks are at the top of every empirical
hierarchy of social discrimination, though that case has also been made.xv Having established
that, yes, the Jew is oppressed (and, yes, the Black is oppressed) Fanon refuses to let the lived
experience of oppression dictate the terms of his meditations on suffering. He writes: [The Jew]
belongs to the race of those [who] since the beginning of time have never known cannibalism.
What an idea, to eat one’s father! Simple enough one has only not to be a nigger [emphasis
mine]…[I]n my case everything takes on a new guise. I am the slave not of an idea others have of
me but of my own appearance. (Black Skin, White Masks 115-16) Two tensions are at work
here. One operates under the labor of ethical dilemmas-- “simple enough one has only not to be a
nigger.”xvi This, I submit, is the essence of being for the White and non-Black position: ontology
scaled down to a global common denominator. The other tension is found in the impossibility of
ethical dilemmas for the Black: “I am,” Fanon writes, “a slave not of an idea others have of me
but of my own appearance.” Being can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as
nonniggerness; and slavery then as niggerness. The visual field, “my own appearance,” is the cut,
the mechanism that elaborates the division between the non-niggerness and slavery, the
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difference between the living and the dead. Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and
thus can become existentially present through some struggle for/of/through recognition, Blacks
cannot attain the plane of recognition (West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the
violence that has positioned and repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of historical
movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The violence
that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black
through tactile and empirical technologies of oppression, like the “little family quarrels” which for
Fanon exemplify the Jewish Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first
ontological instance, the Middle Passage, “wiped out [his/her] metaphysics…his [her] customs
and sources on which they are based” (BSWM 110). Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as
Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the
latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt
analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks
among them. This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively,
destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black within an infinite and
indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say
fungible) for any subject. As such, “the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the
white man” (110) or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity.
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Redressing the pained body – practices not meant to overcome the condition, but to redress the condition
through performance that works in and against the system. We are like the slaves who break tools.
Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia, Scenes of Subjection, p. 50-2]
Exploiting the limits of the permissible, creating transient zones of freedom, and reelaborating innocent amusements
were central features of everyday practice. Practice is, to use Michel de Certau’s phrase, “a way of operating”
defined by “the non-autonomy of its field of action,” internal manipulations of the established order, and ephemeral
victories. The tactics that compromise the everyday practices of the dominanted have neither the means to secure a
territory outside the space of domination nor the power to keep or maintain what it is won in fleeting, surreptitious,
and necessarily incomplete victories. The refashioning of permitted pleasures in the effort to undermine, transform,
and redress the condition of enslavement was consonant with other forms of everyday practice. These efforts
generally focused on the object status and castigated personhood of the slave, the pained and ravished body,
severed affiliations and natal alienation, and the assertion of denied needs. Practice is not simply a way of naming
these efforts but rather a way of thinking about the character of resistance, the precariousness of the assaults waged
against domination, the fragmentary character of these efforts and the transient battles won, and the characteristics
of a politics without a proper locus.
The everyday practices of the enslaved encompassed an array of tactics such as work slowdowns, feigned
illness, unlicensed travel, the destruction of property, theft, self-mutilation, dissimulation, physical confrontation
with owners and overseers that document the resistance to slavery. These small-scale and everyday forms of
resistance interrupted, reelaborated, and defied the constraints of everyday life under slavery ad exploited openings
in the system for the use of the enslaved. What unites these varied tactics is the effort to redress the condition of
the enslaved, restore the disrupted affiliations of the socially dead, challenge the authority and domination of the
slaveholder, and alleviate the pained state of the captive body. However, these acts of redress are undertaken with
the acknowledgement that conditions will most likely remain the same. This acknowledgement implies neither
resignation nor fatalism but a recognition of the enormity of the breach instituted by slavery and the magnitude of
domination.
Redressijng the pained body ecompasses operating in and against the demands of the system, negotiating
the disciplinary harnessing of the body, and counterinvesting in the body as a site of possibility. In this instance, pain
must be recognized in its historicity and as the articulation of a social condition of brutal constraint, extreme need,
and constant violence; in other words, it is the perpetuatl condition of ravishment. Pain is the normative condition
that encompasses the legal subjectivity of the enslaved that is constructed along the lines of injury and punishment,
the violation and suffering inextricably enmeshed with the pleasures of minstrelsy and melodrama, the operation of
power on black bodies, and the life of property in which the full enjoyment of the slave as thing supersedes the
admittedly tentative recognition of slavey humanity and permits the intemperate uses of chattel. This pain might
best be described as the history that hurts—the still-unfolding narrative of captivity, dispossession, and domination
that engenders the black subject in the Americas.
If this pain has been largely unspoken and unrecognized, it is due to the sheer denial of black sentience
rather than the inexpressibility of pain. The purpoted immunity of blacks to pain is absolutely essential to the
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spectacle of contented subjection or, at the very least, to discrediting the claims of pain. The black is both insensate
and content, indifferent to pain and induced to work by threats of corporal punishment. These condtradictions are
partly explained by the ambiguous and precarious status of the black in the “great chain of being”—in short, by the
pathologizing of the black body—this abhorrence then serves to justify acts of violence that exceed normative
standards of the humanely tolerable, though within the limits of the socially tolerable as concerned the black slave.
In this regard, pain is essential to the making of productive slave laborers. The sheer enormity of this pain
overwhelms or exceeds the limited forms of redress abilable to the enslaved. Thus the significance of the
performative lies not in the ability to overcome this condition or provide remedy but in creating a context for the
collective enunciation of this pain, transforming need into politics and cultivating pleasure as a limited response to
need and a desperately insufficient form of redress.
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Politics of the Slave has no proper locus. None the less in stealing away (fugitivity) the slave anticipates a
kind of coming freedom. This ressitance is radical.
Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia, Scenes of Subjection, p. 62-4]
In considering the determinations and limits of practice it becomes evident that resistances are engendered in
everyday forms of practice and that these resis- tances are excluded from the locus of the "political proper. "33
Both aspects of this assessment are significant because too often the interventions and challenges of the
dominated have been obscured when measured against traditional notions of the political and its central features:
the unencumbered self, the citizen, the self- possessed individual, and the volitional and autonomous subject.
The importance of the concept of practice is that it enables us to recognize the agency of the dominated and the
limited and transient nature of that agency. The key features of practice central to this examination of the
agency of the enslaved are the nonautonomy of the field of action; provisional ways of operating within the
dominant space; local, multiple, and dispersed sites of resistance that have not been strategically codified or
integrated; and the nonautonomy and pained constitution of the slave as person. The barring of these practices
from the political, as traditionally conceived, has a range of consequences and effects that concern the
constitution of the subject, the fea- sibility and appropriateness of certain forms of action, the incommensurability
of liberal notions of will and autonomy as standards for evaluating subaltern behavior, the inscription of agency as
criminal or, at the very least, as deserving of punish- ment, and the inadequacy and incompleteness of redress.
Thus when thinking about these practices as the ''infrapolitics of the dominated,'' to use James Scott's term, or as a
"politics of a lower frequency," to use Paul Gilroy's term, it is impm1ant to note both the effects yielded by the
popular ille- galities or popular intransigence of the enslaved and their remove from the proper locus of the
political.34 This is especially important in the case of the enslaved if we are to engage the particularities of the subject
constitution and object status of the enslaved. The bourgeois individual, the unencumbered self, and the
featureless person that give meaning to the term "political" in its conventional usage, with all the attendant
assumptions about the relation of the subject and the state, cannot incorporate the enslaved, for how does one
express an individual will hen one is without individual rights? After all, the rights of tbe self-possessed mdlVldual
and the set of property relations that define liberty depend upon, if not require, the bla k as will-less actant and
sublime object. If white independence, freedom, and equahty were purchased with slave labor, then what possibilities
or opportunities exist for the black captive vessel of white ideality?35
.
. The slave is the object or the
ground that makes posstble the extstence of the bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction, defines
liberty, citizens ip, and the enclosures of the social body. As Edmund Morgan has argued, the meanmg and the
guarantee of (white) equality depended upon the presence of slaves. White men were "equal in not being
slaves."36 The slave is indisputa ly outside the normative terms of individuality to such a degree that the very
exerctse of agency ts seen as a contravention of another's unlimiied rights to the object. (Even labor is not considered
agency because it is the property of another, extracted by coercive means, and part of the bestial capacities of the
black; it simply persomfies the.power and dominion of the owner.) Not surprisingly, the agency of the enslaved ts
only intelligible or recognizable as crime and the designation of personhood burde ed with incredible duties and
responsibilities that serve to enhance the represstve mechanisms of power, denote the limits of socially tolerablfo
ms of violence, an intensify and legitimate violence in the guise of protection, JUStice, and the reco m- tion of slave
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humanity. This official acknowledgment of agency and .hum mty, rather than challenging or contradicting the object
status and absolute subjugatton of the enslaved as chattel, reinscribes it in the terms of personhood.
. Though this
examination of slave agency primarily conces issues of.res stance, restitution, and redress, it is equally attentive to
the constramts of dommatton and the brutal exercise of power that give form to resistance. Mindful of the aforeme
- tioned concerns regarding the subject, this exploration of agency and resistance is less concerned with issues of
heroic action and oppositional consciousness than with the inadvertent, contingent, and submerged forms of
contestation. This approach emphasizes both the preponderance of resistance and the absence of a proper locus that
would grant autonomy to those practices. These practices are significant in that they are local assaults and pedestrian
challenges to slavery, the slave owner, the law and the state and, at the same time, they are provisional and short-lived
and exploit the cleavages of the social order. However, the focus on the contingent and transient character of these
practices is not an attempt to underestimate the magnitude of these acts, for they are fraught with utopian and
transformative impulses that are unrealiz- able within the terms of the current order precisely because of the scope
of these implicit, understated, and allegorical claims for emancipation, redress, and restitu- tion. The plurality of
resistances enacted in everyday life is produced by and details the relations and mechanisms of power. The dangers
posed by these practices and the threats issued to the dominant order provide a map of the specific mechanisms of
repression and power in antebellum social relations. For example, both the very incongruence or
incommensurability of purpmted dangers posed by slave gatherings and the great force used to meet and crush them
document the crisis of slavery and the attempt to manage this crisis by a combined strategy of patemalism and brutal
repression. In the context of crisis, infinitesimal assaults to the slave order acquire even greatet· signilicance. The
import of these practices is evidenced not only in the testimony of the enslaved or the formerly enslaved and the
terms in which they represent their experience but in the power exercised both to encourage and manage slave
amusements and to constrain, prohibit, and police such activities. The disrup- tions caused by a small act like sneaking
off to a dance or attending a praise meeting catalyzed a chain of events that was disruptive, short-lived, and, to some
degree, expected. The enslaved defied and redefined their condition of absolute subjection In acts of minor
transgression: movement without a pass to visit a loved one, stealing, unpermitted gatherings, etcetera. Certainly it
would be difficult to describe such acts as revolt or as a threat to bring the state to its knees, yet the very excess of force
that met such acts certainly serves ,to illustrate the tetmr that is part and parcel of the everyday landscape of slavery
and, more important, the difficulty of action in such circumstances. How is resistance registered in a context in which
being found with a pen or pencil is almost as bad as having murdered your master, according to Elijah Green? Or in
which being caught at a dance without a pass might result in being stripped and given twenty-five lashes if you're lucky
or a severe and life-threatening beating if you aren't? How does one enact resistance within the space of the
permissible or exploit the "concessions" of slave owners without merely reproducing the mechanisms of
dominance? What shape does resistance or rebellion acquire when the force of repression is virtually without limit,
when terror resides within the limits of socially tolerable, when the innocuous and the insurgent meet an equal force
of punishment, or when the clan- destine and the surreptitious mark an infinite array of dangers? In this context, might
not a rendezvous· at an unauthorized dance, attending a secret meeting, or sneaking off to visit your companion suddenly
come to appear as insmgent, or, at the very least, as quite dangerous, even when the "threats" posed are not
articulated in the form of direct confrontation but expressed in quite different terms? As Toby Jones recalled, such
gatherings engendered a liberatory and utopian structure of feelings. Raymond Williams defines a structure of feelings
as "a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can
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become fully articulate and defined exchange.' '38 This inchoate and practical consciousness is expressed by Jones as
tbe recollective anticipation of freedom and by others as an impulse or "instinct that we was going to be free. "39
Obviously, this structure of feeling existed in a troubled relation to slavery, for if a slave entertaining thoughts of
freedom was discovered, he would be lucky to escape with a beating. Other slaves were usually forced to witness this
beating and threat- ened with the same treatment if they were caught.40 As one ex-slave commented, "Whipping
darkies was the joy of the white man back in those days."41 John McAdams recounted that even small challenges to
slavery could have disas- trous effects: ''The only way the slaves could go from one plantation to another was tbey had
to have a pass from their Mas[t]er or Mistress; if they went without a pass, woe be unto that negro, for the mas[t]er
oftbe place would ask us for om·pass, and if we could not show one, it was just too bad. He would give us one of
the worst whippings we ever got. Of course I use to slip off and go to see my girl on another farm, but I was very
careful that I did not let anyone catch us."42 Even a child's display of rebelliousness could be met with the threat
of death. As a child, Susan Snow would "fight and scratch" with other children, black and white. In order to break
her of Ibis habit, her master forced her to look at the bodies of slaves who had been hanged for harming a white
man. 43
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AT: Framework – Fuck proper politics. Proper politics is anti-black. We are where politics of the slave
happens.
Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia, Scenes of Subjection, p. 64-5]
How does one survive the common atrocities of slavery yet possess a sensibility, a feeling, an impulse, and an
inexplicable, yet irrepressible, confidence in the possi- bilities of freedom? It is hard to imagine possibility, let alone
freedom, within the context of such fatal incommensurabilities: cruel whippings and courting, death and dance.
Extreme acts of violence are depicted matter-of-factly because of their regu- larity. The recollections of Susan Snow
and Mingo White catalog the coexistence of the mundane and the unimaginable, the constancy of tbe unbearable,
and the diffu- sion and rationality of terror. The grotesque incongruence of act and punishment and the violence that
awaited even the smallest transgression document the provisional, tentative, and restricted character of these
practices or any claims that might be made on their behalf. As well, these instances demonstrate that even in
contexts of direct and primary forms of domination there are innumerable sites of confrontation and struggle, and
perhaps even more important, they indicate the great cost of such acts. In order to illuminate the significance of
performance and the articulation of social struggle in seemingly innocuous events, everyday forms of practice must
be contex- tualized within the virtually unbounded powers of the slave-owning class, and whites in general, to use
all means necessary to ensure submission. Thus it is no surprise that these everyday forms of practice are usually
subterranean. I am reluc- tant to simply describe these practices as a "kind of politics," not because I question
whether tbe practices considered here are small-scale forms of struggle or dismiss tbem as cathartic and
contained.44 Rather, it is the concern about the possibilities of practice as they are related to the particular object
constitution and subject formation of tbe enslaved outside tbe "political proper" that leads me both to question the
appropriateness of the political to this realm of practice and to reimagine the political in this context. (As well, I take
seriously Jean Comaroff's observations that "tbe real politik of oppression dictates tbat resistance be expressed in
domains seemingly apolitical.")45 The contradictory status of tbe enslaved, their ambiguous relation to the state, and
the nonautonomy of both their social status and their practice determine this limited and tentative use of the
political and informs this effort to wrench tbe political from its proper referent. Given tbe exclusion of the slave from
the sphere of the political, what forms do the assettion of needs and desire acquire? What assumptions of tbe
political are at all relevant or adequate to their social location? Slaves are not consensual and willful actors, the
state is not a vehicle for advancing their claims, they are not citizens, and their status as persons is contested.
Assimilating these practices into the normative frame of the political is less important than examining the relation of
subjectification and practice and the form the political acquires for the enslaved. In what ways are the
(im)possibilities of practice related to, if not deter- mined by, the closures of politics? How are the claims of the
dominated articulated or advanced or their needs addressed or accommodated? The historical and social limits of
the political must be recognized in order to evaluate the articulation of needs and the forwarding of claims in
domains relegated to the privatized m· nonpolitical. If the public sphere is reserved for the white bourgeois subject
and tbe public/private divide replicates that between the political and tbe nonpolitical, then tbe agency of the
enslaved, whose relation to the state is mediated by way of another's rights, is invariably relegated to the
nonpolitical side of this divide. This gives us some sense of tbe full weight and meaning of the slaveholder's
dominion. In effect, those subjects removed from tbe public sphere are formally outside the space of politics. The
everyday practices of the enslaved generally fall outside direct forms of confrontation; they are not systemic in their
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ideology,, analysis, or intent, and, most important, the slave is neither civic man nor free worker but excluded from
the narrative of "we the people" that effects the linkage of the modern individual and the state. The enslaved were
neither envisioned nor afforded tbe privilege of envi- sioning themselves as part of tbe "imaginary sovereignty of the
state" or as "in- fused with unreal universality."46 Even the Gramscian model, witb its reformula- tion of the relation
of state and civil society in the concept of the historical bloc and its expanded definition of the political, maintains a
notion of tbe political inseparable from the effort and the ability of a class to effect hegemony.47 By questioning the
use of tbe term "political," I hope to illuminate the possibilities of practice and the stakes of these dispersed
resistances. All of this is not a preamble to an argument about the "prepolitical" consciousness of the enslaved but an
attempt to point to the limits of the political and tbe difficulty of translating or interpreting the practices of the
enslaved within that framework. The everyday practices of the enslaved occur in the default of the political, in the
absence of tbe rights of man or tbe assurances of the self-possessed individual, and perhaps even without a
"person," in the usual meaning of the term.
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Stealing Away – Fugitivity is a politic of stealing back the body of the slave that has been stolen by
Humanity. You can’t capture our performance! The play upon the originary act of theft (of the slave body
and its performance) and reclaims the desire and agency of the slave, explodes the paradox of “property
can’t steal property”
Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia, Scenes of Subjection, p. 65-7]
When the enslaved slipped away to have secret meetings, they would call it "stealing the meeting," as if to
highlight the appropriation of space and the expropriation of the object of property necessary to make these
meetings possible. Just as runaway slaves were described as "stealing themselves," so, too, even shortlived
"flights" from captivity were referred to as "stealing away." "Stealing away" designated a wide range of activities,
from praise meetings, quilting parties, and dances to illicit visits with lovers and family on neighboring plantations.
It encompassed an assortment of popular illegalities focused on contesting the authority of the slave-owning class
and contravening the status of the enslaved as possession. The very phrase "stealing away" played upon the
paradox of property's agency and the idea of property as theft, thus alluding to the captive's condition as a legal
form of unlawful or amoral seizure, what Hortense Spillers describes as ''the violent seizing of the captive body
from its motive will, its active desire.'' 49 Echoing Proudhon's "property is theft," Henry Bibb put the matter simply:
"Property can't steal property." It is the play upon this originary act of theft that yields the possibilities of
transport, as one was literally and figuratively carried away by one's desire.5o The appropriation of dominant
space in itinerant acts of defiance contests the spatial confinement and surveillance of slave life and, ironically,
reconsiders the meaning of property, theft, and agency. Despite the range of activities encompassed under this
rubric, what these events shared was the centrality of contestation. Stealing away was the vehicle for the
redemptive figuration of dispossessed individual and community, reconstituting kin relations, contravening the
object status of chattel, transforming pleasure, and investing in the body as a site of sensual activity, sociality, and
possibility, and, last, redressing the pained body. The activities encompassed in the scope of stealing away played
upon the tension between the owner's possession and the slave's dispossession and sought to redress the
condition of enslavement by whatever limited means available. The most direct expression of the desire for redress
was the praise meeting. The appeals made to a "God that saves in history" were overwhelmingly focused on
freedom.51 For this reason William Lee said that slaves "couldn't serve God unless we stole to de cabin or de
oods."52 West Turner confirmed this and stated that when patrollers discovered such meetings they would beat
the slaves mercilessly in order to keep them from serving God. Turner recounted the words of one patroller to this
effect: ''If I ketch you here servin' God, I'll beat you. You ain't got no time to serve God. We bought you to serve
us. "53 Serving God as a crucial site of struggle, as it concerned issues about styles of worship, the intent of
worship, and, most important, the very meaning of service, since the expression of faith was invariably a critique of
the social conditions of subordination, servitude, and mastery. As Turner's account documents, the threat embodied
in serving God was that the recognition of divine authority superseded, if not negated, the mastery of the slave
owner. Although by the 1850s Christianity was widespread among the enslaved and most owners no longer
opposed the conversion or religious instructions of slaves, there was nonetheless an ethical and political struggle
waged in religious practice that concerned contending interpretations of the word and styles of religious _worship.
Even those slaves whose owners encouraged religion or sent them to white churches found it important to attend
secret meetings. They complained that at white churches they were not allowed to speak or express their faith in
their own terms. "We used to slip off in de woods in de old slave days on Sunday evening way down in de swamps to
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sing and pray to our own liking. We prayed for dis day of freedom. We come from four and five miles to pray
together to God dat if we don't live to see it, to please let 0ur chillen live to see it, to please let our chillen live to see
a better day and be free, dat they can give honest and fair service to the Lord and all mankind everywhere. nd
we'd sing 'our little meetin's about to break, chillen, and we must part. We got to part in body, but hope not in
mind. Our little meetin's bound to break.' Den we used to sing 'We walk about and shake hands, fare you well my
sister's, I am going home.' "54 These meetings held in "hush arbors" or covertly in the quarters illumi- nate the
significant difference between the terms of faith and the import of Chris- tianity for the master and the enslaved.
For example, the ring shout, a form of devotional dance, defied Christian proscriptions against dancing; the shout
made the body a vehicle of divine communication with God in contrast to the Christian vision of the body as the
defiled container of the soul or as mere commodity. And the attention to the soul contested the object status of
the enslaved, for the exchange of blacks as commodities and their violent domination were often described in
terms of being treated as if one did not have a soul.
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Stealing Away –
Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia, Scenes of Subjection, p. 65-7]
Freedom was the central most important issue of these meetings. According to William Adams, at these
meetings they would pray to be free and sing and dance. 56 The avid belief in an imminent freedom radically
challenged and nullified the gospel of slavery, which made subordination a virtue and promised rewards in the
''kitchen of heaven." Elizabeth Washington stated that ministers would "preach the colored people if they would
be good niggers and not steal their master's eggs and chickens and things that they might go to the kitchen of
heaven when they died." It was not uncommon for slave owners to impart a vision of Christianity in which the
enslaved would also attend to them in the afterlife. As one mistress stated, "I would give anything if I could have
Mal'ia in heaven with me to do little things for me. "57 For the enslaved the belief in a divine authority minimized
and contained the do- minion of the master. As well, these meetings facilitated a sense of collective identification
through the invocation of a common condition as an oppressed people and a shared destiny. Serving God
ultimately was to be actualized in the abolition of slavery. Stealing away involved unlicensed movement, collective
assembly, and an abrogation of the terms of subjection in acts as simple as sneaking off to laugh and talk with
friends or making noctumal visits to loved ones. 58 Sallie Johnson said that men would often sneak away to visit
their wives.59 These nighttime visits to lovers and family were a way of redressing the natal alienation or enforced
"kinlessness" of the enslaved, as well as practices of naming, running away, and refusing to marry a mate not of
one's choosing or to remarry after a husband or wife was sold away; all of these were efforts to maintain, if not
reconstitute, these ties. 60 Dora Frank's uncle would sneak off at night to see his woman. On one occasion, he
failed to return by daylight, and "nigger hounds" were sent after him. He was given 100 lashes and sent to work
with the blood still running down his back.61 Dempsey Jordan recognized that the risks involved in such journeys
were great but slipped off at night to see his girl in spite 0f them: ''I was taking a great chance. I would go and see
my girl lots of nights and one time I crawled 100 yards to her room and got in the bed with her and lay there until
nearly daylight talking to her. One time I was there with her and them patterollers come that night and walked all
around in that mom and this here negro was in her bed down under that moss and they never found me. I sure
was scared."62 The fact that the force of violence and the threat of sale did not prevent such actions illustrates
the ways in which the requirements of property relations were defied in the course of everyday practices. The
consequences of these small-scale challenges were sometimes life threatening, if not fatal. Fannie Moore
remembered the violence that followed the discovery of a secret dance. They were dancing and singing when the
patrollers invaded the dance and started beating people. When Uncle Joe's son decided it was "time to die"
because he couldn't sustain another beating and fought back, the patrollers beat him to death and whipped half a
dozen others before sending them home. 63 According to Jane Pyatt, if slaves had a party or a prayer meeting
and they made too much noise, patrollers would beat them and sometimes would sell them. The patrollers took
two of her brothers, and she never saw them again.64 Generally, the punish- ment for unlicensed assembly or
travel was twenty-five to fifty lashes. Stealing away was synonymous with defiance because it necessarily involved
seizing the master's property and asserting the self in transgression of the law. The trespasses that were invariably
a patt of stealing away were a source of danger, pride, and a great deal of boasting. Garland Monroe noted that
the secret meetings he patticipated in were held in the open, not in huts or arbot. They were confident that they
could outwit and defy patrollers. If the patrollers came, the slaves took advantage of a superior knowledge of the
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ten-itory to escape capture or detection.6s Physical confrontations with patrollers were a regular feature of these
accounts, and a vine stretched across the road to trip the patrollers' horses was the most common method of
foiling one's pursuers.66 As James Davis bragged, "I've seen the Ku Klux in slavery times and I've cut a many
grapevine. We'd be in the place dancin' and playin' the banjo and the grapevine strung across the road and the Ku
Klux come ridin' along and run right into it and throw the horses down. "67 The enslaved were empowered by the
collective challenge posed to power and the mutual reinforcement against fear of discovery or punishment. From
this perspective, pastoral and folksy slave gatherings appear like small-scale battles with the owners, local whites,
.and the Law. These day-to-day and routine forms of contestation operated within the confines of relations of
power and simultaneously challenged those very relations as these covert and chameleonic practices both
complied with and disrupted the demands of the system through the expression of a counterdiscourse of freedom.
In the course of such gatherings, even the span of the Potomac could be made a bridge of community and
solidarity. As James Deane remembered, they would blow conch shells at night to signal a gathering. "We would
all meet on the bank of the Potomac River and sing across the river to the slaves in Virginia, and they would sing
back to us."68 Such small-scale infringements of the law also produced cleavages in the spatial organiza- tion of
domination. The play on "stealing," "taking or appropriating without right or leave and with the intent to keep or
make use of wrongfully" or "to appropriate entirely to oneself or beyond one's proper share," articulates the
dilemma of the subject without rights and the degree to which any exercise of agency or appropriation of the self is
only intelligible as crime or already encoded as crime.69 As well, it highlights the transgression of such furtive and
clandestine peregrinations since the very assertions and activity required to assemble at praise meetings, dances,
et cetera, were nothing less than a fundamental challenge to and breach of the claims of slave property-the black
captive as object and the ground of the master's inalienable right, being, and liberty. The agency of theft or the
simple exercise of any claims to the self, however restricted, challenged the figuration of the black captive as
devoid of will. 70 Stealing away ironically encapsulated the impossibility of self-possession as it exposed the link
between liberty and slave property by playing with and against the terms of dispossession. The use of the term
"play" is not intended to make light of the profound dislocations and divisions experienced by the enslaved or to
imply that these tentative negotiations of one's status or condition were not pained or wrenching but to
highlight[s] the performative dimension of these assaults as staged, repeated, and rehearsed-what Richard
Schechner terms "twice-behaved behavior. "71 Through stealing away, counterclaims about justice and freedom
were advanced that denied the sanctity or legitimacy of rights of property in a double gesture that played on the
meaning of theft. Implicit within the appropriation of the object of property was an insistence that flew in the face
of the law: liberty defined by inalienable rights of property was theft. Stealing away exploited the bifurcated
condition of the black captive as subject and object by the flagrant assertion of unlicensed and felonious behavior
and by pleading innocence, precisely because as an object the slave was the very negation of an intending
consciousness or will. The disruptive assertions, necessarily a part of stealing away, ultimately transgressed the
law of property. Similarly, stealing away defied and subversively appropriated slave owners' de- signs for mastery
and control-primarily the captive body as the extension of the master's power and the spatial organization of
domination. Stealing away involved not only an appropriation of the self but also a disruption of the spatial
organization of dominance that confined slaves to the policed location of the quarters unless provided with
written permission of the slaveholder to go elsewhere.n As well, the organization of dominant space involved the
separation of public and private realms; this separation reproduced and extended the subordination and
repression of the enslaved. If the public realm is reserved for the bourgeois citizen subject and the private realm is
inscribed by freedom of property ownership and contractual transactions based upon free will, then in what space
is the articulation of the needs and desires of the enslaved at all possible?73 How does one contest the
ideological codification and containment of the bounds of the political? Ultimately, the struggle waged in everyday
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practices, from the appropriation of space in local and pedestrian acts, holding a praise meeting in the woods,
meeting a lover in the canebrake, or throwing a sun-eptitious dance in the quatters to the contestation of one's
status as transactable object or the vehicle of another's rights, was about the creation of a social space in which
the assertion of needs, desires, and counterclaims could be collectively aired, thereby granting property a social
life and an arena or shared identification with other slaves. Like de Cetteau's walker who challenges the
disciplinary apparatus of the urban system with his idle footsteps, these practices also create possibilities within
the space of domination, transgress the policed space of subordination through _unlicensed travel and collective
assembly across the privatized lines of plantation households, and disrupt boundaries between the public and
private in the articulation of insurgent claims that make need the medium of politics.74
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Fugitive Knowledge production - We must steal from the dominant knowledge production of debate.
Fugitives of the academy. We are the maroon colony of the debate space. Also our knowledge breaks
down biopower – should fail to become the good subjects upon which biopower depends. Our knowledge
production is the knowledge production of the object, we create a maroon colony in the debate space.
Moten and Harney 2004 [Fred and Stephen, “The University and the Undercommons,” Social Text 79, Vol. 22,
No. 2, Summer 2004.]
“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely
borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of
universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it
cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In
the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its
hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not
of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. Worry about the university. This
is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or
Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But
for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational
men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out
of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but
cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the
underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the
Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted,
where the revolution is still black, still strong. What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing
the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work of the university. Teaching is
merely a profession and an operation of what Jacques Derrida calls the onto-/auto-encyclopedic circle of the Universitas. But it is
useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. The
university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it. It is not teaching then that holds
this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward
a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic
organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the
experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to mark the
exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the
consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened. The
moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually, one should not teach for food. If the
stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and
teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly
calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it with having the “determination and courage to use one’s intelligence
without being guided by another.” “Have the courage to use your own intelligence.” But what would it mean if teaching or rather what
we might call “the beyond of teaching” is precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance? And what of those
minorities who refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond2 (that which is beyond “the beyond of
teaching”), as if they will not be subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the
perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste. But their collective labor will always
call into question who truly is taking the orders of the Enlightenment. The waste lives for those moments beyond2 teaching when you
give away the unexpected beautiful phrase— unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower
of the Enlightenment truly better than this? Perhaps the biopower of the Enlightenment know this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the
objecthood of this labor as it must. But even as it depends on these moles, these refugees, they will call them
uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be given one last chance to be
pragmatic—why steal when one can have it all, they will ask. But if one hides from this
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interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the underground of the
university, into the Undercommons— this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is at
the same time, the only possible act. In that Undercommons of the university one can see that it
is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualization of research.
To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that
fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the
life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge
gives commons. What the beyond2 of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not
completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion
and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the
kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the
auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the
teaching as it is the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own
organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore
as yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the Undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the
university, and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. The
Undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood.
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NEG
NEG – Blackness is negative ground…. Cannot “resist” that is to assume a contingent ontological status of
the Human. Doesn’t get at Blackness.
Wilderson 2010 [Frank B. Red White and Black , p. 40-58]
How is it that the Black appears to partner with the senior and junior partners of civil society
(Whites and colored immigrants, respectively), when in point of fact the Black is not in the world?
The answer lies in the ruse of analogy. By acting as if the Black is present, coherent, and above all
human, Black film theorists are “allowed” to meditate on cinema only after “consenting” to a
structural adjustment.xvii Such an adjustment, required for the “privilege” of participating in the
political economy of academe, is not unlike the structural adjustment debtor nations must adhere
to for the privilege of securing a loan: signing on the dotted line means feigning ontological
capacity regardless of the fact that Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated
form. It means theorizing Blackness as “borrowed institutionality.”xviii Ronald Judy’s
(Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular
and “On the Question of Nigga Authenticity” critique the Black intelligentsia for building aesthetic
canons out of slave narratives and hardcore rap on the belief that Blacks can “write [themselves]
into being” ((Dis)Forming the American Canon: 88, 97). Judy acknowledges that in such
projects one finds genuine and rigorous attention to the issue that concerns Blacks as a social
formation, namely, resistance. But he is less than sanguine about the power of resistance which
so many Black scholars impute to the slave narrative in particular and, by extension, to the
“canon” of Black literature, Black music, and Black film: In writing the death of the African body,
Equiano[‘s] 18th century slave narrative] gains voice and emerges from the abject muteness of
objectivity into productive subjectivity. It should not be forgotten that the abject muteness of the
body is not to not exist, to be without effect. The abject body is the very stuff, the material, of
experiential effect. Writing the death of the African body is an enforced abstraction. It is an
interdiction of the African, a censorship to be inarticulate, to not compel, to have no capacity to
move, to be without effect, without agency, without thought. The muted African body is
overwritten by the Negro, and the Negro that emerges in the ink flow of Equiano’s pen is that
which has overwritten itself and so becomes the representation of the very body it sits on.
(Emphasis mine, 89) Judy is an Afro-Pessimist, not an Afro-Centrist. For him the Negro is a symbol
that cannot “enable the representation of meaning [because] it has no referent” (107). Such is the
gratuitousness of the violence that made the Negro. But it is precisely to this illusive symbolic
resistance (an aspiration to “productive subjectivity”), as opposed to the Negro’s “abject
muteness,” and certainly not to the Slave’s gratuitous violence, that many Black scholars in
general, and Black film theorists in particular, aspire when interpreting their cultural objects. My
claim regarding Black film theory, modeled on Judy’s claim concerning Black Studies more
broadly, is that it tries to chart a project of resistance with an ensemble of questions that fortify
and extend the interlocutory life of what might be called a Black film canon. But herein lies the
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rub, a rub in the form of a structural adjustment imposed on the Black film scholar her/himself.
“Resistance through canon formation,” Judy writes, must be “legitimated on the grounds of
conservation, the conservation of authenticity’s integrity” (19). A tenet that threads through
Judy’s work is that throughout modernity and post-modernity (or post-industrial society, as Judy’s
echoing of Antonio Negri prefers) “Black authenticity” is an oxymoron, a notion as absurd as
“rebellious property” (“On the Question of Nigga Authenticity…” 225), for it requires the kind of
ontological integrity which the Slave cannot claim. The structural adjustment imposed upon Black
academics is, however, vital to the well-being of civil society. It provides the political economy of
academia with a stable “collegial” atmosphere in which the selection of topics, the distribution of
concerns, esprit de corps, emphasis, and the bounding of debate within acceptable limits appear
to be “shared” by all because all admit to sharing them. But Judy suggests that the mere presence
of the Black and his/her project, albeit adjusted structurally, threatens the fabric of this “stable”
economy, by threatening its structure of exchange: Not only are the conjunctive operations of
discourses of knowledge and power that so define the way in which academic fields get
authenticated implicated in the academic instituting of Afro-American studies, but so is the
instability entailed in the nature of academic work. That instability is discernable even in the
university’s function as conservator. ((Dis)Forming the American Canon Emphasis mine 19)
This academy-wide instability, predicated on the mere presence of the Black and his/her object,
has three crisis-prone elements which Blackness, should it ever become unadjusted, could
unleash. First is a realization that African-American studies cannot delimit “a unique object field”
(i.e., a set literary texts, or a Black film canon) which threatens the nature of academic work, for
Black Studies itself is indexical of the fact that “the object field—i.e. the texts—has no ontological
status, but issues from specific historical discursive practices and aesthetics” (20). Secondly, these
“specific historical discursive practices and aesthetics,” heterogeneous as they might be at the
level of content, are homogeneous to the extent that their genealogies cannot recognize
and incorporate the figure of the Slave. As a result, “interjecting the slave narrative into the
privileged site of literary expression achieves, in effect, a (dis)formation of the field of American
literary history” (20-21) and, by extension, the field of Black film studies. “The slave narrative as a
process by which a textual economy is constituted—as a topography through which the African
American achieves an emancipatory subversion of the propriety of slavery—jeopardizes the
genealogy of Reason” (97). Once Reason’s very genealogy is jeopardized then its content, for
example, the idea of “dominium,” has no ground to stand on. We will see, below, how and why
“dominion” is recognized as a constituent element of the Indian’s subjectivity and how this
recognition enables partial incorporation. But a third point proves just as much, if not more,
unsettling than a crisis in the genealogy of Reason. For if Slave narratives as an object field have
“no ontological status” such that the field’s insertion into the field of literary history can disform
not just the field of literary studies but the field of knowledge itself (the paradigm of exchange
within the political economy of academia), and (dis)form the hegemony of Reason’s genealogy,
then what does this tell us about the ontological status of the narrating slave her/himself? This
question awaits both the Black filmmaker and the Black film theorist. It is menacing and
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unbearable. The intensity of its ethicality is terrifying, so terrifying that, as a space to be
inhabited and terror to be embraced, it can be seized by a significant number of Black artists and
theorists only at those moments when a critical mass of Slaves have embraced this terror in the
streets. Normally, in moments such as the present (with no such mass movement in the streets),
the “effect of delineating a peculiar African American historiography” (19) seems menacing and
unbearable to the lone Black scholar; and so the Black scholar labors— unwittingly, Judy implies—
to adjust the structure of his/her own “nonrecuperable negativity” (96) in order to tell “a story of
an emerging subjectivity’s triumphant struggle to discover its identity” and thereby ascend “from
the abject muteness of objectivity into productive subjectivity” (88-89). The dread under which
such aspirations to Human capacity labor (a labor of disavowal) is catalyzed by the knowledge,
however unconscious, that civil society is held together by a structural prohibition against
recognizing and incorporating a being that is dead, despite the fact that this being is sentient and
so appears to be very much alive. Civil society cannot embrace what Saidiya Hartman calls “the
abject status of the will-less object” (Scenes of Subjection 52). Explicating the rhetorical and
philosophical impossibility of such an embrace, Judy writes: The assumption of the Negro’s
transcendent worth as a human presupposes the Negro’s being comprehensible in Western
modernity’s terms. Put somewhat more crudely, but nonetheless to the point, the humanization
in writing achieved in the slave narrative require[s] the conversion of the incomprehensible
African into the comprehensible Negro. The historical mode of conversion was the linguistic
representation of slavery: the slave narrative [or Black film and Black film theory]. By providing
heuristic evidence of the Negro’s humanity the slave narrative begins to write the history of
Negro culture in terms of the history of an extra-African self-reflective consciousness. (Judy 92)
But this exercise is as liberating, as “productive of subjectivity,” as a dog chasing its tail. For
“[p]recisely at the point at which this intervention appears to succeed in its determination of a
black agent, however, it is subject to appropriation by a rather homeostatic thought: the Negro”
(97). And the Negro, as Fanon illustrates throughout Black Skin, White Masks, “is comparison,”
nothing more and certainly nothing less, for what is less than comparison? Fanon strikes at the
heart of this tail-chasing circularity and the dread it catalyzes when he writes: No one knows yet
who [the Negro] is, but he knows that fear will fill the world when the world finds out. And when
the world knows the world always expects something of the Negro. He is afraid lest the world
know, he is afraid of the fear that the world would feel if the world knew. (BSWM emphasis mine
139) By aspiring to the very ontological capacity which modernity foreclosed to them—in other
words, by attempting to “write themselves into being” ((Dis)Forming the American Canon
97)— Black film theorists and many Black films experience as unbearable a tenet shared by Judy
and other Afro-Pessimists that “humanity recognizes itself in the Other that it is not” (94). This
makes the labor of disavowal in Black scholarly and aesthetic production doubly burdensome, for
it is triggered by a dread of both being “discovered,” and of discovering oneself, as ontological
incapacity. Thus, through borrowed institutionality—the feigned capacity to be essentially
exploited and alienated (rather than accumulated and fungible) in the first ontological instance (in
other words, a fantasy to be just like everyone else, which is a fantasy to be) the work of Black
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film theory operates through a myriad of compensatory gestures in which the Black theorist
assumes subjective capacity to be universal and thus “finds” it everywhere. We all got it bad,
don’t we Massa.
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Empathic Identification is the commodification of the black body - This is the logic of the master over the
slave that constitutes the racist logic of the world. Like the good abolitionist Rankin, the AFF plays on the
audience’s progressive self-important liberal narcissism to get the ballot. In the process of empathic
identification, the AFF becomes the hero of the debate, the suffering of blacks and browns is reinscribed,
and the experience of the other is obliterated.
Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia]
In an epistle to his brother, John Rankin illumined the "very dangerous evil" of slavery in a description of the coffle,
detailing the obscene theatricality of the slave trade: "Unfeeling wretches purchased a considerable drove of slaves
how many of them were separated from husbands and wives, I will not pretend to say-and having chained a number
of them together, hoisted over the flag of American liberty, and with the music of two violins marched the woe-worn,
heart-broken, and sobbing creatures through the town." 1 Rankin, aghast at the spectacle and shocked by "seeing
the most oppressive sorrows of suffering innocence mocked with all the lightness of sportive music,'' decried: ''My
soul abhors the crime.'' The violation of domesticity, the parody of liberty, and the callous defiance of sorrow define
the scene in which crime becomes spectacle. The "very dangerous evil" of slavery and the "agonizing groans of
suffering humanity" had been made music.2
Although Rankin conceded that the cruelty of slavery "far exceed[ed] the power
of description," he nonetheless strove to render the horrors of slavery, And in so doing, Rankin makes apparent that the crimes of slavery are not
only witnessed but staged. This is a result of the recourse to terms like "stage," "spectacle,” and "scene” in conveying
these horrors, and, more important, because the “abominations of slavery" are disclosed through the reiteration of
secondhand accounts and circulating stories from "unquestionable authorities" to which Rankin must act as
surrogate witness. In the effort to "bring slavery close," these circulating reports of atrocity, in essence, are
reenacted in Rankin epistles. The grotesqueries enumerated in documenting the injustice of slavery are intended to shock and to disrupt
the comfortable remove of the reader/spectator. By providing the minutest detail of macabre acts of violence, embellished by
his own fantasy of slavery's bloodstained gate, Rankin hoped to rouse the sensibility of those indifferent to slavery by exhibit ing the
suffering of the enslaved and facilitating an identification between those free and those enslaved: "We are naturally too callous to the
sufferings of others, and consequently prone to look upon them with cold indifference, until, in imagination we
identify ourselves with the sufferers, and make their sufferings our own .... When I bring it near, inspect it
closely, and find that it is inflicted on men and women, who possess the same nature and feelings with myself, my
sensibility is roused" (56-57). By bringing suffering near, the ties of sentiment are forged. In letter after letter, Rankin
strove to create this shared experience of horror in order to transform his slaveholding brother, to whom the letters
were addressed, as well as the audience of readers. In this case, pain provides the common language of humanity; it extends
humanity to the dispossessed and, in turn, remedies the indifference of the callous. 3
The shocking accounts of whipping, rape, mutilation, and suicide assault the
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barrier of indifference, for the abhorrence and indignity roused by these scenes of terror, which range from the mockery of the coffle to the
dismemberment and incineration of a slave boy, give rise to a shared sentience between those formerly indifferent and those suffering. So
intent and determined is Rankin to establish that slaves possess the same nature and feelings as himself, and thereby
establish the common humanity of all men on the basis of this extended suffering, that he literally narrates an
imagined scenario in which he, along with his wife and child, is enslaved. The "horrible scenes of cruelty that were
presented to [his] mind as a consequence of this imagining aroused the ''highest pitch of indignant feeling.'' In
addition this scenario enables Rankin to speak not only for but literally in the place of the enslaved. By believing
himself to be and by phantasmically becoming the enslaved, he creates the scenario for shared feelings:
My flighty imagination added much to the tumult of passion by persuading me, for he moment, that
1 myself was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of terror. I began in
reality to feel for myself, my wife, and my children-the thoughts of being whipped at the pleasure of
a morose and capricious master, aroused the strongest feelings of resentment; but when I fancied
the cruel lash was. Approaching my wife and children, and my imagination depicted in lively colors,
their tears, their shrieks, and bloody stripes, every indignant principle of my bloody nature was
exerted to the highest degree. (56)
The nature of the feelings aroused here is rather complicated. While this flight of imagination enables a vicarious
firsthand experience of the lash, excoriates the pleasure experienced by the master in this brutal exercise of power,
and unleashes Rankin's fiery indignation and resentment, the phantasmic vehicle of this identification is complicated,
unsettling, and disturbing. Although Rankin's fantasy culminates in indignant outcries against the institution of
slavery and, clearly, the purpose of this identification is to highlight the crimes of slavery, this flight of imagination
and slipping into the captive's body unlatches a Pandora's box and, surprisingly, what comes to the fore is the
difficulty and slipperiness of empathy. Properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order to better under
stand the other or "the projection of one's own personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one's own
emotions."4 Yet empathy in important respects confounds Rankin's efforts to identify with the enslaved because in making the slave's
suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach.
Moreover, by exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity extended
In other words, the ease of
Rankin's empathic identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the
fungibility of the captive body.
to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations of chattel slavery.
By making the suffering of others his own, has Rankin ameliorated indifference or
only confirmed the difficulty of understanding the suffering of the enslaved? Can the white witness of the spectacle of
suffering affirm the materiality of black sentience only by feeling for himself? Does this not only exacerbate the idea that black sentience is
inconceivable and unimaginable but, in the very ease of possessing the abased and enslaved body, ultimately elide an understanding and
acknowledgment of the slave's pain? Beyond evidence of slavery's crime, what does this exposure of the suffering body of
the bondsman yield? Does this not reinforce the "thingly" quality of the captive by reducing the body to evidence in the very effort to
establish the humanity of the enslaved? Does it not reproduce the hyperembodiness of the powerless? The purpose of these inquiries is not to cast
doubt on Rankin's motives for recounting these events but to consider the precariousness of empathy and the thin line between witness and
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spectator. In the fantasy of being beaten, Rankin must substitute himself and his wife and children for the black captive in order that this pain be
perceived and experienced. So, in fact, Rankin becomes a proxy and the other's pain is acknowledged to the degree that it
can be imagined, yet by virtue of this substitution the object of identification threatens to disappear. In order to
convince the reader of the horrors of slavery, Rankin must volunteer himself and his family for abasement. Put
differently, the effort to counteract the commonplace callousness to black suffering requires that the white body be
positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this suffering visible and intelligible. Yet if this violence can
become palpable and indignation can be fully aroused only through the masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear
that empathy is double-edged, for in making the other's suffering one's own, this suffering is occluded by the others
obliteration. Given the litany of horrors that fill Rankin's pages, this recourse to fantasy reveals an anxiety about making the slave's
suffering legible. This anxiety is historically determined by the denial of black sentience, the slave's status as object of
property, the predicament of witnessing given the legal status of blacks, and the repression of counterdiscourses on
the "peculiar institution." Therefore, Rankin must supplant the black captive in order to give expression to black suffering, and as a
consequence, the dilemma-the denial of black sentience and the obscurity of suffering-is not attenuated but instantiated. The ambivalent
character of empathy-more exactly, the repressive effects of empathy-as Jonathan Boyarin notes, can be located in
the "obliteration of otherness" or the facile intimacy that enables identification with the other only as we "feel
ourselves into those we imagine as ourselves." And as a consequence, empathy fails to expand the space of the other
but merely places the self in its stead. 5 This is not to suggest that empathy can be discarded or that Rankin's desire
to exist in the place of the other can be dismissed as a narcissistic exercise but rather to highlight the dangers of a
too-easy intimacy, the consideration of the self that occurs at the expense of the slave's suffering, and the violence of
identification.6
The Affirmatives Spectacle of Suffering is anti-black and reproduces the fungibility of the black body.
Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia]
As well, we need ask why the site of suffering so readily lends itself to inviting identification. Why is pain the conduit of
identification? This question may seem to beg the obvious, given the violent domination and dishonor constitutive of
enslavement, the acclaimed transformative capacities of pain in sentimental culture, the prevalence of public
displays of suffering inclusive of the pageantry of the trade, the spectacle of punishment, circulating reports of
slavery's horrors, the runaway success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the passage through the "bloodstained gate,"
which was a convention of the slave narrative, all of which contributed to the idea that the feelings and
consciousness of the enslaved were most available at this site. However, what I am trying to suggest is that if the scene
of beating readily lends itself to an identification with the enslaved, it does so at the risk of fixing and naturalizing this condition of pained
embodiment and, in complete defiance of Rankin's good intention, increases the difficulty of beholding black suffering since the
endeavor to bring pain close exploits the spectacle of the body in pain and oddly- confirms the spectral character of suffering and the inability to
witness the captive's pain. If, on one hand, pain extends humanity to the dispossessed and the ability to sustain suffering leads to transcendence,
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on the other, the spectral and spectacular character of this suffering, or, in other words, the shocking and ghostly presence of pain , effaces and
restricts black sentience.
As Rankin himself states, in order for this suffering to induce a reaction and stir
feelings, it must be brought close. Yet if sentiment or morality are "inextricably tied to human proximity," to quote
Zygmunt Bauman, the problem is that in the very effort to "bring it near" and "inspect it closely" it is dissipated.
According to Bauman, "Morality conform[s] to the law of optical perspective. It looms large and thick close to the eye. "7 So, then, how does
suffering elude or escape us in the very effort to bring it near? It does so precisely because it can only be brought near by way of
a proxy and by way of Rankin's indignation and imagination. If the black body is the vehicle of the other's power, pleasure, and
profit, then it is no less true that it is the white or near-white body that makes the captive's suffering visible and discernible. Indeed, the
elusiveness of black suffering can be attributed to a racist optics in which black flesh is itself identified as the source of opacity, the denial of
black humanity, and the effacement of sentience integral to the wanton use of the captive body. 9 And as noted earlier, this is further
complicated by the repressive underside of an optics of morality that insists upon the other as a mirror of the self and that in order to recognize
suffering must substitute the self for the other.
While Rankin attempts to ameliorate the insufficiency of feeling before the spectacle of the other's suffering, this insufficiency is, in
fact, displaced rather than remedied by his standing in. Likewise, this attempt exacerbates the distance between the readers and those suffering
by literally removing the slave from view as pain is brought close. Moreover, we need to consider whether the identification forged at
the site of suffering confirms black humanity at the peril of reinforcing racist assumptions of limited sentience, in that the humanity of the
enslaved and the violence of the institution can only be brought into view by extreme examples of incineration and dismemberment or by placing
white bodies at risk. What does it mean that the violence of slavery or the pained existence of the enslaved, If
discernible, is only so in the most heinous and grotesque examples and not in the quotidian routines of slavery? As
well, is not the difficulty of empathy related to both the devaluation and the valuation of black life?
Empathic Identification is complicated further by the fact that it cannot be extricated from the economy of chattel slavery with which is
at odds, for this projection of one's feeling upon or into the object of property and the phantasmic slipping into captivity,
while it is distinct from the pleasures of self-augmentation yielded by the ownership of the captive body and the
expectations fostered therein, is nonetheless entangled with this economy and identification facilitated by a kindred possession or
occupation of the captive body, albeit on a different register. In other words, what I am trying to isolate are the kinds of
expectations and the qualities of affect distinctive to the economy of slavery. The relation between pleasure and the
possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal senses, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the
slave—that is, the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodityand by the extensive capacities of property-that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment
in external objects and persons. 11 Put differently, the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an
abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others' feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property,
the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master's body since it guarantees his disembodied
universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion. Thus, while the beaten and mutilated body presumably
establishes the brute materiality of existence, the materiality of suffering regularly eludes (re)cognition by virtue of
the body's being replaced by other signs of value, as well as other bodies.
Thus the desire to don, occupy, or possess blackness or the black body as a sentimental resource and/or locus of excess enjoyment is
both founded upon and enabled by the material relations of chattel slavery. In light of this, is it too extreme or too obvious to
suggest that Rankin's flight of imagination and the excitements engendered by suffering might also be pleasurable?
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Certainly this willing abasement confirms Rankin's moral authority, but what about the pleasure engendered by this
embrace of pain--that is, the tumultuous passions of the flightly imagination stirred by this fantasy of being beaten?
Rankin's imagined beating is immune neither to the pleasures to be derived from the masochistic fantasy nor to the
sadistic pleasure to be derived from the spectacle of sufferance. Here my intention is not to shock or exploit the
perverse but to consider critically the complicated nexus of terror and enjoyment by examining the obviated and
debased diversions of the capricious master; the pleasure of indignation yielded before the spectacle of sufferance;
the instability of the scene of suffering; and the confusion of song and sorrow typical of the coffle, the auction block,
performing before the master, and other popular amusements.
By slipping into the black body and figuratively occupying the position of the enslaved, Rankin plays the role of captive and attester
and in so doing articulates the crisis of witnessing determined by the legal incapacity of slaves or free blacks to act as witnesses against whites.
Since the veracity of black testimony is in doubt, the crimes of slavery must not only be confirmed by unquestionable authorities and other white
observers but also must be made visible, whether by revealing the scarred back of the slave-in short, making the body speak-or through
authenticating devices, or, better yet, by enabling reader and audience member to experience vicariously the "tragical scenes of cruelty." 12 If
Rankin as a consequence of his abolitionist sentiments was willing to occupy the "unmasterly" position, sentimen
talism prescribed the terms of his identification with the enslaved, and the central term of this identification was
suffering. For Rankin, the pageantry of the coffle and sportive music failed to disguise "the sorrows of suffering
innocence." However, for others who also possessed antislavery sentiments, the attempt to understand the inner
feelings of the enslaved only effaced the horrors of slavery and further circumscribed the captive's presumably
limited capacity for suffering. For many eyewitnesses of the coffle, the tenors of slavery were dissipated by song and
violence was transformed into a display of agency and good cheer.
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Turn – Imposing rights onto the slave / Making the slave human is a technique of slave subjection
Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia]
However, suppose that the recognition of humanity held out the promise not of
liberating the flesh or redeeming one's suffering but rather of intensifying it? Or what if this
acknowledgment was little more than a pretext for punishment, dissimu- lation of the violence of
chattel slavery and the sanction given it by the law and the state, and an instantiation of racial
hierarchy? What if the presumed endowments of man-conscience, sentiment, and reason-rather
than assuring liberty or negating slavery acted to yoke slavery and freedom? Or what if the heart,
the soul, and the mind were simply the inroads of discipline rather than that which confirmed the
crime of slavery and proved that blacks were men and brothers, as Charlie Moses had hoped.
Here I am interested in the ways that the recognition of humanity and individuality
acted to tether, bind, and oppress. For instance, although the captive's bifurcated existence as
both an object of property and a person (whether understood as a legal subject formally endowed
with limited rights and protections, a submissive, culpa- ble or criminal agent, or one possessing
restricted capacities for self-fashioning) has been recognized as one of the striking contradictions
of chattel slavery, the constittF. tion of this humanity remains to be considered. In other words,
the law's recognition of slave humanity has been dismissed as ineffectual and as a volte-face of
an imperiled institution. Or, worse yet, it has been lauded as evidence of the hegemony of
paternalism and the integral relations between masters and slaves. Similarly, the failure of
Reconstruction generally has been thought of as a failure of imple- mentation-that is, the state's
indifference toward blacks and unwillingness to en- sure basic rights and entitlements sufficed to
explain the racist retrenchment of the postwar period. I approach these issues from a slightly
different vantage point and thus consider the outrages of slavery not only in terms of the object
status of the enslaved as beasts of burden and chattel but also as they involve notions of slave
humanity. Rather than declare paternalism an ideology, understood in the orthodox sense as a
false and distorted representation of social relations, I am concerned with the savage
encroachments of power that take place through notions of t•eform, consent, and protection. As
I will argue later, rather than bespeaking the mutuality of social relations or the expressive and
affective capacities of the subject, senti- ment, enjoyment, affinity, will, and desire facilitated
subjugation, domination, and terror precisely by preying upon the flesh, the heart, and the soul. It
was often the case that benevolent correctives and declarations of slave humanity intensified the
bt•utal exercise of power upon the captive body rather than ameliorating the chattel condition.
Likewise, in considering the metamorphosis of chattel into man catalyzed by the
obolition of slavery, I think it is important to consider the failure of Reconstruction
wt simply as a matter of policy or as evidence of a flagging commitment to black
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'ights, which is undeniably the case, but also in terms of the limits of emancipation, he ambiguous
legacy of universalism, the exclusions constitutive of liberalism, and he blameworthiness of the
freed individual. Therefore I exmnine the role of rights in
'acilitating relations of domination, the new forms of bondage enabled by propri:torial notions of the self, and the pedagogical and legislative efforts aimed at ransforming the
formerly enslaved into rational, acquisitive, and responsible indi- liduaJs. From this vantage point,
emancipation appears less the grand event of iberation than a point of transition between modes
of servitude and racial subjec- ion. As well, it leads us to question whether the rights of man and
citizen are
•ealizable or whether the appellation "human" can be borne equally by all.6
In response to these questions, I contend that the recognition of the humanity of he slave did not
redress the abuses of the institution nor the wanton use of the
:aptive warranted by his or her status as chattel, since in most instances the acknowl:dgment of the slave as subject was a complement to the arrangements of chattel
Jroperty rather than its remedy; nor did self-possession liberate the former slave
'rom his or her bonds but rather sought to replace the whip with the compulsory
:ontract and the collar with a guilty conscience. Put differently, I argue that the Jarbarism of
slavery did not express itself singularly in the constitution of the slave ts object but also in the
forms of subjectivity and circumscribed humanity imputed to
:he enslaved; by the same token, the failures of Reconstruction cannot be recounted \
mlely as a series of legal reversals or troop withdrawals; they also need to be located
1n the very language of persons, rights, and libetties. For these reasons the book
:xamines the forms of violence and domination enabled by the recognition of hu- manity, licensed
by the invocation of rights, and justified on the grounds of liberty md freedom.
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To suffer always means to suffer before the master. In staging suffering and bringing it into proximity in the
debate space, the AFF creates a false equivalence between their suffering and the suffering of others. This is
the rendering commodity of the other in the political economy of debate that points to how white
supremacy functions in the mundane and everyday, such as this debate round.
Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia]
What concerns me here is the spectacular nature of black suffering and, conversely, the dissimulation of suffering through spectacle. In
one respect, the combination of imagined scenes of cruelty with those culled from unquestionable authority evidences the crisis of witnessing that
results from the legal subjection of slaves. At the same time, the spectacular dimensions of slavery engender this crisis of witnessing as much as
the repression of black testimony since to the degree that the body speaks it is made to speak the master's truth and augments his power through
the imposition and intensification of pain. 13 All of this is further complicated by the "half-articulate" and "incoherent song"
that confounds the transparency of testimony and radically complicates the rendering of slavery. In light of these
concerns, this chapter wrestles with the following questions: Does the extension of humanity to the enslaved
ironically reinscribe their subjugated status? Do the figurative capacities of blackness enable white flights of fantasy
while increasing the likelihood of the captive's disappearance? Can the moral embrace of pain extricate itself from
pleasures borne by subjection? In other words, does the scene of the tyrannized slave at the bloodstained gate
delight the loathsome master and provide wholesome pleasures to the upright and the virtuous? Is the act of
"witnessing" a kind of looking no less entangled with the wielding of power and the extraction of enjoyment? Does
the captive's dance allay grief or articulate the fraught, compromised, and •.mposs1ble character of agency? Or does
it exemplify the use of the body as an instrument against the self?
The scenes of subjection considered here-the coerced spectacles orchestrated to encourage the trade in
black flesh; scenes of tort re and festivity; the tragedy of virtuous women and the antics of outrageous darkies-all
turn upon the simulation of agency and the excesses of black enjoyment. The affiliation of performance and
blackness can be attributed to the spectacularization of black pain and racist conceptions of Negro nature as
carefree, infantile, hedonistic, and indifferent to suffering and to an interested misreading of the interdependence of
labor and song common an3ong the enslaved. 14 The constitution of blackness as an abject and degraded condition and the
fascination with the other's enjoyment went hand in hand. Moroever blacks were envisioned fundamentally as vehicles for white enjoyment, in all
sundry and unspeakable expressions; this was as much the consequence of the chattel status of the captive as it was of the excess enjoyment
imputed to the other, for those forced to dance on the decks of slave ships crossing the Middle Passage, step it up lively on the auction block, and
amuse the master and his friends were seen as the purveyors of pleasure. The amazing popularity of the "darkies" of the minstrel stage must be
considered in this light. Contending variants of racism, ranging from the proslavery plantation pastoralism to the romantic racialism of
abolitionists, similarly constituted the African as childish, primitive, contented, and endowed with great mimetic capacities. Essentially, these
characteristics defined the infamous and renowned Sambo. This history is of central importance when evaluating the politics of pleasure, the uses
of slave property, the constitution of the subject, and the tactics of resistance. Indeed, the convergence of terror and enjoyment cannot be
understood outside it.
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AT: But what we are doing is really real!
We know, performances are real. But your performances are also staged for our enjoyment. This reduces
Otherness with a capital O to other with a lowercase o that is the becoming commodity of otherness of
white supremacist late capitalism. This is the logic of neoliberal multiculturalism and it turns case.
Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at Canterbury University, Baudrillard’s Challenge 88-91)
Baudrillard develops his most sustained discussion of the erasure of ‘Otherness’ and the proliferation of ‘difference’ in
The Transparency of Evil (TE). His critique distinguishes ‘difference’ from a form of otherness that is radical, in which there is no scale
of values upon which otherness can be registered. Baudrillard is emphatic that not only is otherness not the same as difference, but
difference is what destroys otherness. Differences are indeed differentiated along a single scale of values. In an interview with Le Journal
des Psychologues he says that difference is diversification, ‘it is the spectre of modality’, making it distinct from alterity in a
way he describes there as ‘absolute’ (Gane 1993: 173). The ‘hell of the same’ (the void in the second quotation cited at the
beginning of this section) is deflected by the hyperreal ‘melodrama of difference’ (both being chapter titles in TE).
Simulation of a spectacular, everproliferating display of ‘difference’ is entirely consistent with the logic of sign value.
Baudrillard claims that otherness can now be considered to be subject to the law of the market, and in fact, as a rare
item, is highly valued. The ‘Other’ is no longer to be conquered, exterminated, hated, excluded, or seduced but rather
now to be understood, liberated, recognised, valued, ‘coddled’, resurrected as ‘different’. This distinction between a form of
‘otherness’ that is indeed structurally irreducible, neither comparable nor opposable, and a form of ‘difference’ that is precisely predicated on
establishing criteria against which difference is ascertained,3 is central to the critique offered here of feminist insistence on
‘irreducible difference’. For this feminist proclamation to be meaningful we need some kind of structural critique of the
social, political, economic, and semiotic structuring of difference and otherness. Baudrillard’s analysis shifts the ground
considerably. It makes additional questions pertinent; for example, what is at stake contemporarily in insisting on the
importance of ‘irreducible difference’? His work suggests that this kind of question has to be addressed through a
critique of the political economy of the sign. At least. With reference to Baudrillard’s ‘melodrama of difference’, the word
‘melodrama’ has the sense of ‘decidedly overdone’. A dictionary definition is: ‘sensational dramatic piece with crude
appeals to emotions and usually happy ending’. The ‘usually happy ending’ is rather ironic given its humanist appeal,
and the ‘happy ending’ of cultural hybridity would see the end of the apparent anachronism of racism, a form of
discrimination Baudrillard analyses as precisely prescribed by ‘difference’ (I will elaborate on this below). Baudrillard uses
the term ‘melodrama’ in conjunction with ‘psychodrama’ and ‘sociodrama’ to critique contemporary discourses and practices of
‘otherness’, both of which conjure the centrality of simulation to the scene of ‘cultural difference’, and metaphorically depict the simulated and
dramatised absence of the other, with its ‘melodramatic’ undertones of crude emotionality.
Baudrillard’s argument that racism is an artefact of the institution of difference is integrally related to the structure of differentiation
and the axiological and semiological form of its logic. To differentiate in the hyperreal mode of simulation is to discriminate: to
establish differences that, generated from the model, are nothing more than more of the same. Racism, Baudrillard
argues, does not exist ‘so long as the other remains Other’ (TE: 129). When the Other is foreign, strange, ‘other’, for example, within the
order of the symbolic in Baudrillard’s critical terms, there is no scale of equivalence or difference against which discrimination can be performed.
Encounter and transformation are fully open and reversible, in all forms (including the agonistic encounter of violence
and death). Racism becomes possible when ‘the other becomes merely different’ as then the other becomes ‘dangerously similar’. This is the
moment, according to Baudrillard, when ‘the inclination to keep the other at a distance comes into being’ (TE: 129). The intolerable
introjection of difference in the case of the construction of ‘the subject’ as ‘different’, or traversed by a multiplicity of ‘differences’,
means the other must be exorcised: the differences of the other must be made materially manifest. The inevitability of a fluctuation,
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oscillation, vacillation of differences in a differential system means the ‘happy ending’ will always be illusory. ‘Difference’
(of others) is fetishised as the icon that keeps ‘the subject’ different.
As the biological bases of racism are exposed as pure fallacy in theoretical and genetic terms, and as the principles of democracy have
advanced since the Enlightenment, racism should have declined. Logically, as Baudrillard claims in his book The Perfect Crime
(PC), this should have been the case, yet he observes that as cultures become increasingly hybrid, racism actually grows stronger
(PC: 131– 2). He analyses this contra-indication in terms of the increasing fetishisation of difference and the loss of the encounter
with the Other, and in the erosion of the singularity of cultures qua increasing simulation of differentiation. The ‘relation’ within the order of
‘cultural difference’ is phobic, according to Baudrillard: a kind of reflex that is fundamentally irrational in terms of the logic of
the system. The ‘other’ is idealised, and: because it is an ideal other, this relationship is an exponential one: nothing
can stop it, since the whole trend of our culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual
extrapolation of the same from the other. (PC: 132)
‘Autistic culture by dint of fake altruism’, he adds, recapturing the cultural imperative of the western hyperreal ‘culture’
to recognise, value, liberate, and understand difference. On the other hand, racism can equally result from the opposite sentiment;
that of a desperate attempt to manifest the other as an evil to be overwhelmed. Either way, both the benevolence of the humanitarian and the
hatred of the racist seek out the ‘other’ for reasons symptomatic of the fetishisation of difference. As the increasingly cult-like dedication
to differences escalates with its concurrent impulse to increasing homogeneity,4 another ‘other’ emerges.
Baudrillard comments on the figure of the alien as a ‘monstrous metaphor’ for the ‘viral Other’, which is, in his
words, ‘the compound form of all the varieties of otherness done to death by our system’ (TE: 130). I remember
thinking recently how there must be some significance to the outpouring of ‘alien’ movies (on television especially) and
wondered if this was the final frontier of ‘otherness’ to be ‘done to death’ (what else is left?). I recall also being
disturbed, as I watched one such movie, to reflect on my accepting without question the imperative of exterminating the
aliens who (that?) were going to invade and transform human society in evil ways. Baudrillard emphasises that this
metaphor of alien ‘Other’ seizes on what he describes as a ‘viral and automatic’ form of racism that perpetuates itself in a way that cannot
be countered by a humanism of difference. Viral in the sense of self-generating and invisibly infecting, reconstructing: a ‘virus of difference’,
played out through minute variations in the order of signs.
Such a form of monstrous otherness is also the product of what Baudrillard calls an ‘obsessional differentiation’ (TE:
130), emanating from the compulsion of the ‘self’ (same) to manifest signs of ‘difference’ in the form of the ‘other’. The problematic
structure of this self(same)–other(different) dynamic, Baudrillard argues, demonstrates the weakness of those ‘dialectical’ theories of
otherness which ‘aspire to promote the proper use of otherness’ (TE: 130). Racism, especially in its current viral and immanent
form, makes it clear that there is no such thing as the ‘proper use of difference’. This point links again with my concerns
about the emptiness of feminist claims for the importance of ‘irreducible differences’ in the absence of a structural
critique.
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