Minneapolis, MN • Photo by Lisa Arrastía, 2009
"Myrrh," a contributor to the Cosmic Hobo blog which discusses afro-pessimism, provides an explication of a statement Myrrh made in a post on 18 May 2009: "there is no space for the afropessimist in the academy." Myrrh writes: "In Frank Wilderson's wording, one of the arguments that afropessimists would make is that the essential capacity of the Human-- such as the capacity to 'transform endless time into meaningful event and endless space into nameable place'-- is destroyed for the black.
When Myrrh claims "there is no space for the a-p," what I really hear Myrrh saying is that there is no space for the "Black" subject because s/he is, indeed, an object constructed out of multiple modes of historical and contemporary violence (or 'violences,' if you will). With this I would agree--not that agreement is essential here. This understanding of the "Black" subject as reiterated by Myrrh is essential and in that sense, yes, there is no "continuous area or expanse that is free, unavailable, or unoccupied in the university"--i.e., "(no)space."
But, I believe there are very public nooks that afro-pessimists (if this is how each of this ilk might like to be identified) are filling in both space, time, and thought in the university. Saidiya Hartman's work, for example, is a powerful testament to this. Her ideas about violence and Black subjectivity influence, push back, and construct pathways for adverse thinking and theories.
I think the push back "afro-pessimists" are making is incredibly important, especially to my own work. The critique that, again, Saidiya Hartman makes about obscured modes of violence and their relation to the construction of the "Black" subject through slavery and the critique that Frank Wilderson makes where he differentiates between contemporary wage laborer and slave (or as he says, "prison-slave-in-waiting") need to be considered by a larger (and even less scholarly) audience. We have wrestled with these ideas in generalities, but Wilderson, Hartman, Spillers have brought a vital specificity to them. Perhaps it is up to us to make these ideas more active. I have already begun to do so in some of the work I do with K-12 teachers.
A note about time and space: We should discuss this issue here in more depth, no? We might begin by thinking about the work of American studies scholar David W. Noble (truly the prime mover of contemporary American studies). David's work examines bourgeois conceptions of time--the imagining that nature and therefore, the global marketplace was and remains a timeless space"--vs. post-1960s American studies scholars who examine what he calls "timeful cultures." He argues that what transnational neoliberalism argues is that there is a "universal timeless space of perpetual plenty would be the end of history."
So what happens when we juxtapose this analysis with Wilderson's conclusion? I'm very interested in making a useful connection or collaboration between David's and Wilderson's claims. I sense both great consonance and some dissonance between the two. I feel a need to work out the incongruities, because as theories in partnership I sense the two theories' utility for broadening analyses of race and capital.
If I understand Wilderson's argument correctly from the quotation Myrrh provides, his argument is that one of the fundamental abilities or powers of the Human is to change the appearance and character of unbounded, limitless, or rather "endless time" into important and useful circumstances or experiences.
One of the arguments that afropessimists would make is that the essential capacity of the Human-- such as the capacity to 'transform endless time into meaningful event and endless space into nameable place'-- is destroyed for the black.
Here is the first tension: could this be understood as the bourgeois nationalists' notion of an erroneous "timeless space"? "Bourgeois nationalists," David writes, "believed that a nation's people was a universal national that was homogenous and timeless." At the same time I wonder if within this first tension we can discern what Wilderson is getting at. Is the hegemony of a timeless universal the social and philosophical dynamic Wilderson believes destroys for "the black" the potential for transforming time? Or, is where David and Wilderson meet at the following point: this capacity for almost instantly seeing and understanding self, other, and place differently (as not timeless, stable, and rational) is reserved solely for and by bourgeois nationalists--"the black" cannot participate in making this happen; she cannot participate in such a process of agency due to the foundation upon which this agency is constructed.
This latter part would make sense when thinking about Wilderson's argument in his "The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal" (download article) that civil society in concept and action is not for "the black." Thus, the institutions of civils society (e.g., the university) there to, as Wilderons notes, produce, contest, and map hegemony are already constituted--Wilderson says "coded"--as White. Consequently, these sites are impossible spaces for the Black subject . . . Ah ha, and they are impossible spaces for the afro-pessimist. Hence, Myrrh's reference to "(no)space."
There is a congruity between Wilderson's concept of "antiblackness," which comes out of civil society's need for "coherence" and social categories, and David's ideas about the bourgeois's need to overcome "unstable" cultures (e.g., black, woman, queer, poor, non-Christian). Yet where David sees hope, Wilderson does not. I wwant to end my discussion by directly referencing this particular contrast by citing both Wilderson's and David's work. Writing that was not-so-ironically produced in 2002:
Civil society is not a terrain intended for the Black subject. It is coded as waged and wages are White. Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested, mapped. And the invitation to participate in hegemony's gestures of influence, leadership, and consent is not extended to t he unwaged. We live in the world, but exist out side of civil society.
- Frank Wilderson
It is the hope of many critics of the international marketplace that the Seattle coalition, which was present in spring 2000 at protests against [the IMF and World Bank] . . . can expand to include more and more groups who have been excluded from the limited prosperity of the global economy. It is a coalition that believes in an international alliance whose groups want to preserved. It is a coalition, that if it grows in strength . . . perhaps, then, we can finally free ourselves from those metaphors that encourage us to flee the timeful complexity of a locality to find liberty in the timeless abstractions of the marketplace. Perhaps, then, we will be able to construct metaphors that will allow us to live at home within the circle of the Earth.
- David W. Noble, Death of a Nation: American Culture & the End of Exceptionalism
L, I like your reading of the interplay of these texts and their central ideas. I don't know Noble's work, but it sounds like what you're driving at is that Noble does not racialize the problem of time as radically as Wilderson might. The following passage from Wilderson's article illustrates the point:
"Anglo-American Gramscians like Buttigieg and Sassoon, and U.S. activists in the anti-globalization movement whose unspoken grammar is predicated on Gramsci’s assumptive logic continue this tradition of unraced positionality which allows them to posit the valency of Wars of Position for Blacks and Whites alike."
For Noble, it seems from the passages of his work that you quote, time is one of the modalities of oppression that positions working class whites, white women, and a diverse group of ethnicities that Wilderson would call "the junior partners of civil society." These are subject positions that articulate (in diverse ways) a politics of oppression and alienation, in the Marxian and Gramscian tradition. Blacks, of course, are oppressed/alienated as well--and so much of what Noble observes may indeed apply to them-- but that is not what positions them as blacks first and foremost. Blacks are positioned by accumulation and fungibility-- the gratuitous violence that accrues to us via the middle passage and the subsequent modalities that this absolute violence takes. In other words, Noble seems to be writing from a positionality of universal Human and assuming that the universal Human's set of concerns about time are equally essential and relevant to the black positionality. Whereas, for Wilderson, there is no time of the black. Blacks can only borrow the time of the Human (whites and the "junior partners of civil society"). What do you think?