by Maurice E. Stevens
For some time now, my teaching load has included a course that frames intersectionality as an alternative approach to theorizing difference. In the class I suggest that intersectionality is three things at once. It is an analytic framework, a source of theorizing informed by one’s experience of embodiment, and a call for institutional intervention. Intersectionality invites and perhaps requires us to shift how we think about identity precisely because it requires a shift in how we understand and respond to our experience and naming of difference.
[I want to make “difference” mean something more than the empty, eroded sign now so often co-opted by already-empowered academics. In my teaching I have discovered that “difference,” re-infused with the radical power that inspired its early formulations, can rescue Intersectionality from the atrophied, half-dead version of itself trotted out in most academic or legal contexts of its present-day conjuring. In my teaching I have found that Intersectionality need not be reduced to a theoretical hammer calling everything a nail. Rather, it has always been a call to action informed by embodied experience and the knowing that emerges there, however illegible, heretical, or even gaslighted. This kind of “difference” doesn’t require projection onto the “Other” or the rejection of interrelatedness. This kind of “difference” knows and loves the continuity between Self and Other that does not overlook oppression or harm. This kind of “difference” is dynamic and close and possessed of an intensity that is often confused with the intensity of a body’s adrenalized state – looks like trauma’s coming! – but is something else entirely.]
Through the lens of intersectionality as I understand and enact it, identity is not an object. It is not something coherent and seamless that we somehow possess and that we are, therefore, at risk of losing. Identity, together with the subject with which it articulates, like two bones or old lovers, is created and is an artifact of culture [an effect of questions asked and unasked, harms witnessed and others illegible, possibilities dreamt, and awakenings sometimes rude]. Intersectionality can be to identity what critical literacy is to everyday living – the great revealer, the moment of unsparing self-reflection, rupture and potential transformation. But, of course, intersectionality can also be the re-imposition of the habitual, of illusions, of the old order, of the “great again.”
[Here I am taken back to my first reading (I was 22) in Jung’s 1961 Memories, Dreams, Reflections, of his account of a visit in 1925 with Ochwiay Biano then Chief of the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. Biano spoke of the “madness” of whites being most evident by their reliance on the “head” for thinking rather than the “heart.” This moment of having his shadow mirrored back to him launched Jung into a reflection on his contact with the content of the Other’s gaze and the recognition of his own loss, the cost of whiteness. As Jung describes his experience: “. . .[S]omeone had drawn for me a picture of the real white man. It was as though until now I had seen nothing but sentimental, prettified color prints. This Indian had struck our vulnerable spot, unveiled a truth to which we are blind. I felt it rising within me like a shapeless mist something unknown and yet deeply familiar.” How different this is from Fanon’s moment in Black Skin, White Masks of recognizing himself as “other to the Other”? Whereas Jung imagines himself continuous with the Other of Biano’s projection, Fanon cannot. Remember Lacan’s famous mirror stage, that moment where a particular kind of subjectivity comes into being when the infant introjects an imagining of a distinct and coherent ideal self it has “seen” in the mirror. With pleasure and also rage the infant proclaims, “That’s me over there!” Jung re-cognized his shadow self in Biano’s projection and was consumed by the “shapeless mist” of a surfaced awareness of atrocities of structural violence enabling and enabled by colonial contact. Fanon could not. In the face of, “Look Mommy, a Negro,” Fanon says, “that’s not me over there” and shatters, collapsing into the work of creating a serviceable Self.]
Identity is the effect of a practice of identification with social positions that shift in relation to political forces, representational activities, the creation of publics of information authorization, and the ideological apparatuses of the State such as families, churches, media, medical industrial complexes, and legal structures. Identity is not about “I am” as much as it is about “I be” or “I am being,” or “we be” or “we are being.” We are constantly engaged in negotiating and contesting popular narratives (sometimes dominant and sometimes counter) vying for our identificatory attention. There is always the contingent, sliding, elusive sense of: “Yes, that is me over there.” Such confirmations of manufactured recognition are arbitrary closures that over and over again create temporarily bounded identities to which we ascribe a sense of coherence and permanence. But the truth is that there is never anything solid to any of this. There is never any objectively stable or permanent there there. Moreover, choosing identificatory positions with which to identify is not a free activity through which some ideal of personal agency can be enacted. Our practice of identification is fraught. Many scholars, performers, and revolutionaries have waded into the treacherous conversational waters about what makes the labors of identification so contested and their dynamics so vexed. We must allow ourselves to keep talking about this in order to generatively align our own identifications with new shifts in our experience and naming of our difference.
This habit of understanding identity as coherent and needing ongoing curation and policing has been a requirement born of the colonialism about which Fanon spoke so ambivalently in his book of 1952, Black Skin, White Masks. (See also his later elaborations of this theme in A Dying Colonialism (1959), Wretched of the Earth (1961), and Toward the African Revolution (1964)). While Fanon spoke primarily of the colonial contexts with which he was familiar, many scholars of the African-diaspora and some contemporary Afro-pessimists [here and here too] have built upon his work to develop the argument that under contemporary neoliberalism now shaping the modern world a fundamental and exceptional mode of anti-Black racism constrains knowledge production and stunts both configurations of the human and humanity itself.
I confess I find the often psychoanalytically informed philosophy proffered by the luminaries of Afro-pessimism compelling and resonant with my own critical sensibility and theorizing. Seeing the display of anti-Black violence flooding the public sphere for as long as I have been aware of it, of anything really, raises the question of to what degree and in what ways civil society takes pleasure from (in a psychoanalytic sense)—and even requires—the debasement of Black life in order to constitute its own coherence.
[Just sitting with the depth of this possibility produces in me a deep discomfort. How about for you? What shall I do? Turn from it? Amplify it? What do you want to do?]
I too bristled at the many conversations I witnessed where mostly white critical cultural theorists repeatedly reduced structural violence to questions of capitalism without acknowledging the centuries-long racialization of that regime of relations. My work in critical trauma theory and critical psychoanalysis has led me to believe that a fundamental aspect of the manufacturing of a model of the normative psyche, of a universal psychology, actually depended on a notion of the Black other as not possessing psychic interiority. The modern universal psyche depended upon the Black other not being “human” in the territorialized space of living, across all scales from the most mundane of material relations to the most abstracted practices of social imagining. Yes, I’ve found Afro-pessimism compelling. It aligns with some of the deeper feelings accompanying me from early on in life and resonates with my own third-person reference to my body until I was an adult as “the monster.”
Truth be told, I sometimes relish the explosions caused by the hand-grenade Afro-pessimism tosses into the academy. The consternation of colleagues and erstwhile critical cultural theorists who have been sabotaging our [infrequent!] moments of possibility stolen, in their eyes, through claims on identity, calls for diversity, imaginings of multiculturalism, demands for inclusion, arguments for equity, or leadership-building strategies. Their elaborate critiques of the same have been so abstractly cogent. All this has secretly pleased me.
[As if we don’t know that those code words are so often deployed in neo-liberal institutions to quell the protest and demands of we relatively recently arrived and marginalized academics. As if we don’t know that we are making a way outta no way in a space that never wanted us, in an academy that dreams itself through our obliteration. Yes, we know, yes, yes, the subject is dead, we know, identity politics stifles discourse, yes, we know, we academics of color, we who are reduced to “speakers for the people” who (one at a time, please!) can tell you what the drums are saying, yes, we know and yes, we make use of what is to hand. But go ahead, continue sheltering in the sedating comforts of your incisive critique… oh wait, Afro-pessimists are also making these arguments… hold up! Odd bedfellows, indeed!]
My pleasures though have been fleeting and even held in abeyance at times by Afro-pessimism’s claim to a kind of priority. As in prior to all else. As in irreconcilable with other a priori. There can be only one, they seem to say. Other constitutions of “absolute others” within the neo-liberal ontology such as Native Americans or Indigenous peoples (named “Indian” or “Savage” under colonial dispensations of meaning—read: regimes of structural violence) are, for Afro-pessimism, merely secondary iterations of the original sin of anti-Blackness. Like Iblis, God’s first creation, the “Black” has been cast furthest from heaven in the creation of the (white/human) fetish orienting the world. Something repels me from claiming this place of primacy in this game of ontologies. Perhaps it feels too coherent, this position of absolute alterity. Too settled, maybe. Too predictably formulaic?
Yet, I have also felt the pleasures of Afro-futurism and the joy in its approaching what I have called trans(per)formance, a kind of liberation psychology born of the critical “seeing through” of systems of oppression ➔ the liberative and radical imagining of “newing” futures ➔ the stepping into and living them ➔🡪the reflecting on what one has newly performed ➔ and the critical seeing through the systems of oppression one has also wrought ➔ then imagining again [and repeat!]. Is this a de-territorializing of my occupied interiority? A decolonization of my psyche carried out through the production of collective power? The beauty of Blackness, the magic of centuries alive in that same absolute embodiment, the multi-dimensional magic in speculative fictions and elsewheres imagined here/now. It can bring such a relief at the discursive level. Feeling some sense of having been represented, that satisfaction at being part of the human symbolic order, the sense of belonging and mattering. “That’s me over there, finally, and I am beautiful and descended of kings and queens!” [oh, the sheer pleasure in my big screen experience of Black Panther!]
Still, there seems something saccharine here. As if, in the name of representational survival, I must settle for some spectacular simulacra of my safety, belonging, agency, sufficiency, and dignity, routed through representational regimes already territorialized and overdetermined by unmarked white supremacy. The choice between the counterfeit agency offered by Afro-pessimism’s reactive fight-against and the saccharine imaginings of Afro-futurism as spectacle of Beloved-Blackness, is not one I choose to make. This is not all that is available. I and my body know that more is possible.
This tension between the “fact of Blackness” named by Afro-pessimism and so brutally evident in the world, and the mythical and always elsewhere imaginings of Afro-futurism [Keep hope alive! Wakanda Forever! Black Girl Magic!] has produced in me the awareness of a deep and powerful longing throughout my years navigating this minefield life.
I have learned to soften into—and amplify—this longing [which is not cobbled together from lack or from desire for what is not yet present but is instead a signifier pointing to my own and shared plentitude]. How could I do otherwise? The pessimist and the futurist offerings both feel poor and empty to me. Neither seem to respond in any true-feeling way to the deeper knowing I sense within myself and daily make practical when turning attention to my immanent livingness. Now I meet the brutal facts of the world not with the imaginings of alternate pasts and futures nor the sedated and fatalist calling out of the present. I meet them with the “truth” of the dynamic and immanent Life within/around me/us. Now I ground my trans(per)formance in the present and direct affective experience of my own animation—whether to be called human or not, whether imagined as human or not, whether vouchsafed by neo-liberal institutions or not—my direct experience of my own livingness. That as-yet-unmanaged experience of affect defines the contours of my experience of interiority. [in contestation and co-performance with dominant discourses, it names my alienation from the human] That too is my pleasure, my source of safety, belonging, agency, sufficiency, and dignity. This is my return to a new sociogeny (Fanon’s word) as well as my point of departure as I engage our important conversations so often posed in opposition and that would shape me different.
Fear of a Black Planet
Over the past several years academic and popular spaces have staged debates between the opposed positions of Afro-futurism and Afro-pessimism. It seems a repetition of a theme in African American discourse, a theme of opposition [as if reacting against the homogenizing impulses of stereotype and anti-black racism – “they are all the same” – “the community” pitches two tents – “see? we really are diverse and not all the same”] between two embattled perspectives or approaches to matters important to African-Americans. Oppositions like: survivalist/liberationist in traditions of African American religious life, separatist/assimilationist ideals for Black cultural engagement with dominant culture, Malcolm/Martin, DuBois/Washington, [Tupac/Biggie?], and so on. While framing possibilities through a rejection of the homogenization of anti-Black stereotyping, these dyads of binary opposition have also always felt constraining—as if designed to police the myriad modes and expressions of Black life and living.
Will a new sociogeny offer space outside of the Afro-pessimism/Afro-futurism binary?
[pondering the various compulsions driving the terms of the binaries to spend energy fighting against one another is a rabbit hole I’ll avoid for now] A tension exists between a declaration that Black Lives Matter shouted into a public sphere that quite obviously, bluntly, and brutally demonstrates that it does not, and the presence of those who say Black Life has never been Human in a world where only humans matter. A child of the “summer of love,” I remember a similar tension emanating from my reaction to the rejoinder, “Black is Beautiful!” [Free your mind! — whose mind?] My earlier question was whether the issue wasn’t whether Black was beautiful, but rather, whether Black was at all.
There are resonances between lynching photography and contemporary video of police shootings and other murders. Images are circulated in the service of: 1) propping up white humanity against the background of the inhumanity of the Black recipient of violence; 2) proffering an image of proper white masculinity (and femininity); 3) supplying potential evidence in the courts (of public opinion, of city and state policymakers, of courts litigating police brutality claims); 4) supplying potential evidence of “the broken social contract.” [lord, who ever thought the “social contract” was being upheld for those outside the frame of 5/5ths and civilized humanity?]
And yet, are we not also seeing, in so many ways, white identifying people flailing against the fact that Whiteness does not, in the end, protect them from becoming Black? The precarities once avoided by the privileges promised (and often, though not always, delivered) by Whiteness. Freedom to move in the streets (unless under a shelter in place order), freedom from risk in the public sphere (unless you contract COVID-19), freedom to depend on financial agencies leaning in your favor (unless desires to please shareholders lead lenders to seek less and less “risky” borrowers), freedom to work (unless you are a non-essential worker or your workplace shuts down), freedom to vote (unless prevented by the failures of leadership), the freedom to health care (unless the system is failing under the burden of many hundreds of thousands of infections… so far), the freedom to enact and publicize anti-Black violence without sustained or institutional response (until that summer following the murder of too many Black people), and so on. All these freedoms once guaranteed (or imagined guaranteed) now disrupted and the flames of fear and resentment fanned [this is nothing new, come on! They’d always rather be red than Black].
This strangely extended moment has afforded me the opportunity to return to a new kind of sociogeny. An opportunity to turn my attention to the immanent experience of my own Life, my own animation, in pleasure and also in pain. An opportunity to know that which is beyond some Black coherence pessimistically outside the human or speculatively beyond it, beyond an unending contestation with institutional claims on Black being. In returning to this new sociogeny I shall route my safety, belonging, agency, sufficiency, and dignity not through the poor and empty world but through contact with the intensity of my own livingness.
Oh my body does make of me always…