on glossolalia, vessels and pentecost.

“…it seemed as if a vessel broke within me and water surged up through my being which, when it reached my mouth came out in a torrent of languages God had given me. The message came with power, so quick that but few words would have been recognized. Interpretation of each message followed in English. I sang under the power of the Spirit in many languages and in the home where the meeting was held the Spirit led me to the piano where I played and sang under inspiration although I had not learned to play.”
Jennie Moore (1906) 

i just love the language she uses: vessels that break, surging as water, emanating as torrential upsurge and downpour of (inarticulable) speech. it’s as if anything Heidegger would say much, much later about clay pots and jugs as “things” that prompt their making by way of their capacity to hold and give was anticipated by Jennie Moore. what’s so cool about her description is how, if the vessel broke within her, we must ask a few questions :: was the vessel always already there or, when was that vessel placed therein? what breaks such a vessel and is this an example of a brokenness that is, in fact, productive? Nate Mackey’s “From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate” get us close to something like an answer…that even something broken could not destroy that which was already there.

speech converges with song converges with performance, all after the fact of the breaking of interior vessel that emanates outward toward a sociality.

so within her is something that is filled to capacity, and by way of ecstasy [a being beside oneself] breaks and overflows within her, cannot be contained, becomes a spiritual expectorant of sorts and the evidence of such vessel ever being there is that which remains, the trace “of perfume” that emanates as a “torrent of languages” …

moth’s powder [02.12.10]

from: a
to: dtim
Friday, February 12, 2010, 2:07 PM
subject: Re: ummmm 

this.

mp, 

shit…totally forgot to tell you that i started bikram last week. the vinyasa just wasn’t cuttin it anymore so of course, yeah, i’m bein all deep with it. an hour and a half of just being in a hotass room, hoping that i can stand head-to-knee or whatever. imagine this black dude in a room full of white women sweating his ass off so early in the morning [i go to the 6am class]. yeah. it’s funny when i think about it too…lol

but anyway. got me to thinking about all sorts of things…and it’s – finally? – helping me put shit in perspective, i think. or. i hope.

my grandfather’s grandfather – or so the story that i’m told goes – was a griot and preacher, though a “preacher” in a very loose, kibdasorta not too christian kind of way. whenever we’d visit Darien, granddaddy would always tell us the story of his grandfather, telling us that the folks [the whites and blacks, of course] knew him most for sayin “ha! ha! ha!” to enunciate phrases, called him Ha!-John, in fact, because of it. he started doing it after he tried to escape to a small maroon community in the swamplands between Georgia and South Carolina but was caught right before he reached refuge. anyway. they beat the shit outta him – “least a hundred lashes,” granddaddy’d say.

but most intriguing in the story and the part that animated granddaddy so much was this: while Ha!-John’s mouth was open to release a yelp, a bunch of moths – “least a hundred or so!” – flew into his mouth and, no doubt, disintegrated into that powdery substance. couldn’t breathe, in fact and almost choked to death. no sound would come out, “quiet as a mouse piss on cotton,” he’d say. each time. Ha!-John’s mouth opened, of course, because he needed to let go all of the pain he felt with each blow. not really exhaling or inhaling but some sorta other thing where he’d make a shriek that sounded out nothing other than withdrawal from the world, as if as soon as he’d make a noise to match the pain, he’d take relent and refuse such satisfaction. “but then moths came from everywhere, all over the place” and filled Ha!-John’s mouth and throat and lungs. the women standing around prayed. he began to choke. and that they all heard. the dude who “owned” him [i still never know how to say this. i don’t like the word “owned” and i definitely resist the word “master” … but you get what i mean] had at least a small bone of decency in his body, cut Ha!-John loose from the post and let grandaddy’s grandfather just lay there. everyone gathered around, dressing his wounds, praying and cussin the occasion of that violence in the first place.

he had always told stories but when he finally “came to,” he decided to become a preacher; said he was converted the moment he could no longer breathe. well, granddaddy told us of how Ha!-John received a new name because, now when he told stories, there was an insistence and longing, complete with the “ha!” as if what mingled in every enunciation was the force necessary to rid himself of the overwhelming need to breathe again. each and every time, in fact. it was that “ha!” that, in fact it turns out, led to his eventual successful escape [new enlightenment, or “endarkenment” into the swamp; moved to swamp, told stories and could be heard laughing for miles but wasn’t locatable; new enlightenment where he escaped the desire for some sorta Kantian self-inflicted individualism for a social; anyway. he was partially successful because he was laughing while preaching and partially because he planned with other folks to leave rather than attempting some sorta genius plan to be famous; Ha!-John was always a bit of a showman, from what the stories of him said].

it may be hella weird – actually, i know it is, in fact – but Ha!-John is what i thought about in yoga today while in savasana [my head is never clear of thoughts], mainly because they tell me to hold poses for so long that i get angry and when i am angry, my breathing becomes labored. but because they tell us to only “breathe in nose and out the nose” and that we must, under no uncertain circumstances, breathe with the mouth, i sometimes laugh “ha! ha! ha!” in order to get all sorts of relief from the heat. it’s also a proverbial “fuck you!” but of course, you’d know that. so i began to think about Ha!-John’s “ha!” and how it likely echoed all sorts of sentiment that was nothing other than critique. i mean, think about it. enslavement was this institutional practice that tried to sever the possibility for breathing, that tried in fact, to exhaust people so much that they would have no energy to resist, no energy to even as it were, breathe deeply with joy. but then we hear all these stories of how folks went to praise houses and clearing way back in the woods after working all day and would stay and sing and pray and dance [without ever crossing their legs; that would be unholy!] all night. and others – the more secular of them – would stay behind on porches and tell stories or dance crossing the legs [so you know it was sinful…lol].

all these uses of breath after the possibility had been, excuse such corniness, choked out of them. it’s as if enslavement was the perpetual movement from outside, from having moth’s powder in your mouth, throat and lungs as the condition of possibility for a new sound. so with each breath there mingled the critique of having been put in a situation where choking would be relief, where laughter in the face of denigration would be the curious rescue from such denigration. Ha!-John would laugh at dude who “owned” him in his sermons and that dude began to tell folks that, after the moth incident, Ha!-John was crazy. but granddaddy would tell us how deep and long and beautiful the “ha!” was of Ha!-John, how his entire body would shake when he laughed, when he prayed, when he preached. and the dude who owned him could only hear crazy rather than thinking that the sounds had intention behind them, that they were, indeed, a way around such oppressive practices.

anyway. made me think about that song we used to sing at my church…and ya’ll probably sang it in yours too. i should ask your mother but, well, i still am afraid to contact her.

ha ha ha ha…ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha…ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha…ha ha ha ha
and he brought laughter into my soul 

indeed.
a.-

— — — 

from: dtim
to: a
Friday, February 12, 2010, 8:39 PM
subject: Re: ummmm 

is that story real?! it’s sooooo great! and, chile, i don’t know how you do bikram. i tried it a few times but it was WAAAAY too hot. and your godson is trippin…terrible twos…lol. we miss you…come see us soon!

— — —  

from: a
to: dtim
Friday, February 12, 2010, 9:04 PM
subject: Re: ummmm 

well what is he doing? lolol…and i miss  you too! i need to visit soon. and i’ve tried to find other stories of Ha!-John but couldn’t. but everyone i know from back home seems to know something about the story…so who knows? even if it ain’t real, it sounds true. 

shouts.

Shouts — Afro-Arabic, Sea Coastal Ring and Pentecostal — are the itineraries for the lines of force and architectures of resistance; the protocols for movement that always counter and intuitive, intentionally agitational and nuanced. Barely perceptible auralities of the body, given by the jerked movements that are ever-present. Gotta listen closely. Shouting can be whispered, shouting can be screamed. Laminated plea, escaped rapture.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s description of a ring shout

“[O]ften the John Brown song was sung, but oftener these incomprehensible negro methodist, meaningless, monotonous, endless chants with obscure syllables recurring constantly & slight variations interwoven, all accompanied with a regular drumming of the feet & clapping of the hands, lake castinets; then the excitement spreads, outside the enclosure men begin to quiver & dance, others join, a circle forms, winding monotonously round some one in the centre. Some heel & toe tumultuously, others merely tremble & stagger on, others stoop & rise, others whirl, others caper sidewise all keep steadily circling like dervishes…At last seems to come a snap and the spell breaks amid general sights & laughter.”

“historicity and black studies” [chapter redux]

Historicity and Black Studies: The Aesthetics of Pentecost

My dissertation analyzes the religious and cultural underpinnings of Black social life found in performance forms from the mid-18th thru the mid-20^th centuries such as Negro Spirituals, “Shout” songs and the attendant Ring Shout dance practices, and Gospel music. My research of the history of these performance forms revealed that often these cultural productions were dismissed as primitivist, anti-Christian, unenlightened. There were incessant injunctions against such practices, clergy and scholars calling for the abandonment of these spiritual and ecstatic modes of life, though they were integral for resisting racist evils. The use of these cultural productions has often been deemed valid only when they were heuristic devices for producing a proper, secular and enlightened, citizen. The ecstatic content that formerly animated both religious and secular black life was viewed through a distorting nostalgia and largely sentimentalized. For many upwardly-mobile Black people, this content became an “embarrassment” because it recalled the enactment of these forms during the period of US slavery.

My dissertation asks how embarrassment for and subsequent abandonment of particular ecstatic aesthetics occurred in various discourses, and investigates the ways new discourses tended toward secularism, dismissing the ongoing importance of religion. To ground this investigation, my dissertation focuses on the performance practices – in particular of song, dance, and breath – of what eventually would be called at the turn of the 20^th century, Black Pentecostalism. Though Christian in faith, Pentecostalism, I argue, is not reducible to a Christian theology. Rather, my project analyzes historical performance practices to theorize the possible interrelations of Christianity, Islam and indigenous religiosity of West Africa. Mine is a literary and cultural studies project, arguing that religious expression helps us understand 20^th century black literature and culture as necessarily syncretic. This 20^th century group, calling themselves Pentecostal, desired to continue performance practices that were important to the spiritual and ecstatic lives of the enslaved, practices that allowed the enslaved to persist in the face of various oppressions. But this 20^th century group was often dismissed variously as “holy rollers,” as “cultish,” and as primitive. My dissertation argues that an aversion to and embarrassment for these performance practices developed after the Civil War. I seek to investigate the philosophical underpinnings of this aversion and embarrassment. I engage philosophical movements of Enlightenment, Romanticism, Phenomenology and Pragmatism that preceded this 20th century Pentecostal movement in order to theorize aversion and embarrassment and the ongoing consequences of discourses – academic and national – operating from these philosophies.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinarity engagement with literary theory and theological studies as well as continental philosophy, queer theory and musicology. Historicity is organized as two parts: Movement 1 theorizes three philosophical movements that, I argue, have an aversion for Black social life and will analyze performance practices – the history and ontology – of the aesthetics of Black dance, song and breath as constitutive of a resistant Black social life. Movement 2 analyzes three important figures that produced studies of the resistant strains of Black social life, examining how they engaged spiritual and ecstatic practices, and critiqued normative epistemologies.

Chapter Summary

Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for thinking of the aesthetics of Pentecostalism. Using Enlightenment philosophy’s theories of race, the chapter will attempt to analyze those theories as ”choreographic,” as a series of placements and arrangements that creates the concept of racial difference. Philosophy as a choreographic arrangement of thoughts may allow us to think about the relationship of space, place and movement necessary for the creation of race/ism as organizing logic and teleological principle. Enlightenment philosophy, I argue, cannot think the concept of race generally or the figure of the Negro particularly without becoming anti-logical. I will argue that there is a choreography of thought, found in performance of dance that avoids such racist philosophy. As such, the chapter will end by exploring the historicity of another choreography – the spirited, theological, expressive, social interrelations between Afro-Arabic saut, 19^th century Ring Shout and 20^th century Pentecostal “shouting”.

Chapter 2 will treat American Romanticism’s notion of freedom of the individual and Phenomenology’s transcendental subject – chronological and philosophical descendants of Enlightenment thought – as also important theoretical and philosophical grounds for Pentecostalism’s ecstatic and aesthetic critique. The twentieth-century Pentecostal “Testimony Service” of song+dance – the section of the church service when anyone can sing, pray, testify – often leads to ecstatic dance. Testimony Service occurs before the preached moment and often reconfigures the service order, at times making the preached moment a non-necessity. I will argue that Testimony Service is both the preparation for divine encounter and also, in its very preparation, that same moment of encounter. This chapter explains the politics of preparation as an always-aesthetic intervention into the world that is both the anticipation for and refusal of Romanticism’s free individual and Phenomenology’s transcendental subject, rather providing moments of waiting and practice, allowing the emergence of new sociality such as a singing, shouting congregation, behaving together in in the world differently.

With Chapter 3, I will consider the historicity and transference of breath as the necessary physiological and spiritual force that makes possible the song and dance of Pentecostalism. The chapter again returns to the Afro-Arabic/Afro-Christian relation, theorizing “recitation” of Qur’anic text with Christian “Whooping,” the speaking of a phrase eclipsed by pause and breathing. I argue that breath use is intentional, yielding an interrelation between modes of speaking and prayer. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Schmidt) discusses a person’s capacity to hear one’s own breath as prayerful posture toward the divine and how that breath is a reminder of the connection with and allows the hearing the voice of the divine internally. This chapter will ponder Pragmatism as a philosophical tradition that is also about eclipse and pause, though not of breath, but of possibility and vitality by way of an incrementalism as teleology.

Chapter 4 begins Movement 2 with an analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois’s theories of Negro life and problematics in the Americas. The chapter explores Du Bois’s “Of the Faith of the Fathers” as a moment of tension between the epigraph – a section of a William Sharp poem – and the actual imaginative, theological and ethical force that informs the subsequent text of the essay. The tension, I argue, is lays bare the interplay of aversion and the politics of avoidance, embarrassment and the politics of preparation. In the essay, Du Bois explores Negro religious “frenzy” and this chapter theorizes frenzy as an aesthetic quality of Pentecostalism with and against the journal he published, Phylon, the radical writings of which were, at least in part, responsible for making Du Bois appear to be “unfit” for Atlanta University. This is to ask: what is the relationship of knowledge to frenzy, of epistemology to ecstatics.

Chapter 5 addresses Zora Neale Hurston’s unusual and provocative theories of Black expressive culture. In her anthropological studies, took seriously the Black Pentecostal tradition and she used the same rigor with the linguistic capital and sociality of Black people in her fictional writing. In Chapter 5, I discuss Hurston’s engaging critique of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, with her claim that the songs they sang were not performed in ways consistent with what one would have heard on a plantation. Her writing about Negro expressive culture took aim at the performance of “civilized” jubilee songs learned in the university, as the university was a regulatory apparatus for Negro expressive culture, was the refinement of that which embarrassed. I argue that her writing was experimental, blurring disciplinary boundaries of the university and this experimentality is consistent with Pentecostal aesthetics. She utilized a sociality that allowed her to take seriously the thought and intentionality of the moments and movements of Pentecost.

Finally, in Chapter 6, I write about Mamie Till, the mother of 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till, as I wish to consider the religious ethics that prompted her desire for the world to experience the death of her son by way of an open casket and the proliferation of photographs of his bloated, mottled body. An active member of a Chicago, IL Pentecostal church at the time of Emmett’s death, Mamie Till lets us consider what her openness to Black Pentecostalism extended for Till-Bradley in terms of a very specific enactment of black feminist care. This chapter asserts that there is a refusal of closure – of caskets, of sacred space – through which one can be moved and so move others and is the culmination of breath+song+dance in the open display of Emmett. 

moth’s powder [01.27.10]

from: dtim
to: a 
Wednesday, January 27, 2010, 5:44 PM
subject: ummmm

so i got your text…why didn’t you reply?! what happened?! how did you respond? so many questions!!! are you ok?

— — — 

from: a
to: dtim 
Wednesday, January 27, 2010, 8:13 PM
subject: Re: ummmm

sooooo sorry about not replying. my phone died almost as soon as i sent you the text and i had to go to a bunch of meetings. anyway. yes, one of my students kindasorta outted me today, though i did help him…lol. things are fine, though. well, except, the whole thing made me think of mp much too much. so i kinda just sat here for a while when i got home and tried not to think. but then i wrote or whatever. it’s been a while but read this …

dear moth’s powder,

i can honestly say that, for the first time, i did not know how to reply to students in my class. we’ve been having a good time this semester so far, began with teaching them Baldwin’s Just Above My Head a few weeks ago, and pretty much put a lot on the table in terms of how we might think and talk about sexuality respectfully. i’m lucky, i guess, that at least four of my students have worked with gay-straight alliances when they were in high school, so they really try to help their classmates out. but i was totally caught off guard today by one of those students. he was like

professor a! i found your blog…or, i think i did! is this yours?

he then turned his laptop screen around so that i could see it. and, sure enough, it was mine with that picture of us. you know, the one where my arm is around your shoulder and you have the hella serious face on, glasses on the tip of your nose trying to look “scholarly” (lol), gingham shirt on, fresh cut, lookin like you look…which was hella sexy. and in that same picture, with my arm around you, was me being silly, was me with my lips on your cheek, my own cheeks puffed out and you can almost see the laughter about to break out in both of us. those were, indeed, the good times, the best days. 

yes. that’s the blog he saw. yes. that’s the picture he saw. i replied in the affirmative that it was, indeed, mine. 

is that your partner?

he asked with not even a hint of disdain or whatever it was i’d come to expect from young folks asking questions that pried too much. of course, some in the class became incessantly silent, it sorta hung over the classroom like a wet blanket, all eyes, they might say, on me. some snickered about a bit and others put their heads down. it only felt like eyes were on me. but i don’t really know since i lost focus. it was just uncomfortable. the air was sucked out of the room. they awaited a reply. the picture confirmed before i opened my mouth…so why did they even need an answer.

i felt the curious feeling of sweat beginning to form just under my skin on the forehead…but my underarms? they were, within these very few seconds, filled with all sorts of perspiration, so i had to keep my elbows tight close to me, unmoving, stilled. i’m sure i looked stilted, even. 

well.

yes. well. sorta. i mean, he’s no longer alive. but he was. 

and then, a long pause. nobody said anything. then.

i do miss him. a lot.

another long pause. the student finally continued his questions. 

well, i was asking because i read everything on your blog. and you write about church and being gay a lot and you write about church as if you love it so much. but how can you write about something with so much love when it refuses to love you?

i did not know how to answer. i was, as i’ve said too many times already, thrown off guard. out of the many questions i could have been asked, i was not prepared for that one. 

well…i sorta write with the hopes that it will resonate with someone. and if it does, then my job is accomplished.

it was both the truth and a lie. truthful because i do write hoping to enter into some sorta dialogue. like, i’ve always wondered what people say about me now that i’m this dude who doesn’t go to church, how they think about me and my life or whatever. are they afraid to tell me? but shit…i don’t really wanna know because i know i wouldn’t like what i’d hear anyway. so i just assume they all think i’m bound for hell or whatever. not that it matters. but my response was also a lie because it was hella rushed and not very intentional at all. and sometimes, speaking off the cuff can elucidate all sorts of truth….but not this time. it just felt insidious and wrong and protectionist. i really did just want to cry. so that’s what i did when i got home…but not before i played a lot of music in class in order to avoid further conversation. played a lot of Afrofuturism: Hendrix, OutKast. anything to leave the past. no gospel. at all. 

why did i tell them that i miss you? that…that i can’t figure out.

well.

i got home. sat on the couch for about an hour, in the dark, with only but a few tears. had to think without thinking, see without light, let the lack of light teach me something. i wrote to my students because i have that sorta relationship with them. but are you surprised…i write too much now. they probably just delete or whatever. but here’s what i told them…

dear class,

i know today began a bit stilted but that was because i was not prepared for the questions i was asked. i want you all to know that i am not ashamed of being queer-identified. if i were, i would not have pictures up of myself and my former partner on my very public blog for everyone in the world to find. though, to be honest, i never thought anyone would find it anyway…(smile). so the questions about my sexuality and my partner were not what made me uncomfortable. it was the question about my relationship to church, about my relationship to writing, that i both think about all of the time but never thought about in quite those terms. and those terms were what made me stumble over my words and rush towards playing music. 

now that i’ve had a bit of time to think about it, i will say that i write about the things that i love, not with hopes that it will reply, or accept me, or change. i write about the things i love simply because i believe love is the greatest force against all manner of injustice and evil in the world, whether it be experienced on personal, institutional or systemic levels. i write about what i love because to write about things i hate would be too difficult. i write about what i love because i do believe in the transformative power of words but am not delusional enough to think that whatever i write alone will be enough to change someone’s heart or mind about this or that issue. i write about what i love, even if it does not love me, because my that’s what love does when it is enacted…it insists in the face of injustice, in the way of evil, that there is another way to be in the world. i write about what i love because, in a very weird way, it was a strain of theology in the church that allowed me to accept myself, even as the church preached that homosexuality is sinful. 

i write about what i love because i miss the food and the people, because i feel that i’ve been abandoned by abandoning in a certain sense. 

in other words, life is fairly complicated. it’s never easy to just leave something, even with all of its problems. so since i’d like to talk more intentionally about this, reread the section of Baldwin’s Just Above My Head when Arthur and Crunch first discover love for each other, when Peanut and Red begin calling them “lovebirds” and when the old songs they sang gained new life because of their new love. we can talk about this because i want us to think about the possibility for creating a new world with the stuff we have with us now, how we do not need a utopia, but we simply need each other. and yes, we can talk about theology too…if you’d like. 

have a great weekend,
prof a.

well. i mean, i tried to have it make a bit of sense. what i found so curious about the entire exchange with my class was how so very much it made me think about me and you, and not the question about us but the question about my relation to church and to writing. it’s like, underneath all the stuff i try to do to engage the church is this sadness because i no longer commune with the folks in the ways i did before, that my communion seems to be agonistic and antagonistic even though that is not my desire at all. you know, my writing was and will always be about finding new ways to engage with folks i know, i love, but it seems to inhibit such potential with each and every blog post, letter, email or journal article. 

and, really, so it was with you. but we already know that. and maybe i should stop writing you. let you rest. so that i may rest. but until such time…

love,
a.

— — — 

from: dtim
to: a
Wednesday, January 28, 2010, 6:13 AM
subject: Re: ummmm

sorry for not replying last night but i fell asleep early…and now, your godchild just woke me up, so here i am. first of all: WOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!!!! i can’t believe that happened! but you’re such a good model for your students. i don’t even think what you said in class was insufficient but the fact that you followed-up by trying to address their concerns head-on is type wonderful! love you boo! 

but wait. i’m all confused by a bit of it. you know i love your writing. but really, are you saying that homophobia in the church helped you leave the church? lolol…i don’t think so, but maybe this is a blonde moment…

xoxo!

— — — 

from: a
to: dtim 
Wednesday, January 28, 2010, 9:18 AM
subject: Re: ummmm

well…sorta. what i’m saying is that the church i grew up in has this theology of “deliverance” – you know, if i just wait on the lord, he’ll deliver me from my sins of homosexuality. and they also taught that what we do is not who we are, that are behaviors are not reducible to our identities. and that’s some hella queer theory shit, in all honesty [but i don’t think queer theorists are ready to admit it…lol]. 

so yeah, when my church would say to folks that they can be delivered, what they were implying is a critique of – to be all Kantian for a second – a predetermined teleology but they did so in the service of a predetermined teleology. the word “can” was to tell us that we do not have to be whatever sinful thing we thought we’d be if we didn’t want to be that thing. so they were presenting an alternative future, a different endpoint by disrupting a normative teleology – end point, narrative arc – of where whatever sin we engaged in would lead us. so though they wanted to create a different narrative arc – the possibility of deliverance that would have us end up being “saved, sanctified and filled with the precious gift of the holy ghost” – they had to disrupt the one already set in place BY the theology of fallen humanity, of Adam, Eve and fruits, and Jesus as savior and whatnot. they had to place the theology they preach to the side in order to give us a theology of deliverance.

the problem, of course, is that the “can” of deliverance is only one such possibility…there are, we know, infinite possibilities and i definitely didn’t choose the deliverance camp. but it was in the fact that the church even believed that one’s future was not predetermined that gave me enough time to say that my present and future were not codeteremined, and this was sufficient enough for me to “wait” to see what the future could be for me. sure. i wanted to be delivered but while i was waiting, there was this other possibility that was already in me that began to flourish. and, shit, well…it just made sense.

i guess what i’m saying is that the theological life was hella complicated and i can’t just retrospectively dismiss it as if it were ever somehow white and black. but i also realize that what i made of the theologies were my experiences. so yeah, as convoluted as that might be, that’s my tentative reply…lol

anyway. love you…talk to you laterz…

— — — 

from: dtim
to: a
Wednesday, January 28, 2010, 10:05 AM
subject: Re: ummmm

hahaha…i think i get it but i’m gonna read it about fiftyleven more times before i tell you if i do or don’t…lol

Philosophy of Aversion, Politics of Avoidance and Pentecost

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?

Acts 2:1-8 (NRSV)

Pentecost is a moment of originary difference, irreducible openness, the encounter of displacement as commons, given as the interplay between breath and rest, between velocity and (seeming) poverty that prompts movement away from any claim for origin.[1] Pentecost – of any time, I argue – is the ongoing emergence of spatiotemporal itineraries, prompted by sounds – such as of violent winds of change – compelling the ongoing necessity of escape as the reconfiguring of normative, violative modes of social behavior. Pentecost is an egalitarian mode of spirit indwelling, wherein that which those filled with the spirit have is immediately given way and away to others through aesthetic proclamation, through linguistic rupture that becomes the condition of possibility for expanded sociality: the sound of violent wind is matched with but also exceeded by a sonics of new sociality. This energy of Pentecost was carried into the early 20^th Century by a likewise intergenerational, interdenominational, multi-gendered group of folks who felt that the Acts 2 story mirrored their own desire for spiritedness and a new sociality that was nothing but an enactment of a theo-ethical “motley crew.”[2] But how did they get there? To what social conditions were this 20^th Century group who called themselves Pentecostals responding? And why was the response borne out in aesthetic behaviors that were thought to be at once primitivist, unnecessary and discardable? And how was the overarching resistance to such aesthetics the condition of possibility for Enlightenment Philosophy that came before this 20^th Century moment, this movement? This chapter is concerned with such movement away from the claims for origin while thinking the historicity of Pentecost as moment and movement that operates within “open sociality,” which is nothing other than blackness – the testimony of the resistance of objects.[3]

Pentecost is the irreducible unity of being “together in one place” that responds with aesthetic vitality to historic, metaphysical and material moments and movements of violence and violation. The Pentecostal movement of the early 20^th Century – where we will arrive at the end of this series of explorations – is not reducible to Christological Pentecost of the Christian Bible’s Acts account. The fact of this irreducibility will allow us to consider the energy and indwelling of a spirit of commons, of resistance, to violence and violation that may not always look “Christian” in its deployment, and cannot be reducible to a Christological confession of faith – protestant nor catholic. When we take seriously the Acts narrative, we notice that the spirited response to descent of spirit, wind and sound – which eventually would be called Christian and Pentecostalism – is anachronism. This retrospective look allows us to see the gathering and dispersal of folks who were not Christian-identified but came together to create a new way to be in the world. And that new way reverberates in our present moment as much as it transformed their world. Thus, Pentecost is a capacity to give away that which one has in order to receive more; it is an entry into a type of friendship as a way of life that lays bare the queerness of any sociality.[4]

This chapter will concern itself with laying groundwork – by considering spatial movements upon the ground – for thinking of the aesthetic value of Pentecost, a creative commons and sociality against which, I argue, Enlightenment Philosophy averts its gaze and likewise denigrates. This aversion and denigration is choreographic. Thus, two things: First is discovering within Enlightenment philosophy – using Kant, though applying pressure on the development of the American Enlightenment by way of Benjamin Franklin – the fact of its being a collection of choreographic protocols and itineraries. We will discover this choreophilosophy by thinking through the concept of aversion that, I argue, animates these interconnected philosophical traditions. To say that the (American) Enlightenment is choreographic protocol and itinerary allows us, I think, to think about the relationship of interiority and exteriority, movement and spatiality necessary for the creation of race as organizing logic and teleological principle.[5] It is also to consider how the thinking of Enlightenment philosophy necessitated multiple leaps, splits, displacements – which is to say, movements – that followed or averred a path.

Secondly, the chapter seeks to elucidate the concept of blackness and its embodiment – by way of racist Enlightenment philosophizing – in the figure of the black [raced figure, the Negro]. Particularly, this chapter will think the choreosonic [the always attendant and interconnected concept of movement and sound] philosophy of blackness, how blackness utilizes choreosonics as a politics of avoidance that exists previous to aversive Enlightenment philosophy. This politics of avoidance is ontological and one strain of its historicity we find in the performance of tradition of the always (mis)read as excess and excessive moves and programmatics of black dance performance. The politics of avoidance is an “insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion.”[6] As such, this chapter will end with the object of the spirited, theological, expressive Black Pentecostal dance tradition called “shouting” at the turn of the 20^th Century. But we’ve gotta get there first. So we will explore the historicity of expressiveness of this choreosonic dance tradition, found in the “Ring Shout” tradition that precedes Black Pentecostalism, and found in the Afro-Arabic saut tradition of Sufi Dervish tradition that precede them both. [What I will, when speaking of the three together as a unit, term “Shout traditions”]. We will consider not only the physical movements of such counter-clockwise itineraries, but we will also consider the homophonic substance – the reiteration of the sound of the word, of the concept pronounced “shout” in new world English – of this choreographic tradition.

[1] Both Andrew Benjamin and Nahum Chandler help me understand something about irreducible difference, originary displacement and originary difference. See Andrew E. Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy : A New Theory of Words (London ; New York : Routledge, 1989.) and Nahum Chandler, ‘Originary Displacement’, Boundary 2, 27 (2000), 249-286. In terms of a refusal of a claim for origin, one could ponder if the disciples “received” the Holy Spirit previous to the Acts encounter when Jesus, after his resurrection and appearance to the disciples, “breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:22, NRSV). With both narratives, we can consider that breath and a capacity both to be moved and to receive are consistent in both stories of the reception of the Holy Spirit. But what is of import here is that the claim that the Pentecost moment in Acts is the origin of the Holy Spirit’s “work” in the world is obscured by another moment with a similar claim. Originary difference is what animates the discourse of the Holy Spirit and the aesthetics of indewelling movement.

[2] Peter. Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra : Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston : Beacon Press, c2000.).

[3] See Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition, 1st edn (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 1 where Moten says “The history of blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist. Blackness - the extended movement 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”. 

[4] Michel Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, in Foucault Live: (interviews, 1961-1984) (Semiotext(e), 1996). 

[5] Denise Ferreira da. Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, Borderlines (Minneapolis, Minn.) ; V. 27. (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2007.). 

[6] Nathaniel Mackey, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus’s Run, Atet A.D., 1st edn (New Directions, 2010), p. 42.