helga crane and the storefront pentecostal church

today i presented for #SPS2012 - the Society for Pentecostal Studies - on a panel responding to the documentary film “Let the Church Say Amen,” a cool documentary following the lives of several individuals who attend a storefront pentecostal church in Washington, DC. following are my comments regarding the film [which you can watch on hulu for free, linked above]. 

Helga Crane was on the search for something. She spent the majority of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand trying to understand something about life, about love, which is to say, something about a material-spiritual way to be in the world. Her otherness, her non-whiteness, her mulatto-ness that was also, only and always her blackness sent her on paths across the United States. She also went to Denmark where she felt she had become, to use Frantz Fanon, an object in the eyes of the Danes. Crane returned to the States, to Harlem specifically, because she missed the faces of, and comfort from, black folks who did not make her feel like an objection, like a question, like a problem.

One might say that she was on a journey, that Crane was committed to a general, non-secular agnosticism that was at the same time the refusal of the secular western philosophical construction of atheistic stance that purports, in the most robust sense, the impossibility of further discovery for an object – a journey not dissimilar to Seymour’s and Mason’s travels across the United States in the service of a “seeking” encounter. What moves me about Crane is her continual dissatisfaction with the world as she knew it; her peregrinations were seeking for a fullness that she did not, and most certainly could not know existed previous to its discovery. But this lack of knowledge was not the occasion for a refusal to journey, nor a declaration of the non-existence of such fulfillment. And that Journey, from the US South to Chicago to Harlem to Denmark back to Harlem paused, if only momentarily, as she fell into the warmth and acoustic embrace of a storefront church:

[Helga Crane] had opened the door and entered before she was aware that, inside, people were singing a song which she was conscious of having heard years ago — hundreds of years it seemed. Repeated over and over, she made out the words:

…Showers of blessings,
Showers of blessings…

She was conscious too of a hundred pairs of eyes upon her as she stood there, drenched, disheveled, at the door of this improvised meeting-house…The appropriateness of the song, with its constant reference to showers, the ridiculousness of herself in such surroundings, was too much for Helga Crane’s frayed nerves. She sat down on the floor, a dripping heap, and laughed and laughed and laughed. It was into a shocked silence that she laughed.

[…]

There were, it appeared, endless moaning verses. Behind Helga a woman had begun to cry audibly, and soon, somewhere else, another….

Helga too began to weep, at first silently, softly; then with great racking sobs. Her nerves were so torn, so aching, her body so wet, so cold! It was a relief to cry unrestrainedly, and she gave herself freely to soothing tears, not noticing that the groaning and sobbing of those about her had increased, unaware that the grotesque ebony figure at her side had begun gently to pat her arm to the rhythm of the singing and to croon softly: ‘Yes, chile, yes, chile.’ Nor did she notice the furtive glances that the man on her other side cast at her between his fervent shouts of ‘Amen!’ and ‘Praise God for a sinner!’

She did notice, though, that the tempo, that atmosphere of the place, had changed, and gradually she ceased to weep and gave her attention to what was happening about her…. And as Helga watched and listened, gradually a curious influence penetrated her; she felt an echo of the weird orgy resound in her own heart; she felt herself possessed by the same madness; she too felt a brutal desire to shout and to sling herself about.

She stumbled into a storefront church and the into radical possibility that was opened to her by way of sound, intensity, fervor. We might call this an example of Nimi Wariboko’s “pentecostal principle” as she continually found herself in spaces, constantly moving but never settling, always willing to begin again. She is the embodiment of the material condition that “no finite or conditioned reality can claim to have reached its destiny” and her movements were always in the direction of a sociality. Helga Crane’s movements prompt the question: what is art? And, attendant, how is the storefront the production of art, the production of aesthetic practice?

Crane entered the church because, literally, it was serving as a refuge from the rain storm occurring outdoors. It was there, in the community, open, serving its own purpose previous to her arrival: folks were there, praising there, singing there, joyous there, tarrying there, enacting radical sociality against the grain of sociological projects that would so have a constrained understanding of Negro storefront Pentecostal churches as “Cults,” as E. Franklin Frazier would have it. Crane entered the church because she didn’t want to be wet any longer, wanted to dry off and calm her nerves. The materiality of the building was likewise a dwelling, open, pentecostal.

There was no belief necessary for such material inhabitation. Belief is not what prompted her desire to be in the storefront but a recognition of the conditions of the life she lived. Still. Something happened. Stumbling into the space, the soniferous environment made a claim on her. The voices sang to her, the bodies came to her. Falling on the ground, wet, she laughed. But somewhere between laughs, her engagement became serious. Her initial posture allowed her to listen, and listening opened to experience. The sounds of people singing, praying, praising – the sounds, generally, of the inspiring and expiring of breath, inhaling and exhaling, the aestheticizing of breathing in that tight, constrained space of the storefront – produced a bass, a bottom, a foundation upon which she could be carried. There was a resonance of the sounds, of the voices. She heard them. She inhabited them. She was, literally, covered – by sounds, by bodies – and we might say that this covering also was the refuge, at least at that temporal moment; she sought without having known it. She did not merely open up the church door but she allowed herself to be open to that which she heard, to what she felt. It was, for her, a terrifyingly joyful experience.

“Let the church say ‘Amen!’”

Susan Buck-Morss, in an essay about Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”[i] discusses the etymology of the word “aesthetics” and its relation to the forms of cognition: taste, touch, smell, sight, sound. Aesthetics, she says, are related to this mode of cognition that is unacculturated, that is previous to culture because the senses “maintain an uncivilized and uncivilizable trace, a core resistance to cultural domestication” and that “their immediate purpose is to serve instinctual needs – for warmth, nourishment, safety, sociability” and that this is a biological concern (6). What Buck-Morss makes apparent is that aesthetics are not antagonistic to biology but that they share an originary concern regarding the utilization of the senses. Buck-Morss allows a question: can we think of the storefront church as the space through which aesthetic-biological practice is enacted?

This is what I saw in the film “Let the Church Say Amen.’” The film opens with a man on the journey, not in the church building, but on the street, declaring to the people encounters that there will be needs met – for clothing, for medical care, for food – and that all the people he encountered needed to do was show up at the right place and the right time. And, sure, he may have offered to pray with people if they requested but would not force such a thing if it would be deemed an imposition. The film begins this way: with an understanding that human need for warmth, nourishment, safety and sociability are primary concerns and not adjunct to spiritual practice. That to say: materiality matters. It’s what got Helga Crane into the door of the church; material conditions are that which World Missions for Christ Church attempted to respond. Pastor Bobby Perkins declared that he’d rather be in a chicken coop than in a cathedral if the former had the presence of God and the latter was lacking. Materiality matters, but only insofar as it is infused with an intentionality of divine presence. It is not that the cathedral does not have the presence as a general rule but that the persons there often refuse the presence of certain aesthetic – which are also and likewise theological-philosophical – practices.

We see that World Missions for Christ Church is one of radical affirmation, or maybe radical hospitality. Some examples include the brother-sister bond between Pastor Bobby Perkins and Dr. JoAnn Perkins, and the reiteration of the phrase that the church is somewhere where, as Darlene Duncan said, “everybody is somebody.” Darlene Duncan is most important to me here because she enacts the pentecostal principle, what James KA Smith called the “radical openness to God,” not only – or even primarily – as she sang “I love to praise his holy name” while playing the tambourine inside the walls of World Missions, but as she sat with the woman discussing her aptitude for becoming a nursing assistant. When asked how she would be able to pass the entrance exam, Duncan stated “I’ll study with my children so that we can all do it together.” Without embarrassment or hesitance, she would do it with others, she would do it together. Pentecostalism is a mode of study, it is a hermeneutics that is both previous to and against the grain of secularist enlightenment thought of which Immanuel Kant’s considerations are exemplary.

Enlightenment, Kant answers the question in 1784, is “the emergence from (one’s) self-incurred minority” and minority, accordingly, is the “inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another.”[ii] Enlightenment, we might say after Kant, is the aversion to social choreography, the aversion to social thought; it is movement of the mind, of the faculties, of one’s own accord without considering the space placement of another. Enlightenment is the emergence – the becoming, the bursting forth and free – into an anti-social way of knowing, thinking, doing, moving. Of course, to become, burst forth and free are not, of themselves, the problematic. This is not a critique of movement, nor emergence or escape. Harriet Tubman burst into New York, having escaped by herself only to find her freedom anything but sweet because she was lonely. She returned to Maryland in order to have others abscond with her; freedom is a social thing.[iii] Enlightenment thought’s desire is to dance by oneself on the dance floor and not be bothered by the sweat of another, nor their rhythms, nor smells. It is a retreat from the social in order to produce knowledge. As retreat, it is a move and move away from that which makes possible movement.

For Kant, freedom and sociality are opposed to each other; one does not achieve Enlightenment – as a type of freedom – unless one emerges from the self-incurred minority, unless one leaves behind a sociality and begins not only to think for himself, but to think at all. Thinking is the enterprise of the individual; he does not allow for the masses to be thinking together, for there to be social thought. Thus one wonders, can there be a freedom that is not Enlightenment, that is not about the emergence from a social into a particular transcendental subjectivity? What type of freedom can exist as a function of sociality? The beginning of Enlightenment is found in the averted posture toward, and thus against, the social. In order to think Enlightenment philosophy, we must consider its general field of choreographies of bodies, of objects, of things as well as the enactment of aversions in particular. 

Darlene Duncan’s simple declaration that she would study with her children, and that they would “do it together” is a counterclaim for the production of knowledge. She refuses such philosophy of thinking oneself into existence, of thinking away and alone, she produces a scholarly discourse of the social and a social discourse of the scholar. She learns with others, with the ways they move and behave and agree and dissent. This is, we might say, made evident in the tight constraints of storefront churches. We saw in the film shouting, speaking in tongues, preaching, praying, all taking place in the tiny building, bodies packed closely together. The building reminds me of New Born Mission Church of God in Christ in Newark, NJ, a church where my father preached very often, a storefront church where, immediately when you walk in, your senses are assaulted by the smell of fried chicken and fish, the sounds of people singing and tambourines, the feeling of heat that sorta sits atop you, the sight of hands raised, the touch of dingy carpeting on the ground. This assault was not a violence nor violation but a making real the fact of ones humanity, ones open-ended biological structure.

Duncan’s critique of Enlightenment as the studying and being together with others as a productive mode of thought, also is a biological concern regarding what “the body” is. Buck-Morss states, regarding the body, “Not only is it open to the world through the sensory organs, but the nerve cells within the body form a network that is in itself discontinuous. They reach out toward other nerve cells at points called synapses, where electrical charges pass through the space between them” (13). That which we call “the body” [the thing that Judith Butler problematizes by considering the discursivity of “sex”; by illustrating how any “the body” is a rhetorical, linguistic, philosophical flourish and assumption; and that behaviors in some bodies dematerialize them] is likewise given to radical critique on the grounds of the “natural,” or the “biological” or what is thought generally under the rubric of the “scientific.” Even in that realm, those things called bodies are not closed off but radically open to experience. The nerves reach out, the skin is the in-between of the interior and external world. It is quite curious how the desire to be a subject, a thinker, a scholar in philosophy parallels the desire to be a body, an individual, a closed system in other discourses.

Black Pentecostal churches generally, and storefront churches particularly, are modes of marronage, of marooning, of stealthily moving toward a different rhythm and the creation of radically new epistemological center. The performative practices of pentecostalism – as aesthetic practices that are foundationally theological-philosophical – share a relation, not necessarily of exile, but of marronage. We can look to the maroon communities of the Suriname River in South America, or those who took up dwelling in the South Carolina / Georgia interior border, of those who lived as the Ciprieréin Louisiana. These were communities that “secreted” themselves from local plantations, creating radically different modes of life than enacted on plantations. Maroons, once secreted into communes in which they would dwell, needed to till the land, grow food, clean pots, etch spoons, build dwellings, birth and care for children, form socio-sexual lives. But importantly, the threat violence from the outside world was always possible, so the preparation of the ground, of traps, of food, was always infused with a preparation for possible encounter. Preparation, readiness, practice for encounter, was of necessity an aesthetic, theological-philosophical practice. It was a way to study the swamp, to survey the interior, to know when to let and to recede into the background. It was to be prepared for the surprise of encounter.

This, like Darlene Duncan’s learning, was a gathering of social thought. It had to be done with others, together, the refusal of Enlightenment thought. Storefront churches are the place where thought happens, where thought prompts engagement in the world. This is not to valorize the conditions, such as poverty, which create the need for storefront churches. Rather, this is to assert that storefront churches are likewise places of study, places of life: “Being alive is not equivalent to knowing or experiencing. Rather, it is a tendency to be attuned to living: to look, contemplate, and search. It is thinking” (Jean-Christophe Bailly, 7).

Shouting is one such place where this thinking occurs. And so finally, I turn to Mason. Charles Harrison Mason, founder of COGIC, had much to say about “dancing.” In his piece “Is It Right for the Saints of God to Dance?” he answered with an emphatic “yes.” Mason says:

“The children of God dance of God, for God, and to the praise and glory of his name. They have the joy of the spirit of the Lord in them, they are joyful to their King – the Christ. At times they may be dancing Christ is all, or none but Christ. How sweet it is to dance in Him and about Him, for he is all. So to dance in the Spirit of the Lord expresses joy and victory.”[iv] 

What intrigues me about Mason’s description of shouting is the way that a circumambulatory architecture structures his rendering of the dance. This circumambulatory structure occurs at the level of rhetoric, particularly the prepositionsof, for and to God. This prepositional trinity sets up, and maybe steals a-way, the theological-philosophical “space” in which Pentecostal dance could not only take place, but thrive and flourish. Mason’s rhetoric regarding shouting is consistent with ring shout practices insofar as a way needed to be made out of no way, ground upon which sounds could emanate needed to be cleared.[v] But also with his rhetoric is the reinstantiation of directionality. Prepositions are “pointing” terms; they bespeak spatial orientation and positionality. But at the moment of the enunciation of the dance of, toand for God, Mason also rehearsed a particular hesitance with positionality that would have him stilled. Storefront churches, we might say, are material dwellings of such tripartite prepostionality. They are a created space – in an urban jungle – for praise, refusing a conception that the Lord could only inhabit disconnected buildings, tall steeples decorated with crosses atop. No. Storefronts are open and refuse such disconnection. 

Endnotes

“Peter Pans: Eating in the Diaspora” (Hortense Spillers)

“By revising and correcting ‘blackness’ into a critical posture, into a preeminent site of the ‘multicultural,’ long before the latter defined a new politics and polemic, and by distinguishing it from a sign called the ‘American Negro’ (and we can make any substitution here that might be appropriate, i.e., ‘black,’ ‘Afro-American,’ ‘African-American,’ as more or less the same lady and gentleman), [Ralph] Ellison harnessed ‘blackness’ to a symbolic program of philosophical ‘disobedience’ (a systematic skepticism and refusal) that would make the former available to anyone, or more pointedly, any posture, that was willing to take on the formidable task of thinking as a willful act of imagination and invention.”

blackness, “black bodies” and the occupy movements

i’ve been wondering a lot lately what people of color generally, and black folks particularly, are supposed to be/mean for the Occupy movements. i’ve read so many accounts, watched video clips discussing, and had conversations with folks about the glaring absence of, particularly, “black bodies”* in the occupy movement.

it got me to thinking: if there could be a movement of students in Germany based on the Black Power Movement in the US — one that recognized the philosophic, material force of blackness IN ABSENCE of “black bodies” — what does the desire in the Occupy movements for colored bodies actually metastasize, what does the desire injuriously assume and spread about bodies that are black in contradistinction to a black(ness) philosophy that is material, a historicity of blackness that is embodied? [material and embodied insofar as i’m not making some argument that there should be a theory that is not corporeal, theory that is not active.] [and, note, the Black Power movement of Germany was not, from what i can tell, a resistance to bodies that are black; it was not a refusal to a set of politics called Black Power, embodied fully in folks like Angela Davis. rather, there was not a sense of “waiting” for particular bodies to verify the politico-ethical stance against the state.]

so on the one hand, there is an assumption that “black bodies” have some sorta affinity for social movements of resistance and i’d be all cool with that if, in fact, it was about the capacity for undoing the state and its violence directed at the masses. links, of course, to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements should be made; student sit-ins at lunch counters and financial aid buildings are appropriate analogues and prehistories. but what i seem to detect in most desires for black folks at Occupy movements is a shoring up against state violence and violation by desiring a blackened, colored frontline, matching the historic condition for being frontlined, the object of attack in the US. and that doesn’t sit well with me at all. the surprise with which folks name a “new” relation to police power as a result of the occupy movements is notable. new ain’t really new. often, the rejoinder has been, “well, some communities have always known that the state does not protect citizens, but rather, the interests of the state,” and the naming of folks such as Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Rodney King, Mumia Abu Jamal and, most recently, Troy Davis.

but this assumption, to me, is a bit troubling as it seems to imply that black bodies and state violence should be articulated together as a relation of continual violation against those bodies. those bodies come to stand in for a general purpose of the capacity of the state to inflict harm on the one hand, and the capacity to receive harm of the state on the other.

and though i’m fully convinced that blackness [the history of resistant objects] calls into being the violence of the state [“the conventionality and maintenance of the status quo are violent by nature; if you start opposing the status quo that violence that is implicit will come to focus on you” — blackness is this opposition to the status quo as an ontological force], i am radically against the sorta ethical obligation that those bodies are supposed to fulfill when that movement does not take into account the theological, philosophical concepts animating their desire toward such bodies in the first place. it’s like Hannah Arendt telling folks that she just wouldn’t do what the Negro Mother [of Elizabeth Eckford] did, placing her in harm’s way in Arkansas. what she did not account for, and what her philosophic engagements with blackness lay bare, is the fact that any Negro living in Arkansas in 1957 was in that particular condition of being targeted by the state for violence. they did not have to go to Little Rock Central High School, a separate space, in order to realize this truth. what this means, against Arendt, is that the violence of the state is always directed at certain communities in order to constitute its structure. the focus on the absence of black bodies, it seems to me, thinks about a relation to the state, to citizenship and to violence in ways that are aloof to the material conditions of the ways folks live lives daily.

on the other hand, the desire for particular bodies seems to run rather consistent with both theological and philosophical notions of purposiveness, where particular marginalized figures come to stand in for the limit of the availability for transformation [theologically] or nature [philosophically]. we see this in folks like Great Awakening preachers George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards: both owned slaves but were “encouraged” by the fact that their blacks received “salvation” … always on some, “even the Negro and the Indian would be converted” by their powerful preaching on behalf of the sovereign figure. their ideas about the purposiveness of these marginal characters set into motion their astonishment, shock, and eventually, pleasure gained from “even these” being converted. Kant, as i’ve rambled otherwise, philosophically thought the Negro/black’s purpose in the world was to demonstrate general purposiveness that exists in nature. this general purposiveness was bodied forth in the skin color, color interarticulating with the mental capacity [if it’s white, it’s right / if it’s black, stay back]. 

what leaps out at me is how the conversion of Indians and Negros verified, for Whitfield and Edwards, the rightness of the sovereign [they were both Calvinists who believed in predestination of human station, human position…the slave was, in their theology, “born that way” *cue Lady Ga…no, cue Carl Bean*]. and for Kant, the color of blacks verified the rightness of nature and her hierarchizing. so yeah. it’s weird to think about the ways “black bodies” have not shown up for the Occupy movements and how this has been documented as a problem of hospitality. and, sure, i’m guessing hospitality is one of the reasons black folks have not turned out en masse to Occupy movements. but i’m more intrigued by why this absence is glaring [that is, what sorta occularcentrism animates such concern]. and though hospitality may be one of the animating features to resistance, i’m also wondering if there is a theological, philosophical ethics of “black bodies” that undergirds particular Occupy movements.

— — — 
* “black bodies” is in quotes because, following Butler, we must keep asking what a “body” is in terms of discursivity. 

on enthusiasm & theologic-philosophic self-determination

“In the quest for an end to religious dispute, enthusiasm (along with superstition) held pride of place as the enemy of reason. All the moderate leaders of the early-eighteenth-century revival, therefore, took aggressive action to distance themselves from the threat of enthusiasm. Most of the moderates, including George Whitfield and Charles Wesley, actively discouraged bodily manifestations while they were preaching. Others, such as Jonathan Edwards in New England and James Robe in Scotland, not only discouraged these bodily manifestations, they joined with ministerial critics of the revivals, such as Charles Chauncy, and Enlightened skeptics, such as David Hume, in actively seeking to explain them” (Fits, trances, & visions : experiencing religion and explaining experience from Wesley to James, 19).

Enthusiasm, as a categorical denunciation, shares with other concepts — such as delusions, experience, madness or pathological religious despair. These concepts were aestheticized as bodily manifestations of choreographic protocols and itineraries through the movements, motor behaviors and spatial peregrinations of bodies in response to some divine call or encounter. What intrigues is that at the same time that the body becomes targeted as the site of regulation against religious enthusiasm, experience and despair is the same historical moment that bodies were being refashioned from labor to capital [from the way bodies produce work to bodies that are worked].

The circum-Atlantic trade that Joe Roach writes about as the trading of coffee, sugar and — most vulgarly — human flesh [all as cargo] was foundational to a global capitalist system that had within it the necessity to reconceptualize choreographies by way of geographies, cartographies and topographies, or what we might simply call the “New World Project.” Both da Silva and Jennings discuss the necessity of a new spatial logics in the process of racialization, the way the ground upon which imperialism stood was intentionally — even when subconsciously — conceptually theologized and philosophized as chaste, as available for missionizing, exploring and exploiting. This land was available because of the indigene peoples who populated it, those who purportedly lacked civility, “true” religion and, thus, the proper means toward Christian civilization [thus they would need to be compelled by violent force, so argued José de Acosta]. The New World Project was always and everywhere the interarticulation of religious, economic and racial logics by means of a dissociative violent force.

We will get to the trading in flesh momentarily, but first: the possibility of producing a New World Project depended upon what da Silva critiques as self-determination. Self-determination, for her, is a concept invented by Western philosophic tradition to account for, and theorize about, the ones presumed to be “without thought, will, or volition” and this is most assuredly a racial/ist category.  The concept of self-determination is the assumption of European man as a thinker, with will, with volition and both the indigenes of the Americas and the black/Negros of Africa are without such possibility. The New World Project was animated by the concern for articulating this self-determination, this ability to be Enlightened, to think for oneself. And it is not the “determination” that is of import but the concept of “self” that is nothing other than a racial/ized category of coherence, stasis.

Andrea Smith goes on to extend da Silva, stating that the “central anxiety with which the western subject struggles it that it is, in fact, not self-determining.” As the protestant movement — in all its critical productivity as commentary regarding the regulatory apparatus of the Papist tradition — was still anchored to this desire for western subjectivity, for a true self-determination of thought, will and volition. The indigene in the Americas and the black in Africa would come to stand in as the materiality of difference against which this western subject ideal was constructed, around which it was constituted.

Da Silva and Jennings also, lastly, think about displacement as philosophic in the former and theologic in the latter, that is, matters of the mind that produce the material engagements with blacks and indigenes. Jennings, particularly,  goes to great lengths to demonstrate the relationality of different non-western peoples to the ground, to their environs: from the ways land inhabits the theo-ethical sociality through veneration of ancestors, to the ways a divine energy may be said to infuse peoples, places and things, to the ways land is remembered as holding memory. The arrival of Europeans into the now New World, bringing along with them disease, foliage and Christ, displacing indigenes and forcing them to work in mines [as only one such example], introduces a radically different relation to the land upon which one stood and, thus, a different theological vision. On the other hand, uprooting millions from various nations and bringing them to climes and work conditions different from which they departed is part and parcel of this project of new theological violence.

Bodies uprooted, transferred, displaced. Ways of life uprooted, transferred, displaced. Bodies and ways of life as the material configuration of philosophic-theologic choreographic aversion. It is no wonder, then, that enthusiasm — that concept which easily slipped, for the self-determined ones, into notions of experience, madness and pathology — was targeted as the stumbling block to self-determination, to universality. It is no wonder, then, that enthusiasm had to have its material resonance as a manifestation on the exteriority of the body and that manifestation — so easily thought to belong only to those who lacked self-determination [thought, will, volition] — was radically critiqued as in need of regulation.  

a scrap of a note.

the history of blackness is (also) the resistance — by way of its performance, by way of the performative — to the general choreographic field of aversion [averted gaze, turned head] as philosophy, producing a politics of avoidance [“an insistent previousness, evading” (and avoiding) “each and every natal occasion”].

Zong! (Philip) [or, rambling]

“There is no telling this story; it must be told…” 

“[I]f they were ‘thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwiters.’”

“To not tell the story that must be told” (189)

the final phrase has always struck me by way of performance: and because I’ve been meditating on Piper a lot lately, it appears that this phrase, and the desire for such a not telling of that which must tell works with the “withdrawal into the external world”, the reconfiguration of movement and directionality, where, following Piper, subjecthood becomes objecthood

that is, to not tell begs consideration: what when negation is primary, or is prior, withholds by way of giving its priority; to not tell, for me, indexes a particular withdrawal that is insistently previous to this situation (pace Mackey);

that must be told is, then for me likewise, about method, about aesthetics, about a way to do such a thing, it is about movement down the line, dancing in the street, Carrie Robinson’s tambourine, rejoice and shout on Maxwell Street … 

so of course, Heidegger and the gift of concealment revealed by way of unconcealment, where what is laid bare, what is released, secreted and let to appear, let to show and show forth, is the perpetual holding back of thingliness, the continual concealment.

Philip tells a story that —with each non-word, with each syllable, with each resuscitation of the text from the legal case Gregson v. Gilbert— withdrawal is given. so then, we return to questions of subject and object and the tenuous relationship between the two concepts.

those enslaved on the Zong ship —the 150 thrown overboard as objects, as things, those objects subjected and subjugated to be things, because for the captain of the ship, they were more valuable by way of underwriting underwater inhabitations— open up the space to consider modes of collaboration and resistance that Piper elucidates:

how can we think of these persons, these subjects, these objects, as resisting absorption “as collaborator(s)” because if they were so thought, “that would mean having [their] own consciousness co-opted and modified by that of others”?

we don’t want to think of the enslaved as collaborating with the making of the slave world where they would be so conceived as having “no ontological resistance” to whiteness as Fanon might say, where they were nothing other than anti-social lives, the living-dead as Mbembe might say, or existing within and internalizing Social Death as Patterson might say.

the text that Philip discovers by way of reworking, remixing and submerging the legal case, telling the withdrawal, was a mode of “depriving” this world of collaboration through becoming object, by conflating objecthood with subjecthood. whereas Piper’s performance for her necessitated her “to isolate [her sensory perception] from all tactile, aural, and visual feedback” in order to present herself “as a silent, secret, passive object, seemingly ready to be absorbed” by the artworld through which she moved, she realized it was the desire of the artist, the desire of the object, the desire of the subject-as-object, its intentionality to be an object that was conflictual with total absorption into this world. she could not be totally absorbed because, by making herself object, she became “passively aggressive” in the space, asserting her intention by demanding a peculiar attention. 

and that’s cool. 

so the text that Philip discovers and uses in order to give the gift of concealment, i think, also plays at the edge of the becoming subjecthood of objecthood. 

more soon.

“The Subject and Power” (Michel Foucault)

“The exercise of power is a ‘conduct of conducts’ and a management of possibilities. Basically, power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or their mutual engagement than a question of ‘government…’ To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others” (341).

we might say, then, that power is that which manages, gives form, aestheticizes that which is prior to it, that which is the realm and zone of the possible [and i think this realm and zone Deleuze might refer to as the exhausted, as it comes prior, as it has ontic edge and cut]. we might follow Hardt and Negri by likewise saying, then, that “resistance is prior to power” but that resistance shows up, bodies forth, by way of its management, form, and aestheticization. or Marx might say something like the antagonism exists prior to its enactment and that we know this antagonism by the way [again, method, form, aesthetic] a particular subject position calls itself into being, the means by which it matters and materializes.