I.
It’s not that it doesn’t matter. I know it does, to someone,
somehow, to me even. I think. Right? No, it’s not that, though the grit of my teeth says otherwise. Affectively, which some tout as more true. Whatever that even means. This thing, or these things—history; histories, as my postmodern friends, me included, would insist, though that, to me, does little to change my mind (the stubbornness rears here too, as later, which you’ll see soon)—vex me. It’s not that it doesn’t matter. It does. And that is the issue. It’s that I do not wish it to, to your chagrin. And mine.
Imagine what could be were it to not matter. Imagine.
II.
There’s a refrain. A lyric. I go here a lot, the lyrical, because it, I don’t know, articulates something in service of things that are not permitted articulation. And that, the non-permissably articulable, I mean, is what often provokes accusations of the unrealistic. It’s just poetic, just a desirous dreamscape untethered to the anatomy of the real, the actual. When you are finished with those frivolities, come back to us over here where real work is getting done.
But it’s like, why would I seek to be possible only through this thing, history— histories—when even it doesn’t provide the balm it purports? ‘Cause really, I want to be something else, some other kind of thing that we haven’t been able to think as, you know, a thing. So I search elsewhere, stumble, really. And there I wonder and wander, poutingly, because I have been accustomed to a stubborn disposition that admits it wishes history disassembled.
III.
I used to quote this Baldwin line, that we are formed in and bound by history, and if we rebuke this, defined as a truism, we are, as Jimmy says, literally criminals.
Yes, I have been accustomed to a stubborn disposition that admits it wishes history disassembled. I am, because of this, a criminal. And I revel. Now, don’t get me wrong—or, actually, do. I am wrong, not incorrect, but me, I’m wrong, at the level of ontology. Ontologically wrong, I suppose, which is actually kind of cool—without needing to prove mastery over this exam, it’s possible now to study other things.
There is a way that history (sometimes “History”) is asserted as simply the divinity to which we must genuflect. And I have been passing, intentionally so, for an atheist for over a decade now. (Passing, I say, because something about that word reverberates with dissemblance, with refusing what was given to [well, more like foisted onto] you. And I like that. I hope you see why.) History is what gifts us our very inhabitation of the world; it is how we are positioned within and by it that allows us to be an us. History births the conditions of the present, which orchestrates what is possible for us, what we can be and do, who and how we can relate, what we deem as real and here and now and to be for ourselves and others, what is important and why and when, and to whom. History, it is said, is everything.
And, again, here I am, wanting and needing and demanding everything else.
IV.
Constantly, I am reminded that even when I try to really go there, and the there here is that place (or non-place) of radicality—whatever I mean by that, which is nothing specific, which is kinda the point—that’s not quite what people wish to do. I mean, they often say they do, tearing shit down and burning shit down and fucking all the -isms and yadda-yadda-yadda, but then it’s like, Oh, you can’t do that, you can’t say that, that’s not realistic when I talk about burning down the very notion of the body, of gender, of categorical identities, of the world, of capitalism (and then out the woodworks they come at you with that haughty “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” like the former doesn’t necessitate the latter).
Like, when they bring up an ethical responsibility to “Our ancestors…” (a personified history, to which we are then made to have a more viscerally felt ethical relation), which is okay I guess, but I’m over here knowing full well that one is not, by ancestral fiat, required to do what they wanted, think and say what they wanted, be what they wanted. It is in fact precisely our will to refuse that was gifted by that struggle. To say nah, the first right, as it were, the first movement of something akin to agency, and the first recipients of it are exactly those who tilled the earth for that gift and condemn you for using it.
Not to mention, all of our ancestors are not kin; all who birthed and came from who birthed and came from us are not kinfolk, are not fam, are not owed unceasing veneration.
V.
There are times it seems, perhaps is, inescapable. I show up ahead of myself, or something that touts itself as my “I,” whatever that “I” even is. I do not act alone but with a symphony of gestures and people and structures that have organized what and who, and how and why, and when and to what extent, I can be. And I feel that. And, sometimes, I know that.
I cannot escape, though I try. Others tell me so, and I nod at their acumen. Yes, yes, you are wise, keeping my wandering musings at bay and checking those peripatetic fancifalities. Do not let me stray, for that would be a disservice. Spitting in history’s face, that face approximating something like the imago dei.
VI.
No.
There are times it seems, perhaps is, inescapable. I show up ahead of myself, or something that touts itself as my “I,” whatever that “I” even is. I do not act alone but with a symphony of gestures and people and structures that have organized what and who, and how and why, and when and to what extent, I can be. And I feel that. And, sometimes, I know that.
I cannot escape, though I try. Others tell me so, and I nod at their acumen. Yes, yes, you are wise, keeping my wandering musings at bay and checking those peripatetic fancifalities. Do not let me stray, for that would be a disservice. Spitting in history’s face, that face approximating something the imago dei.
VII.
We want to honor both your important question and the notion of context that it invokes by radically detaching context from anything like a fixed and habitable position. I want to, or try to, honor that, too. If only to remain compassionate, to remain attentive to how, when they’re coming after me, it is only because what I say bears similitude to thoughts, which portend acts, which, indeed, are acts, that have come after them. They’re trying to protect themselves from what looks like harm, because they’ve been harmed so much, by so many. I get it; that’s real. We need to remember the context in which we live, have been bred. Or, that’s what is said, to justify your feelings, justifiably. But that is not the same as position; context is not, and ought not be, conflated with such rigidity; context is not an altar we attend to venerate origination. Specificities of context—the range of differences, say, that we might talk about under the rubric of both blackness and indigeneity—not to mention gender nonnormativity—are manifest appositionally, that is, tangential to, sly and to the side of, as the discontented demonic underthrow, of positionality and being positioned, it seems to us, and me too, and are always given in and as both the denial of position by the racial regimes of the state and capital and the refusal of position by those who want and need to live otherwise. The state and capital have erected a regime that positions; we are positioned by and because of the state and capital, in order to capitalize and track, in order to extract and invade, to dictate and tyrannize. To want out is to refuse this positioning, to refuse history, because history is such a massive attempt to position and quell the need and desire to live outside of that dictated by this positioning. To be positioned is precisely the moment when one is disallowed—the act, the thought, the yearning of—being something else, disallowed refusal. Even within what might be called our own context, as tightly as anyone might ever want to define it, which is far too tight, necessitating the profound exclusion of so much to tout the cohesion of a narrative that cohered by virtue of the violent exclusion of all the other ways the “context” was ill-fit; far too tight, which raises the question of why one would want it to be so tight, why must it be so tight, what are you trying to keep in (and keep out), what seams and sutures and dehiscences are you attempting to obscure, and don’t you know that things happen precisely when we loosen and let go? To live is to lose in service of loose, relating and loving coming when the tightness is alleviated and movement happens, displacement happens.
What if it turns out that at a really fundamental level coloniality is an imposition of the proper (or, a regulatory regime that pathologizes departures from its parameters and violates, before and after departure, the nonnormative and improper, which is a moving target that becomes improper when suitable for the advancement of the proper), and of propriety (or, the invention of law that says that anything can be owned, that “ownership” is even a possibility, a “thing,” as they say), which critiques of appropriation advance rather than retard (or, I own this thing, so you can never have it, when we know the very notion of ownership is a capitalistic, colonial, white supremacist notion that staking unclaimable ground means you’ve claimed and thus possess it through and through), all in the interest of a certain stillness (or, history, context, being realistic), an inertial resistance? There’s a general nonbelonging to which we want (deviantly, of necessity) to belong (or, to be outside of context, of positionality; to not belong because to belong is to be captured by something, somewhere, and we love fugitivity too much for that). All we could ever hope for is to be subject to those changes, to that mobile dispossession.
There is no “What if it turns out,” because it has already turned out.
VIII.
If it’s customary to be accustomed to the unimpeachability of position, of history, then, yes, I am growing and have grown accustomed to a stubborn disposition that admits it wishes history disassembled. I’m dis-positioned, not caring for the hubris of the position that knows me not at all, really, only an assumptive ass made out of you but not me; only an imperfect rearticulation of what cannot be articulated before its emergence. I know I sound mad, and I am, and I think that is an okay thing to feel. It’s just that I desire the possibility of escaping history's tethers, or rather wanting ways to be and live that are not necessarily predicated on a causal relationship to history, or that break (from) history, or that desire and maybe even demand something otherwise, uncapturable by what we deem as “history.” No, I am not a presentist. And I’m not solipsistic. I am exceedingly interested in what has not been captured. And in what cannot be captured. And in a future, which is now and then. A future in which we have not already been disallowed from the outset. I am interested in, finally, being able to live.
Imagine what could be were it to not matter. Imagine.
II.
There’s a refrain. A lyric. I go here a lot, the lyrical, because it, I don’t know, articulates something in service of things that are not permitted articulation. And that, the non-permissably articulable, I mean, is what often provokes accusations of the unrealistic. It’s just poetic, just a desirous dreamscape untethered to the anatomy of the real, the actual. When you are finished with those frivolities, come back to us over here where real work is getting done.
But it’s like, why would I seek to be possible only through this thing, history— histories—when even it doesn’t provide the balm it purports? ‘Cause really, I want to be something else, some other kind of thing that we haven’t been able to think as, you know, a thing. So I search elsewhere, stumble, really. And there I wonder and wander, poutingly, because I have been accustomed to a stubborn disposition that admits it wishes history disassembled.
1
Aesop Rock. Gopher Guts. Rhymesayers Entertainment, 2012.
Yes I
have, and I am okay with that. Though, others are not. And I’m okay with that too. (The stubbornness is here now,
officially.)III.
I used to quote this Baldwin line, that we are formed in and bound by history, and if we rebuke this, defined as a truism, we are, as Jimmy says, literally criminals.
2
Baldwin writes: “We carry our
history with us. We are our history.
If we pretend otherwise, to put it very brutally, we literally are criminals.” James Baldwin,
“Black English: A Dishonest Argument,” in The
Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011), 154.
And here
I am, rebuking history. And here I am, loving my criminality.Yes, I have been accustomed to a stubborn disposition that admits it wishes history disassembled. I am, because of this, a criminal. And I revel. Now, don’t get me wrong—or, actually, do. I am wrong, not incorrect, but me, I’m wrong, at the level of ontology. Ontologically wrong, I suppose, which is actually kind of cool—without needing to prove mastery over this exam, it’s possible now to study other things.
There is a way that history (sometimes “History”) is asserted as simply the divinity to which we must genuflect. And I have been passing, intentionally so, for an atheist for over a decade now. (Passing, I say, because something about that word reverberates with dissemblance, with refusing what was given to [well, more like foisted onto] you. And I like that. I hope you see why.) History is what gifts us our very inhabitation of the world; it is how we are positioned within and by it that allows us to be an us. History births the conditions of the present, which orchestrates what is possible for us, what we can be and do, who and how we can relate, what we deem as real and here and now and to be for ourselves and others, what is important and why and when, and to whom. History, it is said, is everything.
And, again, here I am, wanting and needing and demanding everything else.
IV.
Constantly, I am reminded that even when I try to really go there, and the there here is that place (or non-place) of radicality—whatever I mean by that, which is nothing specific, which is kinda the point—that’s not quite what people wish to do. I mean, they often say they do, tearing shit down and burning shit down and fucking all the -isms and yadda-yadda-yadda, but then it’s like, Oh, you can’t do that, you can’t say that, that’s not realistic when I talk about burning down the very notion of the body, of gender, of categorical identities, of the world, of capitalism (and then out the woodworks they come at you with that haughty “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” like the former doesn’t necessitate the latter).
Like, when they bring up an ethical responsibility to “Our ancestors…” (a personified history, to which we are then made to have a more viscerally felt ethical relation), which is okay I guess, but I’m over here knowing full well that one is not, by ancestral fiat, required to do what they wanted, think and say what they wanted, be what they wanted. It is in fact precisely our will to refuse that was gifted by that struggle. To say nah, the first right, as it were, the first movement of something akin to agency, and the first recipients of it are exactly those who tilled the earth for that gift and condemn you for using it.
Not to mention, all of our ancestors are not kin; all who birthed and came from who birthed and came from us are not kinfolk, are not fam, are not owed unceasing veneration.
3
More Aesop Rock, whose fans, me included, call him Aes: “Apparently we share a
common plasma, so the growing disconnection doesn’t matter,” he soliloquizes
after relaying the utter lack of interwovenness between him and his
mother—"Mom, it's me, I accidentally sawed a woman in half. She said ‘I'll
keep you in my prayers,’ I said ‘I need to hide a body,’ she said ‘Okay, honey,
talk to you on Friday.’" That is, “according to the blood and water
chapter,” the chapter of the socially normative where “blood is thicker than
water,” where you don’t wanna talk to your mom, your brother, your father, your
cousin, and then they come at you with “Life is short,” or “I’d give anything
to talk to my [whoever the fuck] again” and you just shake your head,
exhaustedly, because you are thinking You
just don’t get it. “Weird,” Aes raps, “who wrote the blood and water
chapter anyway? Probably some surly dad, only child, thirty cats, looking for a
way to reconnect with an averted past, except it doesn’t always work like
that.” No, it doesn’t. Rarely, in fact, does it ever.
V.
There are times it seems, perhaps is, inescapable. I show up ahead of myself, or something that touts itself as my “I,” whatever that “I” even is. I do not act alone but with a symphony of gestures and people and structures that have organized what and who, and how and why, and when and to what extent, I can be. And I feel that. And, sometimes, I know that.
I cannot escape, though I try. Others tell me so, and I nod at their acumen. Yes, yes, you are wise, keeping my wandering musings at bay and checking those peripatetic fancifalities. Do not let me stray, for that would be a disservice. Spitting in history’s face, that face approximating something like the imago dei.
VI.
No.
There are times it seems, perhaps is, inescapable. I show up ahead of myself, or something that touts itself as my “I,” whatever that “I” even is. I do not act alone but with a symphony of gestures and people and structures that have organized what and who, and how and why, and when and to what extent, I can be. And I feel that. And, sometimes, I know that.
I cannot escape, though I try. Others tell me so, and I nod at their acumen. Yes, yes, you are wise, keeping my wandering musings at bay and checking those peripatetic fancifalities. Do not let me stray, for that would be a disservice. Spitting in history’s face, that face approximating something the imago dei.
VII.
We want to honor both your important question and the notion of context that it invokes by radically detaching context from anything like a fixed and habitable position. I want to, or try to, honor that, too. If only to remain compassionate, to remain attentive to how, when they’re coming after me, it is only because what I say bears similitude to thoughts, which portend acts, which, indeed, are acts, that have come after them. They’re trying to protect themselves from what looks like harm, because they’ve been harmed so much, by so many. I get it; that’s real. We need to remember the context in which we live, have been bred. Or, that’s what is said, to justify your feelings, justifiably. But that is not the same as position; context is not, and ought not be, conflated with such rigidity; context is not an altar we attend to venerate origination. Specificities of context—the range of differences, say, that we might talk about under the rubric of both blackness and indigeneity—not to mention gender nonnormativity—are manifest appositionally, that is, tangential to, sly and to the side of, as the discontented demonic underthrow, of positionality and being positioned, it seems to us, and me too, and are always given in and as both the denial of position by the racial regimes of the state and capital and the refusal of position by those who want and need to live otherwise. The state and capital have erected a regime that positions; we are positioned by and because of the state and capital, in order to capitalize and track, in order to extract and invade, to dictate and tyrannize. To want out is to refuse this positioning, to refuse history, because history is such a massive attempt to position and quell the need and desire to live outside of that dictated by this positioning. To be positioned is precisely the moment when one is disallowed—the act, the thought, the yearning of—being something else, disallowed refusal. Even within what might be called our own context, as tightly as anyone might ever want to define it, which is far too tight, necessitating the profound exclusion of so much to tout the cohesion of a narrative that cohered by virtue of the violent exclusion of all the other ways the “context” was ill-fit; far too tight, which raises the question of why one would want it to be so tight, why must it be so tight, what are you trying to keep in (and keep out), what seams and sutures and dehiscences are you attempting to obscure, and don’t you know that things happen precisely when we loosen and let go? To live is to lose in service of loose, relating and loving coming when the tightness is alleviated and movement happens, displacement happens.
What if it turns out that at a really fundamental level coloniality is an imposition of the proper (or, a regulatory regime that pathologizes departures from its parameters and violates, before and after departure, the nonnormative and improper, which is a moving target that becomes improper when suitable for the advancement of the proper), and of propriety (or, the invention of law that says that anything can be owned, that “ownership” is even a possibility, a “thing,” as they say), which critiques of appropriation advance rather than retard (or, I own this thing, so you can never have it, when we know the very notion of ownership is a capitalistic, colonial, white supremacist notion that staking unclaimable ground means you’ve claimed and thus possess it through and through), all in the interest of a certain stillness (or, history, context, being realistic), an inertial resistance? There’s a general nonbelonging to which we want (deviantly, of necessity) to belong (or, to be outside of context, of positionality; to not belong because to belong is to be captured by something, somewhere, and we love fugitivity too much for that). All we could ever hope for is to be subject to those changes, to that mobile dispossession.
4
For the source of the italicized portions of this and the previous paragraph, see Yollotl Gómez
Alvarado et al., “Conversación Los Abajocomunes: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
in conversation on the occasion of the Spanish translation of The Undercommons,” The New Inquiry, September 5, 2018,
https://thenewinquiry.com/conversacion-los-abajocomunes/.
There is no “What if it turns out,” because it has already turned out.
VIII.
If it’s customary to be accustomed to the unimpeachability of position, of history, then, yes, I am growing and have grown accustomed to a stubborn disposition that admits it wishes history disassembled. I’m dis-positioned, not caring for the hubris of the position that knows me not at all, really, only an assumptive ass made out of you but not me; only an imperfect rearticulation of what cannot be articulated before its emergence. I know I sound mad, and I am, and I think that is an okay thing to feel. It’s just that I desire the possibility of escaping history's tethers, or rather wanting ways to be and live that are not necessarily predicated on a causal relationship to history, or that break (from) history, or that desire and maybe even demand something otherwise, uncapturable by what we deem as “history.” No, I am not a presentist. And I’m not solipsistic. I am exceedingly interested in what has not been captured. And in what cannot be captured. And in a future, which is now and then. A future in which we have not already been disallowed from the outset. I am interested in, finally, being able to live.