The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#13, SEPT-NOV/2014
Empire-as-western imperialist power is incomprehensible without a permanent police presence enforcing coloniality; rational pursuit of racist dehumanization is the very condition of its possibility. Mass incarceration, normalized torture, immigrant internment camps, mass surveillance; systematic disregard of human ‘being’ is no anomaly in relation to advanced neo-liberal capitalist society but the Real of entrenched global power.
Structural-inert violence as embodied by neo-colonial police force exists as such a commonly occurring regularity within western imperialist metropoles as to function throughout modernity in utter anonymity. As such, structural-inert violence barely creates a social tremor and does not violate the Law, but rather invests the Law with an imperial sovereignty that is decisively called into question by an exceptional antagonism arising from the socio-ontological underground of modernity: Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’.
An unforgiving reciprocity of coloniality in the Raw becomes apparent in the confrontation between Empire and Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, as five neo-colonial police agents surround Eric Garner, who attempts to overcome this socio-ontological impasse by pleading for some kind of human recognition from imperial State sanctioned assailants, regarding his consistent and unwarranted harassment:
“Every time you see me, you mess with me!”
The police move closer and remain poised to act at any moment without responding too much, or genuinely acknowledging in the least, any of Garner’s excited claims. These agents of neo-colonial Law enforcement do not actually ‘see’ him, however, what they do ‘see’ is a ‘phobogenic object’, a constant and recurring ‘biopolitical danger’ that threatens the peaceful maintenance of a western imperialist continuum.
Eric Garner’s affective realization of his own anonymity, a lived experience of human ‘being-in-the-world’ without existential merit before the normative gaze of established power, when combined with the awareness of neo-colonial police edging slowly a bit closer and closer to him; transforms the futility of this discursive plea for recognition, into an adamant assertion of human agency, a naked refusal to adhere to the inevitable conclusion of his certain detention and possible arrest:
“I’m tired of it, this stops today!”
Unfortunately, “this” didn’t stop, even after attempting to rally other people around him in support of his claims, hoping that such a rapid constitution of multitude bearing witness on his behalf might somehow circumvent the encroaching socio-ontological tyranny of neo-colonial Law enforcement.
“Everybody standing here, they tell you I ain’t do nothin’!”
The structural-inert violence of neo-colonial police agents is physically palpable enough to ensure that everybody remains standing there, and no amount of discursive support from the gathering crowd prevents the murder of Man from taking place on yet another street corner of a world ordered according to the precepts of modernity as imposed by western imperialist power.
Media exposure of video footage which captures the neo-colonial police murder of Eric Garner, temporarily breaks through the mendacity of structural-inert violence against human ‘being’ and transforms this routine operation into Spectacle, as that which, though indicative of imperial hegemony in the Raw, is posited as an excessive, extreme and singular phenomenon. The function of Spectacle displaces murder from the Real of its socio-historical roots and as such, distills genuine potentialities of emancipatory praxis into protest-as-ritual event. However, it will take much more than such protest-as-ritual event, no matter how sincere in appealing to the democratic moral simulacra of an advanced neo-liberal capitalist society, to bring this oppression of human ‘being’ to an end. Oppressive structural-inert violence won’t stop today, or tomorrow, until it dialectically Returns as emancipatory praxis which simultaneously facilitates a socio-ontological rebirth of human subjectivity-as-lived universal.
Until the Return of oppressive violence to its constitutive source via emancipatory praxis however, any such lived potentialities of human subjectivity-as-lived universal, much like those introduced by Eric Garner’s assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, experience the same fate as Garner himself, and suffocate to death under the chokehold of structural-inert oppression renewed by five neo-colonial police agents against Man.
“I can’t . . . breathe.”
“I . . . can’t breathe.”
“I . . . can’t . . . breathe . . .”
No comments:
Post a Comment