THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#21, SEPT-NOV/2016
The murder of human ‘being’ is no accident which can be corrected by proper legislation or civic oversight of neo-colonial police activity. Nor is such ongoing murder due to a recurring instance of that mythological Freudian strain, endemic to modernity, of ‘unconscious’ racism as a psychological pathology of mechanistic determinism, which can hence be rectified by police agents undergoing therapy-as-cultural sensitivity training. As such, the perpetual incarceration and accumulative slaughter of Black people by Empire is yet another tragic disclosure of structural-inert racist dehumanization inscribed in modernity, particularly during reconfigurations of western imperialist power as objective violence when confronted by an ascendant humanity challenging the sovereign legitimacy of coloniality in the Raw.
Rupturing the coercive anonymity surrounding the neo-colonial police murder of Michael Brown, insurrection-in-itself, as a lived dynamic correlation between ‘protest-as-resistance’ and spontaneous rebellion, reveals the constitutive role objective violence inhabits within Empire as the normative gaze sifts through claims of human subjectivity, while persisting in severing the imperial mainstream of modernity from the socio-ontological underground. Thus the murder of human ‘being’ finds diffusion through the Law itself, disciplining and punishing any assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ for unleashing socio-ontological potentialities of historical disequilibrium throughout the hegemonic contours of Empire “which does not confront us like a subject, facing us, but like an environment, that is hostile to us.” [1]
The lived relation of coloniality in the Raw that positions structural-inert globalized power against the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ is irreconcilable, diminishes the socio-historical primacy of legal questions concerning innocence or guilt, suspends ethical norms, and unveils an exceptional antagonism that interrogates the very premise of sovereignty exercised by neo-colonial police. For by embodying the Law, neo-colonial police agents wield a legitimate and legitimating violence, and are thus charged with the burden of continuously introducing and reconstituting the biopolitical alterity of modernity, in topographical coherence with a western imperialist continuum. Indeed, Empire, as the latest reconfiguration of a western imperialist continuum, is indicative of the lack of ‘outside’ positionality in relation to the globalized hegemony of structural-inert power. However, the contemporary consolidation of horizontal opposition within Empire only reinforces and highlights the potentialities of an ongoing vulnerability to vertical insurgency from below. “The Outside becomes the Inside, and the Inside now has no limits. What was formerly present in a certain defined place now becomes possible everywhere. What is turned inside out no longer exists in a positive way, in a concentrated form, but remains in a suspended state as far as the eye can see. It is the ultimate ruse of the system, the moment when it is most vulnerable and, at the same time, most impervious to attack.” [2] Indeed, the lack of there being an ‘outside’ to Empire does nothing to negate the insurgent potentialities arising from its socio-ontological underground.
Borders in the classical sense have been reduced to functional simulacra in the service of Empire; regulating movements of deterritorialized human populations and imposing coloniality on human ‘being’, while serving as an unchallenged political canopy under which a massive deregulation of the vulgar influence of capital continues unabated.
As geoterritorial delimitations erode, the margins of Empire can only be grasped as socio-ontological coordinates, topographically exposed by ‘racial incidents’ functioning as sudden sinkholes in the middle of heavy traffic, spontaneously interrupting the normative gaze and disclosing, at times by mere proximity to the glittering ‘liberal-democratic’ prestige of western imperialist metropoles, dark sobering glimpses into a vast underground of modernity peopled by the wretched of the earth. These biopolitical sinkholes, once having collapsed through the glossy surface of the imperial mainstream by way of ‘racial incident’, garner immediate attention and are judiciously ‘fixed’, rapidly patched up and appropriately restored, not by addressing racist dehumanization as the fundamental fault line of modernity, but rather, by the smooth application of yet another ideological layer of imperial concrete that hardens fast, under the guise of maintaining public order, ‘racial’ harmony and restoring the peace. And yet, relative peace for the imperial mainstream is subsidized by structural-inert racist oppression of human ‘being’ as objective violence against the socio-ontological underground.
Objective violence preserves peace as statistical measures simulating progress through symbolic gains which are essentially provisional, divorced from historical impact, without any lasting meaning beyond the daily hyperproliferation of information and news as Spectacle. ‘Protest-as-ritual event’ carried out by good citizens of the imperial mainstream legitimizes Spectacle by wholeheartedly embracing symbolic victory as an end in itself, thus miseducating consciousness in tandem with neo-colonial police violence towards biopolitical pacification of an exceptional antagonism arising from the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’. “This peculiar kind of peace, this armed peace characteristic of imperial order, is felt to be all the more oppressive because it is itself the result of a total, mute, and continuous war. The stakes of the offensive are not to win a certain confrontation, but rather to make sure that the confrontation does not take place, to eliminate the event at the source, to prevent any surge of intensity” [3] from arising which might reintroduce the wretched of the earth to any constitutive socio-historical potentialities of emancipatory praxis against established global unjust power.
Internationally, this popular strategy of peacekeeping is often posited as humanitarian intervention, even as ‘domestic’ versus ‘international’ paradigms are now steadily disappearing as lost referentials of a bygone era, subsumed in Empire. This socio-historical erosion of the sovereign distinction between ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ horizons of struggle introduces a growing oppressive symmetry of biopolitical pacification embodied in neo-colonial Law enforcement. Thus, contemporary policing is clearly and explicitly predicated on paradigms of counterinsurgency as significantly reconstituted during western imperialist wars against internationalist decolonization struggles. “Imperial war has neither beginning nor end, it is a permanent process of pacification. The essential methodology and principles of Empire have been known for over fifty years. They were developed during the wars of decolonization during which the oppressive State apparatus underwent a decisive alteration.” [4]
During such “a decisive alteration” of “the oppressive State apparatus”, neo-colonial police Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) team formations were born in response to the growing insurgent threat of Black liberation praxis to western imperialist power during an era of intense geohistorical unrest spanning from the late 1960s until the mid 1970s. The S.W.A.T. team method of Law enforcement actually made its debut during a particular conflagration of these “wars of decolonization” between the Black Panther Party and the neo-colonial police force of Los Angeles in 1969 at 41st and Central. Therefore, such explicit displays of overwhelming neo-colonial police force, as witnessed by the world during the early stages of the Ferguson Rebellion, that caused such disingenuous mainstream media uproar and social concern over police militarization, should not be regarded as a new and recent trend of excessive police intervention or rampant police militarization gone awry. Rather, the media generated Spectacle surrounding the response of established power to the Ferguson Rebellion displaced actual exposure of the Real of counterinsurgency as intrinsic to contemporary neo-colonial police procedure. “From then on the enemy was no longer an isolated entity, a foreign nation or a determined class, but somewhere lying in ambush amongst the population, without visible attributes. When necessary, the population itself became the enemy, the population as insurgent force.” [5]
Yet another “decisive alteration” underway in New York City involves “the creation of a heavily armed unit to patrol areas of the city and respond to large-scale events, such as protests or terrorist attacks” [6] called the Strategic Response Group. The normative gaze thus increases the imposition of social equivalence between “protests” and “terrorist attacks” as the Real. Even the stated ideological justification of making society “safe from crime, safe from terrorists, safe from disorder,” [7] does nothing to alleviate neo-colonial police violence from taking deadly aim at the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ which is rendered by the normative gaze of structural-inert global power as an ontological reservoir of criminality, ‘biopolitical danger’, and socio-historical disequilibrium. Already, dynamic grassroots activist formations organizing around preventing the accumulative slaughter of Black people are experiencing the brunt of this particular reconfiguration of Empire as a “permanent process of pacification.”
For amongst the “population itself”, there exist rival anthropological currents of human subjectivity. There is an imperial mainstream whose possibility of becoming “the enemy” is contingent upon both the pragmatic necessity of established power and the exercise of human agency in deliberate opposition to structural-inert global injustice, as both Edward Snowden and Bradley/Chelsea Manning can bear ample witness. However, “population itself” is also comprised of a socio-ontological underground for whom the probability of becoming the enemy is a distinct impossibility. Indeed, ever since the imposition of modernity upon the world by western imperialist power, our lot is actually that of already being the enemy by mere facticity of our existence, as indicative of that rational signification of subhumanity called ‘race’. As such, ‘race’ becomes the materialistic anthropological vehicle of a lived experience of coloniality in the Raw, in which we find ourselves overdetermined-from-without by a western imperialist continuum imposing a biopolitical alterity, that a priori constitutes Black subjectivity, not even as an Other human ‘being’-as-enemy, but rather as “the enemy” of human ‘being’ itself. [8]
What does it then mean when neo-colonial police officers brazenly leave Michael Brown’s body exposed to the elements like a rotting animal carcass for several hours as an explicit reminder to Black community of the Real of unrelenting structural-inert violence implicating our temporality and ‘being-in-the-world’? “At each moment of its existence, the police remind the State of the violence, the banality, and the darkness of its beginnings.” [9] And yet, it is not only “the State” for whom historical memory awakens when faced with the existence of neo-colonial police, whose original institutional genesis is functionally located in the surveillance of Black community towards suppressing any assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, both before and after that era of direct formal human slavery endorsed by western imperialist power. [10] Indeed, after witnessing this flaunting of racist dehumanization in all its naked savagery, how significant are any changes in the sovereign relation between neo-colonial police and the lived orientation of Black community constituting new rhythms of ‘protest-as-resistance’ and spontaneous rebellion against Empire?
Initially, the structural-inert violence of neo-colonial police succeeds in reaffirming the sovereignty of western imperialist power by a materialist reduction of human ‘being’ to ‘objechood’ through the murder of Michael Brown, whose body remains sprawled out within a pool of blood in the middle of a sweltering street in Ferguson, Missouri. And yet let us not forget, that the very socio-historical effectiveness and relentless ontological consistency of structural-inert violence against Black people exacted by neo-colonial police throughout Empire is definitively premised, first and foremost, upon the actual recognition of our ascendant humanity as its precautionary starting point. “This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man.” [11] Thus the imposition of coloniality in the Raw upon human ‘being’ is absolutely predicated upon a comprehensive recognition of invulnerable potentialities towards constituting human subjectivity for its methodical effectiveness.
As more and more people bear witness to yet another example of such continuing atrocity against humanity, news rapidly spreads, people communicate, and begin to gather. Before long, crowds form and disperse, and form again. Michael Brown’s body remains there on the street, mortally severed from human subjectivity by police bullets, unsettling a pervasive overdetermination-from-without that situates lived Black experience by inciting our radical imagination towards the Divine, as inconceivable social potentialities of justice beyond the Real of a western imperialist continuum. When socio-historical impasse confronts the Divine, the Real no longer suffices. For that which was once concretely evident and barely tolerated as ‘that’s just the way it is’, now becomes an unbearable weight upon our existence inspired by emancipatory potentialities of its socio-historical surpassing. An intersubjective resonance of Revolt begins to permeate Black community as diverse social formations of grassroots organizing struggle to keep pace with the gathering historical momentum towards ‘protest-as-resistance’ and spontaneous rebellion against established global unjust power.
Insurrection-in-itself needs no justification, for it is the Returning consequence of structural-inert oppression. And yet, insurrection-in-itself does not occur in scientific adherence to iron laws of mechanistic causality set in motion by economic exploitation or racist dehumanization, but rather by the socio-ontological disposition of Black community as ascendant humanity in resistance against the structural-inert oppression inscribed in modernity as objective violence. The lived relevance of human ‘being’ as irreducible cipher of agency situated by a dialectic rhythm of intersubjective resonance with Others and intermediations with the world, encompasses the entirety of humanity. For authentic recognition of situated freedom as rational soul, is not only contingent upon recognition of such ‘presence-to-self’ in Others, but necessarily manifests itself against the Real through praxis, hence guaranteeing an inexhaustible reservoir of existential potentialities towards socio-historical liberation. This socio-ontological disposition is not only shared, but contributed too, by any who, in choosing to fight back against the abdication of human subjectivity-as-lived universal, engage in emancipatory praxis against western imperialist power. And yet, what is it about asserting the singularity of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ through emancipatory praxis that unleashes an exceptional antagonistic reciprocity against Empire towards new potentialities of human subjectivity-as-lived universal? How is it that Black liberation praxis, regardless of whether framed as ‘revolts against human slavery’, ‘maroonage’, ‘underground fugitive networks’, ‘abolitionism’, ‘civil war’, ‘civil rights struggle’, ‘Black power’, ‘ghetto rebellion’, ‘urban guerilla war’, or ‘decolonization’, historically functions with unrivalled potency as a radical catalyst of ascendant humanity against western imperialist power? “In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.” [12]
Insurrection-in-itself overcomes instrumentalist paradigms of beseeching established power for the attainment of objective political ends. As such, in solidarity with our brothers and sisters during “the riots in the UK” and “the Paris banlieues in 2005”, the postmodern lumpenproletariat have “no message to deliver” to the ruling power elite, for such a message would suggest the need for beginning a process of reasonable negotiations towards restoring ‘peace’ and ‘order’ within Empire. [13] Indeed, this insurgent “challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute.” [14] For no matter the diversity of its many discursive formulations, such “an original idea” finds its ultimate enunciation as egalitarian geonational community ad portas.
Through the lived dynamic correlation of ‘protest-as-resistance’ and spontaneous rebellion, an urgent ongoing communication ensues amongst the wretched of the earth situated throughout Empire: circulating between Los Angeles and Paris, between Tottenham and Ferguson, between Baltimore and Gaza, between New York City and Sao Paolo, between Chicago and Port-au-Prince. As such, choosing to draft “clear proposals” [15] with Molotov cocktails towards initiating small scale informal melees of exceptional antagonistic reciprocity between postmodern lumpenproletariat and neo-colonial police, forces the normative gaze of established power into an ‘official’ recognition of ascendant humanity through imperial declarations establishing an ‘official state of emergency’. This ‘official state of emergency’ translates the ‘unofficial’ exceptional antagonism initiated by the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ situated within modernity, from roaming socio-ontological coordinates of lived Black experience, into a comprehensive legal simulation of a territorially based suspension of Law as a ‘state of exception’ which thereby discloses the Real of our contemporary human situation. [16] “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain a consciousness of history that accords with this insight.” [17]
Indeed, any epistemological “difficulty in conceiving of ‘rioters’ in Marxist terms as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject” , [17] aside from presupposing that any vulgar strain of Marxism can grasp insurrection-in-itself on its own terms without being sufficiently ‘stretched’ to account for coloniality in the Raw, actually serves as an important reminder of existing emancipatory tensions, between oppositional stances of rebellion originating within the imperial mainstream against advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization, and insurgent orientations of Revolt originating from the socio-ontological underground of modernity against a western imperialist continuum. “Everything up to and including the very nature of pre-capitalist society, so well explained by Marx, must here be thought out again.” [18]
Rebellion originating from within the imperial mainstream is oppositional by remaining existentially limited through its shared adherence to a materialist determinism and ‘racist’ anthropology as generated and ratified by a western imperialist continuum, even while opposing the dictates of global capital with a competing state communist or redemptive state socialist version of modernity. “They cannot let go of the idee fixe of the white working class ‘saving’ the world’s humanity. Rooted in their preconceived notions, their undialectical ideas, is the deeply ingrained ‘white nation ideal.’ Socialism becomes, like capitalism, a white-nation conception, the great white working-class prerogative. The ‘white man’s burden’ shifts from the capitalists missionaries to the socialists revolutionaries, whose duty to history is to lift the ‘backward’ peoples from their ignominious state to socialist civilization – even if the whites have to postpone this elevation abroad until they have managed to achieve it at home.” [20]
Revolt originating from within the socio-ontological underground is insurgent by threatening an Overturning of the very paradigm of modernity itself. Thereby initiating lived potentialities for reconstituting human subjectivity-as-lived universal against the spiritual poverty of imperialist anthropology born out of concerted attempts towards a systematic violent grafting of human ‘being’ into ‘objecthood’ through chattel slavery which serves as historical precondition for the rise and triumph of global capital. [21]
As such, to suggest the supposed lack of any “visible attributes” in those whom Empire designates officially as “the enemy”, is not only socio-historically false, and ideologically misleading, but indicative of a self-defeating, yet long standing, tradition of exercising an inappropriate amount of epistemological reliance on a western imperialist continuum with the supposed aim of resisting, undermining, and reforming western imperialist power. How else could Zizek, supposedly ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the West’, actually comment on the Tottenham Rebellion ignited after the murder of Mark Duggan by neo-colonial police violence, by stating that “on British streets during the unrest, what we saw was not men reduced to ‘beasts’, but the stripped-down form of the ‘beast’ produced by capitalist ideology.” [22] This disparaging animalistic description of “what we saw”, discloses a shared anthropological orientation between Zizek’s allegedly radical discourse and the normative gaze of Empire in relation to the socio-ontological underground of modernity. Indeed, “at the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity”. [23]
This epistemological reliance on a western imperialist continuum again resurfaces as Zizek attempts to reduce insurrection-in-itself to an oddly coded deracialized fiction sounding eerily derivative of racist reactionary clichés of ‘Black on Black crime’. “The truth was that the conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged: those who have succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are too frustrated to go on trying. The rioters violence was almost exclusively directed against their own.” [24] There is an uncanny theoretical dexterity involved in Zizek’s reduction of protest-as-resistance and spontaneous rebellion to an “implicit admission of impotence” [25] by “rioters” [26] who in actuality communicated quite clearly that “their confrontations with the police made them feel ‘powerful’” [27] while “others described how they threw stones and bottles, rammed police with wheelie bins and shouted ‘F*ck the police.’ Some spoke of how they targeted police property, setting fire to and vandalizing cars, vans and police stations, or deliberately trying to inflict injury on officers.” [28] Even the Association of Chief Police Officers in Britain recognizes that “the disorder seen in August was unprecedented in its scale of violence and the way in which events escalated rapidly.” [29] Indeed, why were 16,000 British police needed to quell such an “implicit admission of impotence”?
As such, regardless of whether it is because of, or in spite of, Zizek’s philosophical leanings, neo-colonial police violence against human ‘being’ somehow becomes irrelevant in his critique, disappearing from the narrative entirely as the “two poles of the underprivileged” fighting amongst themselves reveals “the truth” of “the rioters violence” which is incredulously “not self-assertive”. [30] Is this Lacanian muthaf*cka not Hegelian enough to recognize an unceasing dialectic confrontation of recognition existing between western imperialist power attempting to sustain its ‘mastery’ over an ascendant humanity? “The Master can never detach himself from the World in which he lives, and if this World perishes, he perishes with it. Only the Slave can transcend the given World (which is subjugated by the Master and not perish. Only the Slave can transform the World that forms him and fixes him in slavery and create a World that he has formed in which he will be free. . . . Therefore, it is indeed the originally dependent, serving, and slavish Consciousness that in the end realizes and reveals the ideal of autonomous Self-Consciousness and is thus its ‘truth’.” [31] However, it is here that Douglass necessarily intervenes against Hegel and his interlocutors, for it is not through “the discipline of service and obedience” of slave labor that “the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is” and “acquires a mind of his own”. [32] Rather, it is through emancipatory praxis, “undignified as it was and as I fear was my narration of it”, in confrontation against “the unjust cruel aggressions of a tyrant” that initiates movement towards eclipsing the dialectic of Master and Slave from without, transcending mere role reversals of Master and Slave towards bringing about ‘the end of the world’ that is constituted by, and subsumed in, relations of power between Master and Slave. [33]
Against Mignolo’s sound critique of his work, Zizek quickly reaches for Fanon, ably defending himself, and rightfully berating postcolonial eunuchs like Bhabha for watering down Fanon’s insurgent philosophical orientation. And yet, when there is ‘protest-as-resistance’ and spontaneous rebellion Returning to source in the streets of a western imperialist metropole, Fanon is suddenly out of reach as Zizek gleefully fondles the most ungainly aspects protruding from Arendt’s lamentable discourse on violence and revolution. [34] Indeed, might the fact that Zizek’s intellectual engagement consists in discursively abandoning the wretched of the earth at the lived crossroads between radical theory and emancipatory praxis, be the very source of his popularity within the imperial mainstream? No doubt, there is a clear difference between being ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the West’ and being the most dangerous philosopher to western imperialist power.
As such, f*ck you Zizek, and the ghost of Stalin you rode in on. For as outcasts “outside organized social space” originating from within both extremes of human subjectivity as disenchanted from the imperial mainstream and disenfranchised from the underground of modernity, we postmodern lumpenproletariat definitively “fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’” than anything close to resembling the self-serving imperial complicity befitting good citizens of Empire. [35] Indeed, there is no ‘fixed’ objective truth to be found in rioting, rather, it is through ‘protest-as-resistance’ and spontaneous rebellion as insurrection-in-itself, that new potentialities of meaning are introduced to the radical imagination.
Nationalist partisan politics with supposedly “clear agendas” ,[36] merely shadow dance in subservience to global capital, as a ‘played out’ parliamentary beat of ‘civil society’ sampled from progressive Enlightenment mythology [37] which inspired previous generations towards culturally making the imperial mainstream more accessible to any who worship at the altar of Man-as-western bourgeois subjectivity. However, such sanguine ‘liberal-democratic’ posturing fundamentally ignores its continued symbiotic historical relation to contemporary reconfigurations of western imperialist power at lived expense of ascendant humanity. The once potent ‘wonderbread’ cultural nationalist theology of social recognition, spiritual assimilation, civic participation, and political representation, all coalescing under a biopolitical canopy of ‘whiteness’, no longer even suffices an imperial mainstream in severe anthropological panic faced with impending shrouds of economic austerity imposed by the ruling power elite.
However, in spite of tremendous ideological bombardment and vast imperial assimilationist efforts to the contrary, the overwhelmingly colored face of incarcerated humanity necessitating the preservation of Law and Order within a nation-state still preposterously claiming to be the global standard bearer of ‘liberal democratic’ utopian exceptionalism, explicitly discloses the ‘racially’ distinctive “visible attributes” that identify those of us who constitute the socio-ontological antithesis of maintaining a western imperialist continuum that is “safe from crime, safe from terrorists, safe from disorder”.
The globalized sovereignty of Empire-as-western imperialist power is thus clearly predicated upon the anthropological severance of the mainstream from the underground, particularly through the rational signification of subhumanity referred to as ‘race’ that sustains a biopolitical alterity generated by an overdetermination-from-without subsumed in the Raw of coloniality that utilizes ‘race’ as an infallible source of “visible attributes” from which to then dispense with brutality and injustice on precisely such grounds. “This is to say violence against Black people is ontological and gratuitous as opposed to ideological and contingent.” [38] Indeed, violence is contingent amongst relations within the lived hemisphere of mainstream imperial subjectivity. However, violence takes on a more objective character positioned at the lived crossroads between imperial mainstream and socio-ontological underground of modernity.
And yet, among the enduring images of the Ferguson Rebellion is one of a group of brothers lighting Molotov cocktails intent on Returning structural-inert violence back to source against neo-colonial police force, while a woman whom under the normative gaze is easily identified as ‘white’, is seen assisting in the background, engaged in emancipatory praxis with Black men distributing Molotov’s in confrontation against established unjust global power. Should it matter that she may not be from the same neighborhood as those brothers? Why exactly shouldn’t she be there assisting a struggle for human liberation? In what sense does her engagement in emancipatory praxis enunciate her understanding of human ‘being’? Is this a clear example of outside agitation? What then does it mean when it is precisely her outside agitation that situates her ‘being-in-the-world’ inside the trajectory of an ascendant humanity? Wherever humanity is oppressed, you will find those who refuse to sit back idly and rest on the anthropological guarantee of ‘white’ identity and imperial mainstream privilege as a tacit biopolitical coalition between ruling power elite and toiling proletariat masses against the socio-ontological underground of modernity. However, the question has never been whether or not ‘whites’ can overcome their ‘whiteness’ towards a shared humanity through engagement in emancipatory praxis, but rather, just how long they intend to sustain such egalitarian nobility by remaining locked arm and arm with arms in the struggle for human liberation once rounds of counterinsurgent blowback from globalized structural-inert power begin to focus in their direction?
Since its inception, the working class has continuously confronted the choice of whether to remain well behaved dutiful citizens subsisting on the economic leftovers of imperial hegemony, belligerent activists wanting to enjoy more and more of a just share of the economic spoils of Empire, or human ‘being’ uniting with the wretched of the earth on a trajectory of geonational insurrection-for-itself against a western imperialist continuum. Its glory days as a globally ‘racialized’ buffer class are nearing an ignominious end. [39]
As such, concern by Empire over “the population as insurgent force” is urgently distinct from concern over the population as ‘oppositional force’. Empire threatens opposition with assimilation, while simultaneously threatening insurgency with decimation, for should mainstream opposition and underground insurgency begin uniting through emancipatory praxis against western imperialist power, symbolic cultural progress cedes ground to lived socio-historical movement towards egalitarian geonational community. Indeed, J. Edgar Hoover’s declaration that “the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” [40] is no hyperbole. For by engaging in an exceptional antagonistic reciprocity fueled by the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ against western imperialist power, the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army were never an oppositional threat intent on taking over the nation-state apparatus, rather, as a protean cipher of emancipatory praxis facilitating a lived unity-in-diversity between postmodern lumpenproletariat elements within the imperial mainstream and the socio-ontological underground, they constituted an insurgent threat towards introducing geohistorical disequilibrium against the sovereign legitimacy of the nation-state paradigm itself.
Therefore, how is it that Assata Shakur peacefully living in Cuba as an exile still threatens established global unjust power? What then does recapturing Assata Shakur really mean to the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum? [41] And how is one supposed to interpret renewed attempts to round up, arrest and retry former Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army members based on false accusations and charges which didn’t even hold up back in 1971, as late as the year 2007? [42] Indeed, the sovereign prestige of Empire is invaluable, for “prestige bars any serious attack on power. . . . in the process of things, the prestige of power emerges roughly in that period when power does not have to exercise its underlying basis – violence.” [43] What Jackson surprisingly overlooks however, is how the normative gaze veils the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ with a coercive anonymity, thus allowing for a continuous renewal of structural-inert violence against humanity while simultaneously enjoying a sovereign prestige associated with maintaining the peace.
It is precisely this sovereign prestige-as-imperial peace which is perpetually called into question by the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ which constitutes an exceptional antagonism disclosing an anthropological “threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism” [44] which is imposed as biopolitical pacification upon a deterritorialized population through miseducation, surveillance, incarceration, torture, and accumulative slaughter. “Every fiction of a nexus between violence and Law disappears here: there is nothing but a zone of anomie, in which a violence without any juridical form acts.” [45]
Therefore, what are we really seeing during the Ferguson Rebellion? What does it mean when a Black woman faces heavily militarized neo-colonial police agents with guns drawn and aimed at her very humanity, with an unrepentantly emancipatory gaze and a welcoming gesture of resistance by raising her hands above her head while enunciating with forceful clarity: ‘Hands Up Don’t Shoot’? Is she not daringly beckoning these sentinels of Empire away from the shelter of sovereign prestige towards that precipice of anomie where an exceptional antagonistic reciprocity might resume as emancipatory praxis against western imperialist power? Through her gestures and enunciations Black community recognizes our own all too human agency, and through our emancipatory reawakening, ascendant humanity recognizes itself. Indeed, who dares lay claim to a historical narrative of human freedom, and yet still sit unmoved by the tragic execution of Darren Seals, a fundamental presence in the Ferguson Rebellion, found shot in the head inside a burning car, a week after neo-colonial police agents pulled guns on him and his fourteen year old brother with an overt warning to “pick your enemies better”. [46]
Protest-as-resistance questions the very premise of how violence without legalized form still persists with legal sanction, while spontaneous rebellion subsumes the precipice of anomie through the Return of oppressive violence back to source. Insurrection-in-itself thus introduces the conditions of possibility for a radical seizure of lived experience within the precipice of anomie, from an imperial hegemony embodied in neo-colonial police agents through whom Law is preserved by sovereign force that displaces the social function of ‘rights’ and historical relevance of ‘legality’, imposing relations of power that renew the topographical coherence and reconstitute the pure original violence of coloniality in the Raw. “The point is that the police – contrary to public opinion – are not merely an administrative function of law enforcement; rather, the police are perhaps the place where the proximity and the almost constitutive exchange between violence and right that characterizes the figure of the sovereign is shown more nakedly than anywhere else.” [47] As such, resisting neo-colonial police violence interrogates the socio-ontological reach and sovereign legitimacy of a western imperialist continuum.
Objective violence anchors the sovereign legitimacy of Empire to lived Black experience, gratuitously introducing modalities of ‘social death’ [48] in its wake which can only be overcome through emancipatory praxis. Indeed, authentic emancipatory praxis, because of the structural-inert relation between lived Black experience and modernity, does not cease with the prospect of freeing Black community from Empire in geohistorical exclusivity, although that is where we must necessarily begin; for Black liberation inherently contains within its emancipatory trajectory a socio-ontological imperative for the universal liberation of humanity itself. The burden of lived Black experience as human ‘being’ transcending an originary imposition of human enslavement by western imperialist power that structures the contemporary ordering of the world as modernity, consists in radical socio-ontological potentialities towards seizing responsibility for ensuring a universal trajectory of human liberation. Such is Toussaint’s Lament: What further tragedy awaits us, spread throughout the Black Diaspora, we who must shoulder the burden of asserting Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ and its geohistorical emancipatory implications against Empire?
The lived inertia to spiritually assimilate into an advanced neo-liberal capitalist hegemony has never been greater. And yet, it is precisely the Return of geohistorical momentum as manifest in the Ferguson Rebellion that intersubjectively resonates amongst the wretched of the earth with unprecedented socio-ontological gravity, inciting the radical imagination towards new potentialities of emancipatory praxis against Empire that shows no signs of abating. For the prestige of Empire erodes in confrontation against emancipatory praxis which transforms an exceptional antagonism into an exceptional antagonistic reciprocity, thus disclosing structural-inert dehumanizing violence masquerading as peacekeeping which is the very condition of its sovereign legitimacy.
Insurrection-in-itself enunciates the radical Yearning for discontinuity within a western imperialist continuum arising from the socio-ontological underground as emancipatory potentialities of human ‘being’ which are irredeemable within modernity as imposed by western imperialist power, thus necessitating a fundamental anthropological reorientation at the root of any geohistorical movement towards social justice. Insurrection-in-itself thus Returns to established unjust global power as an emancipatory correspondence of ascendant humanity disclosing waves of geohistorical transition repeatedly crashing against a western imperialist continuum, for even now, the shores of Empire are flooding with adversity . . .
[1] Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, (Semiotext, 2010) p.171.
[2] Tiqqun, p.117.
[3] Tiqqun, p.170.
[4] Tiqqun, “Counterinsurgent Reconfigurations of Empire”, THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, Vol.2, Issue#10, DEC/2013-FEB/2014. This is a revised English translation of what the French collective/journal Tiqqun published in 2001 as “and the State sank into the Imaginary Party” which relies heavily, though not exclusively on the excellent version found in Tiqqun, This Is Not A Program, (Semiotext, 2011) pp.92-99.
[5] ibid.
[6] nytimes.com, “N.Y.P.D. Plans Initiatives to Fight Terrorism and Improve Community Relations”, J. David Goodman, JAN. 29, 2015. Emphasis mine.
[7] gothamist.com, “A Visit With The ‘Goon Squad’: Meet The NYPD's Specially Trained Protest Police”, Scott Heins, DEC. 17, 2015.
[8] Jean Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, (Verso, 1960, 1991) p.720.
[9] Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, p.105.
[10] Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols, (Harvard University Press, 2003).
[11] Sartre, p.111.
[12] Karl Marx, Capital Vol.1, (Penguin Classics, 1976, 1990) p.925.
[13] Slavoj Zizek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite”, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, August 19, 2011. http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite
[14] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press, 1961) p.41.
[15] Zizek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite”.
[16] “Being-outside, and yet belonging – this is the topological structure of the state of exception.” Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, (University of Chicago Press, 2005) p.35
[17] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol.4, 1938-1940, (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) p.392.
[18] Zizek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite”.
[19] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press, 1961) p.40.
[20] Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revoulution, (Apollo Editions, 1968) p.149.
[21] “Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilization. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World.” – Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, (Prometheus Books, 1847, 1995) p.121-2.
[22] Zizek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite”.
[23] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (Vintage Books, 1966, 1994) p.261.
[24] Zizek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite”.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] UK Riots 2011: Reading the Riots, “English riots were ‘a sort of revenge’ against the police”, THE GUARDIAN, December 4, 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/05/riots-revenge-against-police
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Zizek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite”.
[31] Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, (Cornell University Press 1947, 1969) p.29-30.
[32] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p.118.
[33] Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies, 1845, 1855, 1881, (Library of America, 1994) p.591.
[34] Katherine Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, (Indiana University Press, 2014) pp.93-111.
[35] Zizek “Shoplifters of the World Unite”.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (Herder and Herder, 1944, 1972).
[38] Frank B. Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?”, SOCIAL IDENTITIES, Vol.9, #2, 2003. See also THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, Vol.2, Issue#1, DEC/2009-FEB/2010.
[39] “Therefore, any conception of "socialist revolution" simply in terms of the working people of the United States, failing to recognize the full scope of interests of the most oppressed peoples of the world, is a conception of a fight for a particular privileged interest, and is a very dangerous ideology. While the control and use of the wealth of the Empire for the people of the whole world is also in the interests of the vast majority of the people in this country, if the goal is not clear from the start we will further the preservation of class society, oppression, war, genocide, and the complete emiseration of everyone, including the people of the US.” Karin Asbley, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Home Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd, Steve Tappis, “Weatherman Manifesto”, New Left Notes, June 18, 1969.
[40] United Press International (UPI) in “FBI Director Blacks Black Panthers,” Oakland Tribune, July 15, 1969, 17. Much respect to Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. and their outstanding work Black Against Empire for unearthing the actual source article.
[41] In 2013 Shakur’s bounty was raised to 2 million dollars and her name is still included in both domestic and international lists of ‘terrorists’. Nick Chiles, “FBI Puts 2 Million Bounty on Assata Shakur, Calls Her Most Wanted Terrorist”, atlantablackstar.com.
[42] Jaxon Van Derbeken and Marisa Lagos, “Ex-Militants Charged in S.F. Police Officer’s ’71 Slaying at Station”, SFGATE.com, 1-23-2007. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Ex-militants-charged-in-S-F-police-officer-s-71-2654930.php
[43] George Jackson, Blood in My Eye, (Black Classics Press, 1971) p.50.
[44] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, p.3.
[45] Agamben, p.59.
[46] shout out to The Advise Show TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Td4GXhaac
[47] Agamben, Means Without End, (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) p.103.
[48] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, (Harvard University Press, 1982).
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