FRANK B. WILDERSON III
SUMMER 2020
SUMMER 2020
Quinn Andrew Hughes: I'm really glad to hear that! I'm happy that we get this chance to talk face to face. Your participation in and speaking to the debate community has been so active, and I'm really glad that we get this time to talk. I am very excited to get into the meat of our interview today, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about how much I enjoyed reading this book — in large part because you are an excellent writer, and also because the book is organized in a very compelling way. It is written as a memoir, and the narrative is the heart that drives the book, but it is told through the lens of Afropessimism. Going into the book, I have to say I was almost nervous, because I didn't really know what to expect. Was the theory going to be heavy-handed and overwhelm the autobiographical portion of the text? Or was the narrative going to act as a substitute for theory? But truly neither is really the case. The theory acts as a lens by which to read the narrative, and that really blew me away. Another compelling element of this writing style is that both elements of the text complement each other — the narrative is illuminated by theoretical insight, and the theory is made more material and fleshed out by the narrative, lending itself to a very full, robust, and truly unique text. What I want to spend a little bit of time talking about is how you came to write this book. Why did you feel that this was the moment — in your life, and in the climate of Black studies as a discipline — that this book needed to be written?
FW: Well, actually, to be honest with you, I was writing a purely academic monograph at the time. It was probably April or March of 2017 when it all changed. Since you are a debater and you all just tear through critical theory tremendously — you and some of your comrades in debate have read the three articles I've written, which are sort of metaphorical interpretations of the Black Liberation Army, not in terms of their tactics, but in terms of what it means to be Black and insurgent in a world where most people who are insurgents are fighting against capitalism or colonialism. But a Black insurgent is against the world, even if he, she, or they think of themselves as a Marxist-Leninist. So I was trying to interrogate that, and I thought it might become my next academic book. I was also working on a novel, and to be honest with you, Afropessimism — which I am very proud of — wasn't planned. The New Press in New York called me and wanted a collection of critical essays for a trade publication, meaning it has to be written at a language and thinking level for a junior in college who, they said, is riding the bus and does not have a thesaurus or dictionary available — as opposed to an academic book pitched at a professor or graduate student level. What they didn't know is that there are debaters who are juniors in college and juniors in high school who read more abstractly than most professors. They just meant the ordinary junior in college. So I thought, okay, a good way to get more exposure and gain a wider audience — and I began to think about that, and I got an agent. As time went on, I really just began to meld anecdotes and stories that would help illustrate some of the abstract theories of social death and gratuitous violence. I was very fortunate to connect with Liveright, where there was an editor, Bob Weil, who is about my age — I'm 64, I just turned 64 in April of this year, 2020, and he will turn 65 in September. So we have gone through some of the same processes and histories. Not only that, but he had edited a lot of major Black intellectuals over the past 30 years, like Robin Kelly and Henry Louis Gates, so it was a really good connection. He was a great novel editor and a great non-fiction editor, and he knew exactly what autotheory should be. In the past five years, there has probably been only one autotheory book on the market, which was Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. He was really instrumental in supporting me to not have a subtitle for this book — to make it an emphatic, one-word statement. Very few editors and very few agents understood that; they felt that Afropessimism as a one-word statement was not going to connect with readers. But he was old enough and savvy enough to agree with me that we could have one word. And to remember the moment in 1978 when Edward Said came out with one word — "Orientalism" — just one word. That book launched a revolution in academia, what we call today postcolonial studies. So that's part of the background.
QH: It is very interesting hearing you talk about how you came to write this specific book. What stood out to me — and as I'm talking to friends who have read the book — is the way that it flows. You talk about writing a novel before this, and you are writing a memoir as a core element of this book, and I'm wondering if you would be able to talk a bit about inspiration? With theory, inspiration can look like writing with someone, or applying your own thoughts to a text. But with memoir and novel writing, inspiration can come from life or from music. Where do you find inspiration, and how do you translate that into your work?
FW: Yes, and this is very relevant for you, Quinn, because of who you are — a young writer — and some of the other people on your debate team generally speaking. You write for two languages at two different times. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, which most high school and college debaters mobilize around, including my articles, is written in what we would call a provocative manner — it is meant to provoke your analysis. Whereas Incognegro is actually meant to evoke, by connecting the emotions and heartstrings of the reader. So what we wanted to do was meld the two together — to provoke and to evoke. In semiotics, what you have are processes of signification. If you think of Freud's topography of the mind, there is preconscious interest, then unconscious identification, then the structural position of the subject. What you learn in semiotics is that preconscious interest is a mode of signification called secondary processes of signification, and that is 99 percent of the way you all win or lose debates — by returning ideas, thoughts, and fantasies to relational logic, dividing concepts so that they don't mesh together into nonsense. You start off the year with affirmative or negative. Right there, the way the question is posed to you as a debater at the very beginning of the year is posed through secondary processes of signification. That's really good because it is necessary to communicate. Secondary processes of signification are part of what's called the combination of the conscious and preconscious mind. It is the way you in Evanston can understand me in Irvine, in Orange County, California. As I'm speaking to you, I am speaking through the logic of separation and comparison — which is to say that at a minute scale of abstraction, I'm using grammar to make sure that as I speak to Quinn across the airwaves, I don't confuse subjects, predicates, nouns, and verbs. They are all separated in their proper places in a sentence. The fact that I don't have to think about it simply means that the structure of grammar, which represses the nonsensical utterances that I might have in a dream or with a slip of the tongue, keeps everything separate so you actually hear the categories in the proper order and in the proper places, and you know exactly what I'm saying — and you come back to me with the same grammatical structure, and I know exactly what you are saying. But that is only one part of the mind, and it is also the part of the mind least susceptible or least alive to laughter, sorrow, tears, heartbreak, and joy. The other part of the mind, of course, is the unconscious, and that is ruled or governed by primary processes of signification. Primary processes of signification are the ways in which the unconscious uses the tools of the symbolic order to move as quickly as possible to the most joyous, least painful place of conceptualization. For example, you are up all night, tired, studying for the SAT exam, and so your mind tells you through primary process of signification, "Quinn, what we really want to do is go to the refrigerator and get a piece of chocolate and turn on Netflix." Or in a dream, your mind tells you, "It would be nice to have lunch with the Kaiser on a seaside restaurant in Washington state." All those things can happen because the processes of division necessary to make communication whole and proper between two subjects are completely annulled — I said "annoyed" instead of "annulled," and that was the primary process of signification at work. So what you have is a situation in which the unconscious really just wants its fantasies and its pleasures, and it uses signification to get there as quickly as possible, but it doesn't really care about a future life as a student at USC or NYU, or a future life as a professor. It says, "Right now, I want it." Both of those things are part of the subject, and in debate you're really moving 99 percent of the time through secondary processes of signification — you have to win through division, through separation, through the argumentation of categories. But in literature — such as poetry, which is the most pristine form, but also novels — you have what's called facilitation. Facilitation is a kind of language that takes both secondary and primary processes of signification and makes them into one process. Facilitation shows up least, and almost not at all, in mathematical equations, and it shows up most in what psychoanalysts call dreamwork. Those are the two poles, and when you bring them both together, you have facilitation, which allows for a kind of language process that does not scuttle relational logic — that does not scuttle division because it wants the reader to understand — but it brings in the emotional impact of dreamwork into the same sentence or same rhyme. That can be, if you get it right, a very powerful kind of annunciation, because the listener or reader can both understand and feel. I was really attuned to how to orchestrate facilitation, and you've told me I did a good job, so I accept it.
QH: When you talk about the ability to access this middle ground between primary and secondary signification, it makes me think a lot about the work of Black artists — specifically Nina Simone, when she is writing these extremely powerful protest songs animated by a type of spirituality, a type of physical place that is only accessed by what you describe as primary signification, something deep within. I'm wondering if there are Black musicians, filmmakers, or visual artists who inspire you to get to that space? What are the tools you're using when you sit down to write, to really be able to access that perfect moment when you find yourself in a state where you can write consistently at that level?
FW: That's very perceptive — you're absolutely right about that. I was fortunate to go to college from '74 to '78. Of course, reading the book, you know I got kicked out in '78 and had to come back and finish — technically I went from '74 to '80, with two years of expulsion in between. Nina Simone used to come and rock our campuses, and there was something at the level of understanding: we knew the words were revolutionary, but it hit at a gut level as inspirational. For me, the primary person is Sarah Vaughan — you can find a New York Times interview I did on April 5th in which I talked about it. I like the way in which she can draw out a word through a moan. I like the gravitas, the way she can both speak about suffering and make it beautiful at the same time. You are exactly right — there is dreamwork going on, and at the same time I am understanding what she is saying. It's because of her register, which somehow hits my register. Her words go on to make me want to write.
QH: I think that is done really well in the book. The time it is most salient for me is when you are writing about your childhood — writing about growing up. For myself, and for readers in general, I'm drawn back to a place where I was young and coming into the world and beginning to have this understanding that the people moving on the TV screen or talking on the radio have some type of relationship to myself and it's not just noise. I think your ability to write not just with the perspective of yourself as an adult, but also knowing where the text is going theoretically — setting yourself up and writing about your childhood — is really intentional and really beautiful. You have a section of the book to read: this scene with you as a child, with your grandmother, watching the news with the footage of the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King. I'm wondering if you could give us a little bit of context for this passage and read it aloud for us.
FW: Thank you very much for those kind words. I'm really just astounded at the level of rigor that high school debaters in particular, and college debaters, bring — I thought to myself, wow, what was I doing when I was 17? That is a very interesting passage. It was April 1968, and Martin Luther King had been assassinated. As most of your comrades know, this was a tumultuous year. '68 is the year that things change. When you all read Derrida, when you read Foucault, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss — this is the year that the engine of critical theory really takes a turn, because of all the things happening in the world. Less than 12 months before, Che Guevara had been assassinated in Bolivia. About three months before this episode, Americans had finally awoken to the fact that they were not an invincible army — that the Tet Offensive had actually moved the territorial capture of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army to several miles outside of Saigon, that's how far south they had been driven. The Joint Chiefs of Staff would tell Nixon, somewhere around his January '69 inauguration, that his request to mobilize 500,000 more troops to Vietnam simply couldn't happen because there were revolutionaries in the streets. White college students had bombed 3,000 state and corporate establishments across the country — if you can imagine what this year was like. The American Indian Movement started up in Minneapolis. Urban unrest rocked the country. It's very much like this year in some ways, except with more overt political direction, and the powers that be thought their entire edifice was about to crumble. So I am 12, it is 1968, I have been living in an all-white neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota for the past six years, since '62, and it has been hard and not fun. My grandmother has come up from New Orleans — she's about my age now, about 64 at that time — and we are watching the riots.
[Excerpt from Afropessimism]
I turned twelve in April, the same day Congress passed the Fair Housing Act and seven days after the murder of Martin Luther King. I watched the riots on television with my grandmother, a New Orleans Catholic who had taught second grade and at one time played piano with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Grandmother Jules loved all kinds of sports. Her husband, 2-2 Jules (named for his ability to strike out a batter every time the call was two balls and two strikes) turned down an invitation to join the Negro National League and worked the rails as a porter, and then as a plasterer when the Great Depression came. But he died in 1968. When Grandmother Jules came north to visit us, she spent time with me and my father watching baseball, football, and basketball, and never hunted for antiques with my mother, her daughter. She loved pickled pigs' feet and a beer called Hamm's, which was brewed across the river in St. Paul.
The murder of Martin Luther King and the Tet Offensive changed my family's relationship to radio and TV. My parents listened for my uncle's name in the nightly broadcasts of casualties. My grandmother and I watched the riots.
One night her feet shot up from the easy chair and damn near knocked her beer and pigs' feet off the TV dinner tray. As I steadied the table, she laughed like I'd never seen her laugh before.
"Go ahead, son!" she cried.
I'd heard her say this many times over, whenever Tony Oliva made a base hit, or when Gale Sayers ran for a touchdown. But neither Oliva nor Sayers were on the screen. I caught her joy and laughed out loud too. A knot loosened in my chest, a phantom tumor that had been there since first grade. We were watching the riots, and my grandmother laughed my pain away. If I said that for the past six years I'd hated the vast majority of students and half the teachers at my school, I would be lying; it was never that straightforward. But it would be accurate to say that I was never at ease in their presence; and since their faces were with me even when I was not with them, it would also be true to say that I was seldom, if ever, at ease.
"Go ahead, son!"
She wasn't talking to me, she was talking to the man on the screen; but, at that moment, she and I were triangulated with that man on the screen. And I felt loved.
I'd like to say the city on the screen was Cleveland, but it could have been Detroit; D.C.; Cincinnati; Chicago; Kansas City; Baltimore; Pittsburgh; Trenton, New Jersey; or Wilmington, Delaware. It could have been anywhere and everywhere. No fires were visible, but smoke plumed over ruined buildings. Skid marks scarred the street where a shirtless man with a do-rag snapped around his conk nosed a shopping cart down the boulevard. Grandmother Jules laughed like her chest was full of carbonation. I knew there and then that for me the priesthood was dead. I was going to grow up to be a looter and make my grandma proud.
Our racket roused the killjoy giants who owned the house. My mother came downstairs and told her mother not to say such things. I saw my mother in silhouette framed by the living room's sliding French doors, with light from the dining room at her back. She was graceful even when she was still. She and Dad modeled in fashion shows that the Boulé and the Links, two of the Black middle-class social groups to which they belonged, put on. The whole room hushed when the two of them came down the catwalk. Mom's friends said she looked like Donyale Luna, who took the world by storm in 1966 when she became the first Black woman to grace the cover of Vogue. And I struggled to see how the blood in my mother's light skin and slender body was the same blood that ran through my grandmother, who was short and dark, sucked juice from a neck bone, and stomped the damper pedal when she played the piano. At the age of thirty-six, my mother stood in the threshold, framed by her reproach, and spoke to her sixty-three-year-old mother as though their ages were reversed. My grandmother and I looked at her like two kids caught being naughty.
"Don't say that, Mother. Next thing you know he'll be saying that at school. He's wayward enough as it is."
When we turned back to the television, the man with the conk, the do-rag, and the shopping cart was gone. Mom went upstairs and we went back to our antics.
"Why are we mad?" I asked my grandmother as we gazed at the plumes of smoke rising from the flat roofs. "Because we ain't got no jobs?" I said, giggling and looking cautiously at the French doors for signs of my mother and her citation for "ain'ts."
"No," grandmother replied, "it's not about jobs."
"Because we ain't got no hot water?"
"It's not about water, child."
"Because we live in the ghetto."
"Frankie, you're not in the ghetto," she said with a chuckle, "and you're mad."
Then, on the count of three, we said, "We're mad at the world!" From the top of the staircase we heard, "Mother, please!"
It would, though, be a stretch to say that my grandmother was an Afropessimist. But Afropessimism isn't a church to pray at, or a party to be voted in and out of office. Afropessimism is Black people at their best. "Mad at the world" is Black folks at their best. Afropessimism gives us the freedom to say out loud what we would otherwise whisper or deny: that no Blacks are in the world, but, by the same token, there is no world without Blacks. The violence perpetrated against us is not a form of discrimination; it is a necessary violence; a health tonic for everyone who is not Black; an ensemble of sadistic rituals and captivity that could only happen to people who are not Black if they broke this or that "law." This kind of violence can happen to a sentient being in one of two circumstances: a person has broken the law, which is to say, cracked out of turn given the rules that govern; or the person is a slave, which is to say, no prerequisites are required for an act of brutality to be incurred. There is no antagonism like the antagonism between Black people and the world. This antagonism is the essence of what Orlando Patterson calls "social death," or "deathliness" in the words of David Marriott. It is the knowledge and experience of day-to-day events in which the world tells you you are needed, needed as the destination for its aggressivity and renewal.
* * *
QH: What I love about this excerpt is the phrase "Afropessimism is Black people at their best," and what I like about this sentiment is that it undercuts the idea that Afropessimism is a static intellectual discipline that has been invented over the past 20 years by Black intellectuals, because I feel that this is not the case. Your work, and the work of Saidiya Hartman, and the work of others in the field, has definitely saturated these sentiments and put them in a very specific context, but to me, Afropessimism is a theme and a life force that animates the Black radical tradition — and it is truly Black people at our best. So I am wondering how you came to this phrase and what it means to you?
FW: Okay, so what it means to me is that you and I exist in a cartographic — which is spatial — and temporal carcerality, which is to say we are always in prison. And the hydraulics of the prison experience are going to be different for you, as a high school student in a college town like Evanston, than for me as a professor in Irvine, than for someone literally behind bars. The actual first principles of that incarceration are the same, just as the experience of someone in a sweatshop is going to be different from the experience of a middle manager or a professor in Stockholm, but the first principle of capitalism — to extract surplus value from the labor time of the laborer — is going to be the same. So what that means specifically, coming also to your question, is that we are never in a space or time when we can speak freely. We always have to negotiate what the non-Black listener can take — in other words, what can they take emotionally? We have to know that. So it's part of our linguistic and performative DNA. We don't have to know it consciously; in fact, if we knew it consciously, it would be clunky, like grammar. You and I have never, since we began this broadcast, said anything about grammar, but we have been deploying proper grammar all the way through, which is precisely why we are getting across to each other. We don't carry the structure of grammar in our minds, but we know that there are real consequences — real consequences — if you are signing a contract, or talking to the police. So one of the things about being Black is that you really have to be, from a very early age, attentive to just how much of your life you can give to the listener. This is what James Baldwin says in terms of why he stopped being friends with Norman Mailer — because every time he started talking about Black suffering, Norman Mailer, who wanted to be known as the white negro, would translate that into something from his own experience, and if it went beyond that, Mailer would become irritated. And there are all kinds of things that Baldwin needed from Mailer — he needed the little cabin in the back of Mailer's house to write one of his novels. So, what would it be like if we spoke without considering the proper grammatical construction of the rules of engagement between non-Black people and civil society, between us and civil society? What would that look like? And sometimes we see glimmers of it. We can always see it in music, especially instrumental music, but also in ballads and songs, because whatever we put through in that music, the pleasures of reception for non-Black people allow them to not be attentive to the rage, or the suffering. But we can't really do that very easily in the written word or the spoken word — they are going to get it immediately and they can become very pissed off. So, for example, I live in a condo on the University of California Irvine campus, it is a housing complex for professors and staff, and when I saw the police station burning in Minneapolis, I wanted to go out in the courtyard and scream. I don't get to do that. But when the First Gulf War started in January 1991 and Navy ships off the coast of Iraq were sending guided missiles to bomb targets, they got to jump up and down with joy at what CNN was calling the pleasures of what was called "1,000 points of light." So they get to have joy and open expression — and this is what David Marriott means by the fantasies of non-Black people that have objective value — and I have to be very careful. And so in the episode that you had me read, this was a moment when my grandmother did not have to be careful about expressing joy at the sight of America burning. That's Black people at their best. So Afropessimism as a critical theory acknowledges those moments which would otherwise have to be policed — sometimes for bad reasons and sometimes for good reasons. My mother comes down to police her mother and me for what she thinks are good reasons, because at that point Bobby Seale has just been among the first Black Panthers murdered in Oakland, and so we are getting gunned down in the streets for uttering these things, not even for putting them into action. So I think that we are not going to get to a revolutionary praxis until we are able to not take account of what our non-Black listeners can handle when we speak — not take that into account, but simply take into account: what would animate Quinn? What would animate Frank? The hell with everybody else.
QH: Right! And I think one thing that's interesting to me is when you talk about that kind of dangerous act — that radical act of what Afropessimism does in pushing that as possibility. It's interesting when you talk about instrumental music, that it also kind of gets at that rage that's there, but it kind of goes undercover, or slips past in an inconspicuous way. I think of the scenes of some of the first house music parties in Chicago and in Detroit, which is a Black music form, but now you see white kids in Europe going to raves — it's Black music. Or Jazz clubs, like the Cotton Club in New York City, where it's a Black band and white people dancing to it. And I think that's really astute. When you talk about language and grammar, Afropessimism — and theory in general — is in large part a language, and it's a grammar to articulate violence. In the book you write about rhetoric and about how language shaped how you think at a young age. Specifically, I am interested in the languages used by people who were influential to you — the languages used by your grandmother, then the Black Panthers in Seattle. You talk about Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. I'm wondering how these languages of love, care, community, and rage grew to shape Afropessimism as a discipline. One thing that I think about is when you talk about this idea that Afropessimism allows Black folks to speak to what had only been whispered. For me, before I had read or engaged with your work, the work of Saidiya Hartman, the work of Fred Moten, and a lot of the work of Arthur Jafa, the filmmaker — the moments that I see on the news, or the moments that I might read in a book, or hear in music, that get at the same themes of Afropessimism — Nina Simone saying, for example, "I wish I knew how it feels to be free," and then coming to the conclusion at the end of the song, "I know how it feels to be free" — these moments that we constantly come in contact with, I think Afropessimism puts a lens on or puts a framework to, that condenses it and puts it in a very specific orientation. Once it becomes condensed, it is shocking. But it's not necessarily shocking in the sense that something new is being presented — rather it's shocking in the sense that it confirms that fear, especially the reaction of non-Black folks. When you describe that conference in Germany (editor's note: in the book, Frank recounts a conference in Germany with other non-Black American academics when he presented a talk on Afropessimism; many of the academics were enraged with him and the scholarship he presented) — it's not the fear that this is a completely radical or new idea, but the fear that that subconscious, or that primary process of signification that they sit with from a very early age, is real, and that other people recognize it, and that maybe they haven't been as good at the act or the performance as they thought they were.
QH: So when you talk about narrative in the book — and because the book is so constructed in narrative — it's really interesting how the work of narrative writing interacts with how you theorize about narrative. When you write in the book, and I'm kind of paraphrasing, in the altercation that happened between you and your partner Stella, the engagement in the complex in Minneapolis that escalated to violence reaches its climax, and you say that it's hard to mold why this violence happens into narrative because violence and narrative must have an explanation, a contingent movement that makes it make sense. But for anti-Blackness, you say that this logic bleeds out beyond its actors, its immune to logic, and you write: "it presents the rules of narrative with a crisis; because what we have is a situation that resists retelling, for the simple reason that narrative's causal principle, the ghost in the machine we call the causal logic (or 'because principle') of the story, is missing. This is how a Black story is jinxed. There is no ghost in the machine; the reason for the violence is beyond the grasp of reason. There's nothing 'universal' about it; therefore, the only way to make it intelligible is to leave out the parts that may only be accepted by another Black person, and even then discreetly." My question is: for you as someone who builds theory from the narrative of others — as you do with the portion about 12 Years a Slave — but also as someone who writes their own narrative in tandem with the theory, what is it like to engage with Black narrative as a substance that is so challenging to wrestle with? Especially when you talk about this resistance that is intrinsic to it — this resistance to capital-L Logic, capital-E Explanation — what is that process like for you?
FW: Yeah, thank you very much. I really like what you brought me back to, both in reading parts of the book as you did and in your own framing of it, which is most important. One of the things about Afropessimism as a critical theory is that what I'm really saying — and what Saidiya Hartman is really saying, and what Jared Sexton is saying — is that Afropessimism claims and argues not the totality of Black experience, but the truth of Black experience, the truth of Black life. This is very difficult for someone other than yourself to accept and get through, but most Marxists understand that kind of logic — it's just that they are resistant to bring it over to Blackness. They actually understand that if you read volume one of Capital and see that value is not organic, not real or concrete, but is the creation of the capitalist's extraction of what's called socially necessary labor time from a certain species of people, then every person who's a worker is this species — they put in what's called "socially necessary labor time" to produce surplus value. No Marxist worth his, her, or their salt would say, "Well, that's going to be different for a sweatshop worker than a professor in Stockholm." Nor would they say, "That's going to be different for a worker in the Ku Klux Klan or a fascist, and a worker who is part of antifa or a communist." They say, "No — regardless of what the person thinks about themselves, and regardless of the lived experience of labor, this is the law that governs the truth of the paradigm." So if you then come over and say, "Regardless of whether someone is Candace Owens as a Trump supporter, regardless if someone is Quinn Hughes" — do you have a summer job I can name, or something like that? Yeah, okay — if you work at Burger King or something — regardless if you are Frank Wilderson, there is a truth to the rules of subjugation, which is called Blackness, and that's all it is, that's all we're saying. It really doesn't matter what the Black person thinks of themselves, it doesn't matter where they live, just like it doesn't matter if you are a worker in Bali or a worker in Greenland — there is the truth of the paradigmatic position. And part of the truth of the paradigmatic position of Blackness is — this is kind of like a double negative — the absence of the ability to make sense of violence. That is at the core. The absence of the ability to make sense of violence. As a person who has trained in narratology and as a fiction writer with an MFA from Columbia, what I am most interested in is not the successes of slave narratives, not the success of protest novels from the 1950s and 1960s — even though without those writers I couldn't be what I am — but the failures. And what do I mean by the failures? So I don't talk forever, I'm going to give a little anecdote. In the book 12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup keeps writing about violence — people being whipped at night, yanked out of bed for whippings. He talks about the Epps household, so that in the evening he can hear wails up and down that little stretch of the Mississippi River. He talks about Mary Epps and Edwin Epps and their children going for a picnic and on their way stopping at the slave quarters and yanking people out to do family whippings. He talks about the ten-year-old boy riding on his pony and making an old man walk with him through the fields while people are working so he can whip them, the old man performing the labor of a chorus, saying "You're a fine going boy" as he is whipping the very people the old man is going to have to come back at night and sleep beside and put salve on their backs. And so, the logic of the Marxist would say that the violence of slavery is for better productivity. And even before 12 Years a Slave was a movie, we know from little snippets in the first volume of Capital — when Marx is reflecting on his time as a journalist for the New York Herald — that he can't get it through his head: the logic of violence against slaves. Because, as Marx says, it's counterproductive. It makes no sense — people are not able to do the kind of work necessary to industrialize this part of the economy, given the level of violence that he sees taking place when he is in America. And so the narrative of Black writers also fails to make sense of that by reporting on it without fully reckoning with it. And then you get from the book to the movie, and the movie's corruption is even worse — even though there is a lot I like about the film — in which they actually have to juxtapose the inability to pick 500 pounds of cotton in a day with the whippings. No. The whippings produce a sense of presence and pleasure for the people who are doing it. It's part of the family integrity, the family values — it makes relationships whole and produces pleasure. And it is not contingent upon not picking enough cotton, it is not contingent upon disobeying the master — it is gratuitous, it is prelogical, in the words of Orlando Patterson. And so what I didn't want to do is fall into the trap of imposing the logic of contingency onto anti-Black violence. But here is the end of what I want to say: the problem with that is that the structure of storytelling — or, as Roland Barthes would say, the narratology of discourse — requires an arc, and the arc has to make sense of the incursion. So people are genocided because the settler wants their land, or lynched because they crossed the border illegally — and so narrative, before we even put anything in the story, works through contingent violence and the sense-making of oppression. This is why Afropessimism is so disturbing to the logic of debate, because debate — the question and the answer — works through the narrative of contingent violence. I wanted to find a way — because I'm seduced by narrative as much as anyone else, it is an important part of my life. I love good stories; stories don't love me. So that's why I had to interrupt it with the theory, and that's why there's no denouement at the end.
QH: That's really interesting to me, especially when you talk about this impulse to contingency. And I think when Black narrative becomes Hollywoodized, to a certain degree, that is done in a really violent way. When you talk about the enslaved woman who is forced into relations with the master, and it's because she is — in the white articulation of why these relations occur — "beautiful." I think that is one of the most pernicious and violent articulations that we see regularly. My question for you is: how do we engage in Black storytelling? How do we engage with that narrative? Is there a way for us, as an intramural, to resist the imposition of these types of contingencies or these logics? And how do we go about articulating Black narratives in a way that might resist that violence?
FW: I'm struggling through the weeds, trying to find out how to tell it, like you are — and I'm 50 years older than you! I'm just trying. In other words, it's like we have gauze on our eyes. We might be at the point of a new epistemological break, but we won't know until we're on the other side, and then 50 years out. It's a very interesting question. I do think that you — people like you — are doing the work. I think that in 2008 when the Towson debate team won a championship tournament against the Harvard team, that was the first step. What we're seeing now is the Blackening of national debate. It's been going on for a good 10 years or so, and part of that has been that never before, in debate, have college or high school debaters won by refuting the question. Y'all are doing that work — by saying "We are not going to go affirmative or negative," but rather "the question is a murderous juggernaut to Black existence and here is how we are going to interrogate it." Hats off to the judges who allowed that to happen. I must admit, you are in the thick of it at Northwestern, one of the universities that wanted to make that kind of approach illegal, where some professors wanted to have a whole other debate society if you weren't going to make it illegal to interrogate the question. So I'm stumble-bumbling through your answer because I don't have a concrete answer for that. But what I do personally is look at my spiritual progenitors, who happen to be Assata Shakur and James Baldwin. I don't mean everything they've written — Assata Shakur's autobiography, and James Baldwin wrote a book called Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, which was a book he wrote in '68. It's kind of a turning point, because it's the first book in which the book itself makes an argument that brings our struggle into view in some way. And then later the book The Evidence of Things Not Seen, about the Atlanta Child Murders, in which he finally moves away from love and makes a statement: "This is what America does — it kills our children. It's part of the DNA of America." And so one of the things I do is say to myself, "Okay, you've got a book like Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, you've got a book like Assata Shakur's autobiography, you've got a book like Solomon Northup's 12 Years a Slave — what are the places that the book could have gone, but the writing was so afraid of, that it turned back? What are those places? What are they like structurally? And how can I then go into the abyss that they were too afraid to go into?" Because this is terrifying material. But more than likely what happens — and I remember we started this conversation by saying our speech is always under coercion — normally when you are in the writing process of a book, it is the editors and the publisher who put the kibosh on the kind of open-ended, non-reconciliation. They make you show some way that things are going to get better. So we are just not allowed to imagine that on the page. And so I feel that it's my duty to go further than they could, even if I don't know exactly how I'm going to do that. And then you will come along, and go further than I could.
QH: I really appreciate that articulation, and I think a lot about the folks you referenced — specifically James Baldwin. He's got this story "Sonny's Blues," in which a fictionalized narrator talks about his brother who is a drug addict and a jazz player. They always had this tension between them because the narrator is a school teacher and has lived a straight path with his family, but he goes and sees Sonny play, and he talks about going to the jazz club and being washed in water while listening to this music, going deeper into the water. And I think that for me is evidence that this space exists — this acknowledgement that this space exists. When you talk about this redemptive arc, the radicalness of the ability to speak to the fact that there is this space of what you describe as the abyss — I'd like to circle back to when you are talking about the Epps family in 12 Years a Slave, and when you are talking about these moments of familial pleasure. There is a quote in the book that the family is "in their pleasure." When you talk about gratuitous violence and pleasure as entangled with one another, the term you use to describe this is "jouissance." I am wondering if you would be able to speak a bit to how jouissance operates in these scenes, but I'm really interested to hear you talk about why jouissance and violence are a necessary familial fixture for whiteness and civil society.
FW: You got all of them today. I'm giving you a backhanded compliment. Okay, so the first point — I'm going to ask your comrades to do a little more work on this. There's a tiny little book called A Beginner's Guide to Lacan — that's all it's titled. And the writer is Bailey — B-a-i-l-e-y — and it's also an audiobook. Whenever I do the psychoanalytic stuff I kind of have to go back to it, so some of the things I'm going to say are not completely fleshed out. Part of the problem with the word "jouissance" is that it's a French word that doesn't fully translate into English. It's a mode of pleasure from the unconscious, but one feels it in the body. English translations typically translate it as "enjoyment," but in French it's much more nuanced than that. It also has a jurisprudential meaning, so that when you put the two together, it turns into the enjoyment of one's property — I mean that very crudely. Part of why I want people to know that book is that you have to understand what sense an English language translation makes of that word, what sense Lacan makes of that word, and what it really means in French in terms of jurisprudential meaning as well as psychoanalytic meaning. But let's, for simplicity's sake, talk about the pleasure of the unconscious and bring in what Lacan means, because he is borrowing from legal statutes as well — it's a propertied enjoyment. So this is part of the argument, and I would encourage your comrades to read more of David Marriott also. Where Black people exist in a kind of day-to-day life — you're a student, I'm a professor, you're a debater, I go to the gym, whatever — that's how we talk about ourselves. But where we exist in the collective unconscious, we exist as properties for the fulfillment of enjoyment. I've kind of lost something — help me out, Quinn, to come back to your question.
QH: Why jouissance is a constitutive element of the white familial relationship and whiteness as an ontological entity.
FW: In chapter 6 of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon makes the argument that the Black imago is an image — a property image — that is available to resolve all the conflicts of white filiation. What he means by that is that living in a nuclear family has a kind of repressive hydraulics. Repression used in political circles is a bad thing, but repression used psychoanalytically is simply a necessary thing to allow the subject to have a relation with other subjects. So you and I have been experiencing, for the past hour and 15 minutes, the most intense form of repression because we have not allowed ourselves to let speech slip into primary process of signification — grammar is a major repressive apparatus. There is a word I have trouble pronouncing — consanguinity — which refers to the rules of engagement in a family: who can marry whom. In some cultures you can marry a second cousin; in some cultures, like the royalty of Russia, Germany, and England up into the first 30 years of the 20th century, you can marry first cousins — you had to do that so that royal blood stayed concentrated. So there are rules of what you can do, who you can have sex with, who you can marry, what the rules of power sharing are within the nuclear family. And just like what you can do with a verb, a noun, or a predicate — they have rules — these are all repressive apparatuses which allow for communal existence. That's not a good thing or a bad thing; it's just a thing that allows for communal existence. But it also puts anxiety into the unconscious modes and processes of signification, because unconscious processes of signification want to do what they want to do when they want to do it. So if you couple all of what I'm saying — I just made a generic argument — and now you bring in politics and power and circle back through Fanon's chapter six, where you have a naturally occurring apparatus of repression called the nuclear family, or any family: in that naturally occurring apparatus, you have a situation of heavy power imbalance, so that the name of the father, the patriarch, has the most legitimacy, and the daughter the least, and the son somewhere in between. And what it means is that everyone will appear to be a nice happy smiley family on the outside, while inside, in the unconscious, there are various modes of rebellion. In order to get past that rebellion so that it doesn't destroy the structure — let's just work on the western family right now — the western white family has to work through what's called proper Oedipalization, where girls learn how to become good mothers, and boys put aside the desire to take the father's place now at the age of 3, 5, and 6, because they know that at the age of 18 they will take the father's place in another dynamic. But in the meantime, this pressure produces aggressivity — does that make sense?
QH: Yes, yes, mm-hmm!
FW: So if you and I have aggressivity, we still have the hydraulics of grammar — we can just go write a poem or sing a nonsensical song. But if you have aggressivity due to the repressive apparatus of a nuclear family, and the distribution of power is unethical in the ways it is shared, then there could be an internal combustion. And so that aggressivity — which Fanon argues is experienced in all children, but let's just stick with the girl child because it is experienced most severely in the girl child — needs a grounding wire, like an electrical grounding wire. It needs a destination to take out the rage that it doesn't even know it has but feels, that would otherwise be directed against the father. And what Fanon is saying is that the Black image, and then the Black person, is like an object that is always available for that. So that objecthood is available for that kind of aggressivity, and the performance of that aggressivity can, at that same time, produce a sense of elation. I'm being crude here — that's why I want your comrades to read the book — but it's an orgasmic feeling that comes from whipping somebody, an orgasmic feeling that comes from watching Tarzan and Jane massacre the natives. And that is the jouissance, and the imago is the component of the property aspect of the French word. Now that's not uncommon — it happens all over the world — but the thing is that the Black formation has no people other than other Black people to perform that aggressivity on and put it on in a violent or unethical way. So we are simply objects that look like and talk like subjects, who are objects available as the destination of aggressivity that can become joy in its performance. This is what makes the videos of Black people getting murdered a double-edged sword, because they also produce a sense of pleasure at the same time that they are dramatizing horror.
QH: So it's that moment of anxious release — almost like any other ways in which aggression is dispersed, whether you are punching a pillow — but in this instance it is a very nuanced and specific ritual within civil society that makes that necessary. And so, what's interesting to me is when you talk about the paradigm you described in the second portion of the book — when you write about vertigo — and in that section you say that the Black self is at war with itself because it is torn between a projected hate toward the Black imago and a love for the white ideal. I am thinking about Saidiya Hartman's latest work, in which she talks about these communities of love and care that come out of waywardness, and I'm thinking a bit about Christina Sharpe's work about love that happens in the wake, and I'm thinking about Fred Moten's articulation of "Moanin'" as a way of thinking about care and social life that spills out of the white gaze. I'm wondering if this war in the imago that is happening within the Black intramural can be altered with care, and if it can be changed with social life, and if it is a paradigm that can be altered with that articulation of love and community — or if it is a necessary, integral social life formation that allows the Black intramural to exist in the first place?
FW: Let me say what I think, and I didn't quite get the second part — could you say the second question again?
QH: You establish that the Black self is at war with the Black imago through this kind of love for the white ideal, and you describe this, in your answer to the last question, as a paradigm that is happening within Black communities and within the Black self, if I'm understanding you correctly. So within these writers who are talking about love and care and these new epistemologies and new possibilities for subjectivity — that exist within moments of social life and care that happen in different historical instances, that happen now — I'm wondering if you read these as having the potential to alter this violent relationship in the psyche, and if not, is it constitutive to the Black self?
FW: First of all, I want to celebrate these things — they need to happen and they do something. But I'm cautious, and this is where I might differ from some of the writers you mentioned. I'm cautious because once you say what they do, that assumes something I don't believe to be true — which is to say that you can think now about Blackness as different from what it is now. You can act now in a way that resists the pigeonholing of the imago, and those acts are very important. I started Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and then I gave it to a Black woman who needed it for her own personal growth, so I have to buy it again and get back to it — so let me not talk about that right now. But I think that in Hartman's Scenes of Subjection, what she argues is that merriment, stealing away — which is to say yourself as a piece of property going to the next plantation to marry someone or just have fun — playing an instrument like Solomon Northup did, and dancing — these are all important episodes of social life and intramural conversation and relations, but they don't pierce the bubble of social death. This is part of the debate you all might have seen between Jared Sexton and Fred Moten, when Sexton wrote "The Social Life of Social Death." I would call these acts provisional and important, but we can't really say that they are essential. I'm talking to you and debaters who have read this stuff very thoroughly — this is not the kind of thing I would say at a Black community center, for example. Subjectivity is an impossible destination for Blackness, because subjectivity's first principle is that to be a subject is to be elaborated by the symbolic order first, and then to be disciplined by the violence of that order second. And this is the actual inverse of Black elaborations. Black elaborations are the actual inverse of that — we are elaborated and positioned by gratuitous violence, and then the words get piled on after that. So if you're going to be very rigorous or precise, subjectivity is going to be the very antithesis of Blackness. There will be something else on the other side, but it won't be subjectivity, and I don't know really what it will be — and it will only come into being when we have a kind of cataclysmic revolution, after which there are no Blacks, and no humans, and a different paradigm will come into existence. I don't think anyone can imagine or write a sentence about what that would be, because thought is contained in the paradigm from which it emerges.
QH: That's really interesting to me, and that leads me to my next set of questions — specifically when we talk about these moves to the other side, as you articulated: the other side, where there is no subjectivity and there is no Blackness. One question that has been occupying everyone's minds within the last few weeks has been this question of police brutality and specifically the responses to this violence. We talked earlier about the burning of the Minneapolis police department. I'm wondering how you, as an Afropessimist, read the Minneapolis city council's move to dismantle the police — whatever that means in its execution, but that rhetorical statement. I think there is a portion in the book — or maybe it was in another interview I watched with you — where you said dismantling the police is a necessary measure, that police are killing Black folks right now, and I would agree with that. I also recognize that there is a tension between that and civil society being terminally anti-Black. So I'm really curious as to how you read these steps in dismantling what presents itself as state violence within this context.
FW: I don't have a point-by-point pilgrim's progress as to how that would come about, because Afropessimism — to get back to your earlier statement — is a big ear trumpet, a listening device which hears Black speech in those moments when it is not beholden to or concerned about anything else. Here's the speech of Blackness right before death — in other words, what would you say? Like George Jackson's last words, for example — that's Afropessimism. It's like: if you speak Black, you better be prepared to die. So what you do is you really don't speak as Black — you speak in a kind of carefully qualified mode. And I can't say how you get from that to a change I could describe, because all the discourses you are dealing with as debaters — whether you are running the postcolonial K, the Marxist K, or the feminist K — as rhetorical apparatuses, they come with two gestures: one is the descriptive gesture, and one is the prescriptive gesture, which answers the question of whether it can be done. That's why they lend themselves so nicely to debate tournaments. But Afropessimism only comes with the description of Black suffering. It doesn't really come with a prescription or a vision of what the other side would look like. Precisely because all of those other discourses have the subjects of oppression still being subjects after they're liberated — but in a liberated zone in a liberated way. The emancipatory dream or possibility of Afropessimism undoes all of that: there is no more Black and there is no more human. It's a total cataclysm — there are sentient beings, but what will they be? So that's part of it. The other part is, I'm kind of lying by omission — because my speech is coerced even though people think I speak freely. This might be my last interview if I speak freely. What I'm saying is, I'm not against police brutality — which is correct — I'm against the police. But you have to read that statement symptomatically, because what it really means is I'm against the country. And then if you read that symptomatically, I'm against the world. I'm against anyone's capacity to turn limitless space into namable place, and everyone's capacity to transform endless duration into the event. There is no other discourse that is that iconoclastic. It's the kind of spatialization that has its boot on the neck of the Indian. It's the kind of temporality that has its boot on the neck of the worker. It's not the end of the capacity of spatialization, it's not the end of the capacity for the event, that these subjected entities are against. And so, it's really great that you asked me to read the passage, because we actually circled all the way back to my grandmother — the end of the world, not the end of a certain construction of an antithetical world, but the end of world-making capacity as we know it. Am I getting at all to what you are asking?
QH: I think it definitely helps a lot, because I think the articulation that stands out to me — and what you just articulated really helps me — is what you said: you describe this stance of Afropessimism as being the stance against the capacity to turn endless duration into event, the capacity to turn space into town, into city. And so I think what this makes me think of, for me personally, is that I am for police abolition just as I am for geographical abolition, or just as I am for clock abolition — that is all part of the movement of things that ought to be abolished if we are abolishing the world as you described it.
FW: I want you and your folks to write down this woman's name: Teija — T-e-i-j-a — McDougal. You will probably find her on Facebook, because she is writing a dissertation now in which she actually goes right to temporality. And what we never remember when we look at a clock is that 12 o'clock is a construction — there is no such thing as time. It's the violent incursion of discursive labor into endless duration. There is just duration, and then you make time, which is the event. Very few people are working on this, but she is writing an Afropessimist dissertation on it, and what she is finding is that conceptually, for the past three centuries, the conceptualization of temporality — meaning moments on the clock — is intertwined with the vocabulary of words like "slave" and "slave master." It's very fascinating.
QH: What I'm curious to hear you talk about is how we move to the other side — if that is possible, and how you envision that taking place.
FW: Yeah, I think I would like to say something about that, but I don't really know. I mean, I'm the guy with the stethoscope — I'm doing the diagnostic. I would look to your age group especially, people like you, to answer the question about praxis and forward movement. I think we should never trust a professor of any race who wants to tell you about revolutionary praxis. By the time you are part of the academy, especially if you are in it 20-some years like me, we are such milquetoast, non-confrontational people that we are worthless with respect to — we get anxious when the energy is about to set it off, and it has to be set off, it has to be set off. This is what the young people in Minneapolis knew. I look at that burning of the police station not as a political process, but as a gesture I can celebrate that moves toward what I'm talking about. How it does that, I don't know. But the only thing I do know is that where it connects with Afropessimism is this: what we are saying is that the Black imagination needs to be set free. The Black imagination needs to be set free so that it does not have to answer to the constraints or the principles of the imagination of others — and that was a really important moment. I can't say what that looks like on the other side. Even in paradigms based upon contingent violence, 400 years ago, I don't think any philosopher or critical theorist — the intellectuals were ecclesiastics, they were monks of the church — could have imagined that in another hundred years feudal peasants as a structuring element of society would be kicked to the curb, and that we would have this new species called worker and capitalist. It took the revolution to instantiate the new paradigm and bring about the new species. What I will say is that that kind of violence is a prerequisite to thought. People think that Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth is a warmonger and a terrorist. He is making a diagnosis. He is saying that structural change — which is not just in the infrastructure, but is a change in how we think about ourselves and how we think about the world — requires violence as a prerequisite to thought. You simply don't have a new world, with new categories, new thinking, new ways of living freely, without a cataclysmic form of violence that undoes the old world. And this is precisely what so-called progressives who think they are being radical, when they use the word "defund" the police as opposed to "abolish" the police — this is what they are really doing. They are suffering from what Sexton calls the anxiety of antagonism: "This world is bad, but — what if I just tinker with it a little bit." And as Saidiya Hartman told me when I was writing my dissertation — she was the intellectual backbone on my committee — no one wants to be as free as Black people will make them. They will be free of their culture, they will be free of their language, they will be free of their attachment to the land, they will be free of their God. No one wants to be that free. We don't want to be that free, but it's imposed upon us — we are people with nothing in a world with varying degrees of something.
QH: Yeah, I think that's really interesting — that idea of the end of freedom as being in a zone of frustration and violence as well. As we wrap up, I've got one final question for you. We have been talking a little bit about the debate community here and there, but one specific dialogue that's been happening a lot is this idea of non-Black debaters being able to pay large sums of money to Black folks to teach them Afropessimism, then using it to beat Black kids by calling them slaves and the whole nine yards. I'm wondering how you read these moments. You speak about them in the book towards the end — how do you read that?
FW: Well, you all might have heard of Patrice Douglass — she doesn't have a book out yet, but we wrote a piece together in Black Scholar called "The Metaphysics of Violence" (this is in reference to an article called "The Violence of Presence" by Wilderson and Douglass) in a special issue of Black Scholar which was about Black philosophy. She will have a book out in the next five years; she teaches at Duke. She asked me in a graduate seminar, when she was still doing coursework, "How do we keep Afropessimism Black?" And it was a very shocking question, because at that moment I had to realize: we can't. I would like to, but just as our bodies and our music don't belong to us — what Hartman is saying is that when you do make merriment on the plantation, or when you steal away to the next plantation to see a loved one, those are modes of the Black intramural, but they have not changed the general structure, which is to say that all you are is simply an extension of the master's prerogative. And so it happens much more slowly in analytical writing, as we are talking about here, but you get some high-powered, crackerjack intellectuals like debaters, and they are going to figure out a way to steal it and mobilize it into something that is not about Black liberation — just like white boys in the ghetto are more into hardcore rap. In psychoanalytic terms it is called "to volumize one's existence." Black music and white performers turn me on more than white music because it gives me a sense of release and jouissance that can only come from the cultural annunciation of someone who has nothing. That's why Black people are used to energize rallies and multicultural political settings, as long as we don't talk about Black suffering in that setting. So I don't like it — I don't like using the first principles of Afropessimism, using a K from Afropessimism, to articulate some kind of suffering from another group. But the sad thing is that Afropessimism belonged to them anyway, just as we belonged to them. Now, that doesn't mean you have to sit back and take it. It doesn't mean I have to sit there and take it. In fact, Black debaters have, for the past 10 years, staged various revolts on the plantation of debate, which I'm enthused and energized by.
QH: Thank you so much for that — that definitely gives a certain level of clarity that I think is very useful. The very last thing before we have to take off: I would like to know what gives you hope?
FW: I don't know. To die not violently — I'm joking, but I'm kind of serious. I hope that in my 80s I can have some money and live on an island somewhere and go swimming a lot. I'd be lying if I said it's more conceptually coherent than that. What I'm trying to do is to not look at things — what's happening — because I know I'm going to have to look at them to write, like the murder of people who are Black. We are constantly bombarded with what Fanon called the cultural imposition into the Black psyche, and so avoiding that is a large part of my daily praxis. I wasn't like that when I was your age, through my thirties, and part of my forties, but I'm kind of winding down. I'm physically less able. There was a time when I was not afraid of having a fist fight with somebody — now I am. It's that kind of thing. I have hope for the exponential proliferation of joy and rage that comes from people like you and your age group. That gives me hope.