I sit with “deader than dead”. I write Dread. Deader than Dread. There is a feel here of the dread of living it out. And I have a sense of a thirdness – that third character. I am drawn in to the way his movement orient, or disorient. There is some sort of uneasiness.
I want to enter into the conversation about how the entering is called by the work, or what in the work calls for an entering. What moved us into conversation was this question of who enters and how, or what stages the entering? Perhaps this is where the dread is.
What I mean is: I am not given an overview of/in the work, or invited “all the way” in. To get in requires a different modality than that of vision alone, I think. There is something in the “and…tomorrow…and” and in the “and…fact” that comes toward the end that suggests that the ellipsis carries the force of an encounter that is not “for all.” What is this “for all,” or, what does its absence protect.
This is a roundabout way of saying that I am made aware of the shape of whiteness in my encounter with the perceptual field. “Deader than Dead” threatens to “put me” into my white skin. The dread: that I will betray my coming from a place of access to whiteness. That I will attempt to enter this way. That I will make this about my-self. But I need not have worried. The piece is not about me. Or better said, it is not for whiteness, and in any case, I need to stop orienting this around “I,” that endemic habit of whiteness personalizing.
Whiteness personalizing – in all its lefty shame and mea culpa – is deadly. Because there, where we congratulate our-selves for being at the center of understanding difference, we have actually staged a dead-end. This dead end is called “access.” This access is what I feel the work refuses. I am interested in the refusal. I think here of my friend John Lee Clark and his beautiful piece “Against Access”. John is a DeafBlind poet and essayist, and one of the first speakers/inventors of a new DB language/culture called ProTactile. In “Against Access” John is thinking about how seeing/hearing people jump all over themselves to “give” him access. He’s interested in (and dismayed by) the desire to “give” “access” as “the” path for the opening-up of the world. What assumptions underlie this belief that where whiteness (and ableism and neurotypicality) live is the place where we should congregate, his participation always at a deficit? Why would he want to participate third-hand in a world that “fits” him in? His stance has taught me a lot. He writes, for instance, about alt-text – the writing of captions over video. He writes:
“In recent years, there has been a rush on the internet to supply image descriptions and to call out those who don’t. This may be an example of community accountability at work, but it’s striking to observe that those doing the most fierce calling out or correcting are sighted people. Such efforts are largely self-defeating. I cannot count the times I’ve stopped reading a video transcript because it started with a dense word picture. Even if a description is short and well done, I often wish there were no description at all. Get to the point, already! How ironic that striving after access can actually create a barrier. When I pointed this out during one of my seminars, a participant made us all laugh by doing a parody: 'Mary is wearing a green, blue, and red striped shirt; every fourth stripe also has a purple dot the size of a pea in it, and there are forty-seven stripes –’ ‘You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!’
Where he is going with this is toward the question of whose world access promises. Access, despite its good intentions, brings us back to the normative baseline, to the place where the world is assumed to exist. This assumes so much! Where is the room for other ways of perceiving, or other ways of entering into the space of conviviality? For other worlds? And why this assumption that this normative environment where we live so poorly, where whiteness and ableism and neurotypicality and all the ways colonialism operates through racial capitalism today – why assume this as where congregation happens??? Surely we can see that it’s a place where living goes to die?
To trouble access, as I feel your piece does, doesn’t have to mean a kind of frontal refusal. It can be a much more generative refusal, in the sense Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman articulate it. Campt asks: “How do we write, think, perform, practice, visualize, engage, theorize, story, or enact a practice of refusal?” A practice of refusal, as I read it, puts the weight on practice. Refusal is in the practice. “For us ‘practicing refusal’ names the urgency of rethinking the time, space, and fundamental vocabulary of what constitutes politics, activism, and theory, as well as what it means to refuse the terms given to us to name these struggles.”
In “Deader than Dead”, I feel a dramaturgy of body-weight. It’s a strange way of saying it – I wonder if it resonates with you? – but there is a sense that bodies are more weight than form, more shape than individual. Sometimes limpid, sometimes lithe, sometimes coordinated, sometimes dissolving, bodies are shapes of existence more than people dancing. This is not to say there isn’t singularity across the field of movement – there is a different quality to each of the bodies, and there is a strong sense, as I mentioned at the beginning, that there is a kind of thirdness, a quality of surround that carries the edging of a +1, the “one” more-than one? It’s like there are layers of existence and the dancing is how the layering is shaped (not so much staged). What is perceived in this shaping is a kind of indexical quality, indexical in the sense that the thirdness moves it into a feel of surround or environmentality, but not one that shapes toward language exactly, or sense. Language is there, and we hear the words, but somehow it’s the ellipsis that most stands out – and…
Layered into this is also an account that bodies in another way. There are instances of a black body or the black body, but they seem more like a kind of tremor in the piece? That moment when the bodies are piled has the quality of blackness being made body. This “being made body” is open for access. This feels like a moment in the piece where whiteness gets a nod. Black as the less-than one, the piled-on, the fact. But not the future.
But even here access is not offered. Not really. Because the movement keeps moving and soon there will be that intense collective movement where the flicker reduces the environment to a feel of light and dark, where bodies move in unison, the unison a kind of sonorous layering, a multiplicity of shape and weight and glare. This shape is not given freely. It is not a given.
These overlappings make worlds that pulse complexity into being. A path for consuming black bodies was momentarily open but then it regurgitated you. Either you rhythm-in or you are left in the glare. It’s just not about us, our-selves.
When the wig comes off, another bodying is made. A moment of individuality, but not one that comes with a pre-made identity, as if blackness were ready-made. No. The bodying that emerges, that is singular, that “stands out” is an affront to any presupposition. It is defiant.
This is not an interpretation. It’s a feeling-form for how “Deader than Dead” dreads, for how it shapes a worlding that resists, that refuses. That refuses easy organ-ization, that refuses that bland separation that is staged by the affront of a or the black body. The defiance is there, frontally in refusal of any staid attempt to locate, to segregate, to position. Blackness is so much more than the black body, so much more than what is captured, killed, accessed. Blackness is the shape of other modes of existence, existences unaccessed. Unaccessed by whiteness.
Whiteness presupposes it has tools for access. One word it gives for this is “empathy.”
I always turn to Saidiya Hartman when I think of the destructive force of empathy. In “Scenes of Subjection”, she emphasizes that empathy is a feeling for oneself. It is a mechanism for the projection of oneself that promotes self-recognition. “Empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order to better understand the other or ‘the projection of one’s own personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one’s emotions” (1997:18). I’ve thought a lot about this also in terms of neurotypicality and have written about the limited humanism at the heart of a concept that disregards the complex modalities of autistic perception. To feel-with is not empathy. To feel-with is to be changed by the encounter, to be made by it.
In Hartman’s account, empathy comes up around abolitionists like John Rankin. “[I]n making the slave’s suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach. Moreover, by exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations of chattel slavery. In other words, the ease of Rankin’s empathic identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body” (21-22). Empathy amplifies the fungibility of the body by assuming access, by determining the path to access.
If “Deader than Dead” is not about giving access, what is it moving into act? It is moving new perceptual fields into activity, into practice. It is not so interested in you, in me, whatever that figure is. It is interested in the field itself, in blackness, in its rhythm and its shapes, in what it calls forth and refuses, in what it demands and can’t live up to, in what it still has to contend with and generate. “Deader than Dead” is not an account of “a” black body or “the” black body because that’s simply not its register. Its register is not that of empathy. The path it proposes is practice. It rhythms us into looking otherwise so that when the wig falls off we are introduced to our own practices of looking, of being-with or alongside. But not to our-selves. These aren’t the aim. Because our-selves can only ever be whiteness, whiteness always assuming it has the last word on what a body is.
The power, the potency, the dread of “Deader than Dead” is that it lives on without us if that us is our-selves. Blackness is so much more than that limited staid envelope of limited interpersonality. Blackness is between, across, to be decovered, to be danced. It is to be practiced in refusal.