The Image
The caption
” pic: Banksy.
Silly fools, silly fools
Got beaten by the bullies,
the bullies who rule.”
The image is beautiful and moving. The words below it miss the point of global capitalism, the state, and the place of football in it. With Germany winning the world cup, after beating Brazil 7-1, “silly fools” can only refer to the Brazilian people (and/or the young black kids who dream of making it as footballers) who made no decisions about this World Cup.
Jokes apart – and I have been making lots of them about phone calls and selling parts of Brazil for a victory – the Brazilian state ‘invested’ a lot in this world cup, but it wasn’t for its people’s, it was for the sake of its economy (well, its global private and public investors), which will probably do even better after the games end.
Having watched her team win the World Cup today, Angela Merkel is staying in Brazil – and India’s prime minister is coming – for the BRICS meeting this week. Of course, this can only be bad news for most Brazilians (and Indians and Chinese and Russians). Why? Well, just ask the Greeks, Italians, and the Portuguese and Spaniards … Let’s not forget, however, that Europe’s relationship with the BRICS states is different than the one it has with those states at its ‘margins’. In the present global economic playground Germany is a bully but so is the Brazilian state.
Not surprising Dilma Rousseff had an uncomfortable time before and during the World Cup. She entered Maracana after the game had started, due to fears of booing by the rich fools at the stadium. For the same reason Argentina’s Christina Kirchner didn’t even make it to Rio, even though (no, probably because) about 100,000 Argentines basically occupied Rio this weekend. Yes, most Brazilians and Argentines were full of hope at the beginning of the world cup, even though they knew that their teams have only one decent player. Tonight I saw sad faces painted white & blue on TV (and I am not talking about those at the stadium, the rich ones); like the sad green and yellow ones I saw after Holland’s victory yesterday. They cried for their national teams but not for their nation-states, and for sure not for their states and governments. The security state here in this corner of the globe has been doing a really good job telling its people that the fantasy of the nation is over, done.
What about football? Brazil lost 7-1 to Germany and then 3-0 to Holland and all the Brazilian TV commentators can say – after cursing Felipao and the team – is that if we want to improve our football (progress?), to become competitive again, we have to be organised (order?) like Germany. (Any similarity to the banner on our flag is not mere coincidence). Sorry Hegel! There is no place for romanticism and idealism in the stage of global capital: positivism rules, in the classrooms and the football fields!!
Everyone else I heard/read from and talked to, after yesterday’s defeat, was mainly concerned with: (a) how to live with our hermanos Argentinos teasing us (which would last forever) for the 7-1 defeat if they beat Germany today and (b) how to live with the (very short-lived) choice between cheering for Argentina, which is … you know … Argentina or for Germany, which … you know … beat us out of the final by 7-1. In sum, here at home it didn’t take much for football (the game I grew up loving) to become again what is: a game, which is about winning and losing in the field: one in which every match is lived intensely as long as it lasts, and once it is over … next?
More importantly, th’m “silly fools” were also attentive – gunshots and grenades are hard to ignore – to what was going on while the matches were played. No one, I am sure, missed how the security apparatus was working well and hard before and during the competition. On the day before the Brazil–Holland match, my father arrived in my neighbourhood and was met by the ‘robocops’ – heavily armed special police forces -, who were entering houses, without warrant, every house on the street (even empty ones using master key) where the barbershop he goes to is located looking for drug dealers. During the two-day operation they also used a humvee – which moves very fast my nephew Lucas tells me – which is the one used in Iraq. From what my nephew and my father tell me the scene could have been a reply of many we saw on TV unfolding in Iraq.
This unfortunate caption belies a poor understanding of how global capitalism plays on its grounds.
Last Friday, 8 November 2013, I came across three posts friends of mine had added to our shared online scrapbook. My initial reaction was to comment on them directly. Had I done so, whatever in them reminded me of Facebook’s scrapbook quality would have been lost. Here is my attempt to bring it out also publicly.
Post #1 – MI Police ‘Pursue Charges’ Against Homeowner Who Shot 19-Year-Old Black Woman Dead After She Knocked on His Door But in a ‘stand-your-ground’ state, will they stick? (see fulltext here)
Renisha McBride
“He shot her in the head, [and] for what? For knocking on his door,” McBride’s aunt, Bernita Spinks said to the Detroit Free Press. “If he felt scared or threatened, he should have called 911.”
“Police also reportedly mislead the family about where McBride’s body was found. According to Raw Story, they were first told that her body had been dumped near Warren Avenue, some blocks away, where it was later found by authorities. Police soon, however, recanted their prior statement, saying instead that the woman died on the home’s front porch”
Here we go again! This time around the law enforcement arm of the state (which is a name for the public authority) does not even want to allow the killing of Miss Renisha McBride to go before the court. The message to its middle-class-suburban-white[Latino]-homeowners is: kill them on sight/site! This is not only a way a silent legalising of segregation, to make Black People afraid of going into white-middle class spaces’ this not only a silent authorising of lynching. ‘Stand-your-ground’ laws are indeed loud legal-moral authorising of both!
Post #2 – Interview with Lauren Berlant [LB] by David Seitz [DS] for Society and Space – Environment and Planning D (see full text here)
The interview is about Berlant’s very interesting approach to citizenship, which addresses its institutional and intimate moments. I found it revealing of how urgent it is that critical theoretical contributions also theorise racial power; that they go beyond the liberal view of racial subjugation, which is that it indicates unfulfilled universality and freedom. In short, it reminds me that they need to be prefaced by critique of racial power, which is basically the disassembling the liberal (transparent) subject, the one implied in the figure of the citizen, the legal subject, and which resists even in most seductive descriptions of the desiring and the feeling thing.
Basically my comments here are questions to the text. I in a way interview the interview, but my [DFS] questions are mostly to Berlant’s readers.
“DS: We have this commonsense understanding of citizenship as legally, juridically endowed. You’re also interested in the murky, the intimate and the banal dimensions of citizenship. And they’re obviously not unrelated. What first oriented you in that direction? What got you so curious about intimate life as a scene of citizenship drama?
LB: I was always interested in the relationship between law and subjectivity. As I was coming out, nobody was working on citizenship as a vehicle for world-building that had anything to do with sexuality, except allegorically. What really interested me was the relationship between conventional form and erotic attachment — people’s relation to the world, people’s need for the world to look a certain way. So I got interested in the history of the law’s orchestration of bodies, and I got interested in thinking about the ways that certain kinds of institutional forms held up the world, with respect to which people in everyday life were extremely incoherent. The same people can be authoritarian, libertarian, aggressive, passive, romantic, and unsentimental about citizenship: and then I realized that the same sentence could be written about love and attachment. I realized that the juridical object and the intimate object were more similar than they were different, because people want their objects to protect them, but they don’t want them too over-present. They want them to be transparent, but they want also to have them to be flexible and improvisatory. People make contradictory demands of the objects that hold up their world. That interests me. That’s the first thing.”
[DFS: Is the transparent subject presupposed; does it defines ‘people’ who ‘want’ – it is the desiring thing?]
The second thing is I really do want to understand how to work with political incoherence, and I am irritated by the kinds of arguments that people use about certain kinds of voting blocs voting against their interests, since everyone has conflicting interests. For example, I could love the state because it delivers resources to a whole set of people not really caring about the specificities of who those people are, and I could hate the state because it tries to produce universal citizenship. Those two conflicting thoughts don’t make me psychotic: contradiction enables people to proceed wanting a whole set of things from their institution or from their object.
[DFS: Is this the subject of interest, with conflicting interest – the desiring subject, ‘people’ who ‘want’, is the utilitarian subject?]
“[LB:] Also, if you work on political emotions, one of the things you have to deal with all the time is the pedagogy of emotion. Aesthetics is one of the few places we learn to recognize our emotions as trained and not natural. Fear is natural, but the objects that make you afraid emerge historically. You get entrained by the world. When you’re born, all you want is food, and by the time you’re eight, or by the time you’ve been in primary school for awhile, or whatever, you have feelings about citizenship, you have feelings about race, you have feelings about gender and sexuality. You’ve been trained to take on those objects as world-sustaining perspectives. That interests me. So for you, what looked like a conflict between institutional attachment to the world and intimate models of attachment are not to me in conflict at all but are a part of the problem of imagining and living attachments to lifeworlds. (…)”
[DFS: Here is where I became particularly worried about the lack of a theorizing of racial power. I am not saying that Berlant should have done it in this interview. What bothers me is her distinction between ‘natural’ emotions (fear in particular) and their ‘historical’ objects. Of course, I am biased towards continental philosophy, thus suspicious of a distinction between the ‘natural’ subject (non-rational interior thing) of emotions, the one Kant has placed outside the scene of morality and Herder at its centre and whatever is placed on the side of the (‘historical’) object. I am suspicious because here is precisely where the liberal account of racial power has placed the ‘problem of race relation’ and the solution to it. I really don’t care for ‘feelings about race’. I don’t care because these feelings are what defense lawyers work with in court cases to build their clients’ claim to self-defense when they kill unarmed black persons. The problem is this positing of race on the side of the object. For the subject who has ‘feelings about race’ is a racial subject; hence, race is constitutive of it and not a historical object towards which it has feelings.]
“LB: A relation of cruel optimism is a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing. So you can’t say that there are objects that have the quality of cruelty or not cruelty, it’s how you have the relationship to them. Like it might be that being in a couple is not a relation of cruel optimism for you, because being in a couple actually makes you feel like you have a grounding in the world, whereas for other people, being in a couple might be, on the one hand, a relief from loneliness, and on he other hand, the overpresence of one person who has to bear the burden of satisfying all your needs. So it’s not the object that’s the problem, but how we learn to be in relation.”
[DFS: But if the subject is only constituted as such in relation to an object – with Lacan, if the subject is indeed an effect of desire (which is a desire for an object) – then what is this learning “to be in relation”? What learns to be in relation? Does the subject precede the relation? Does the subject pre-exist the relation with the object (which is historical, sexual, whatever, but always exterior to it? Does the subject that learns (in whichever way it does) knows itself as such, and hence can learn to be in relation differently? Does this subject know itself without/before being in relation to an object, any object? If so then this subject is transparent, a natural thing with/of emotions, which it attaches to objects that it meets along the way? Isn’t this the liberal (transparent) subject, the first casualty of any critical understanding of racial subjugation?
Post # 3 – Dud of the Week; 12 Years A Slave reviewed by Armond White for CityArts (see full text here)
“For commercial distributor Fox Searchlight, 12 Years a Slave appears at an opportune moment when film culture–five years into the Obama administration–indulges stories about Black victimization such as Precious, The Help, The Butler, Fruitvale Station and Blue Caprice. (What promoter Harvey Weinstein has called “The Obama Effect.”) This is not part of social or historical enlightenment–the too-knowing race-hustlers behind 12 Years a Slave, screenwriter John Ridley and historical advisor Henry Louis Gates, are not above profiting from the misfortunes of African-American history as part of their own career advancement. But McQueen is a different, apolitical, art-minded animal. The sociological aspect of 12 Years a Slave have as little significance for him as the political issues behind IRA prisoner Bobby Sands’ hunger strike amidst prison brutality visualized in Hunger, or the pervy tour of urban “sexual addiction” in Shame. McQueen takes on the slave system’s depravity as proof of human depravity. This is less a drama than an inhumane analysis–like the cross-sectional cut-up of a horse in Damien Hirst’s infamous 1996 museum installation “Some Comfort Gained From the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything,””
“Some of the most racist people I know are bowled over by this movie. They may have forgotten Roots, never seen Sankofa or Nightjohn, disliked Amistad, dismissed Beloved and even decried the violence in The Passion of the Christ, yet 12 Years a Slave lets them congratulate themselves for “being aghast at slavery.” This film has become a new, easy reproof to Holocaust deniers. But remember how in Public Enemy’s “Can’t Truss It,” pop culture’s most magnificent account of the Middle Passage, Chuck D warned against the appropriation of historical catastrophe for self-aggrandizement: “The Holocaust/ I’m talkin’ ‘bout the one still goin’ on!””
I haven’t seen the film. I will most probably not see it at the theater or on TV. From what I gather there seems to be some controversy out there about the film itself and about this review. I am not really interested in that. Though I share the question Armond White raises, which is about the significance of that stories of black suffering have become a choice of Hollywood’s profit-seekers in the wake of the media announcement (with Obama’s election) of a postracial moment. I wonder how they play – the signifying role they perform – when contrasted with news of ghetto violence in Chicago (see here John Marquez’s formulation of the concept) and legal decisions (in court in Trayvon Martin’s trial case, and in the streets by law enforcement agents as Dearborn Heights cops) that authorize and render just the killing of young Black people. With Saidyia Hartman, in her field-changing book Scenes of Subjection (see here), I find that tales of black suffering, which fail to situate it in the context racial (state or state-authorized) violence, in which it constitutes an effect of political violence, compound this very racial violence by presenting suffering as something that it intrinsic to Black folks’ trajectory and not one of the many ways the state (as a juridical and an administrative entity) works with capital.
To the liberal subject for whom (Hegel has claimed) it is only the formal actualization of his/her freedom (self-determination), the state may be an object – of the kind theorized by Berlant, something exterior, that is a source of desire, something that can be used, appropriated, towards achieving one’s goals or satisfying needs.
To Renisha McBride, her family, her friends, and millions of Black youth, the state has a different kind of exteriority; it is no object of intimate attachment because, before Black youth, it only presents itself as a deadly enemy – We “can’t truss it!”
Fire engulfed streets of London and other cities in England two years ago, after a police officer killed Mark Duggan in Tottenham; fires have engulfed the streets of Los Angeles more than a few times in the past five decades – Watts in1965 and the whole of South Central LA in 1992, to mention two of them.
Fires follow justice … Obama says that the US is a nation of laws … of laws and justice? Laws are justice? Law=Justice? For as long as I can remember black and brown people in Brazil – the whole of the Americas I say until someone proves otherwise – live and die with/because/in spite of racial violence (by which I mean the original incapacity of liberal administration of justice to address racial subjugation and its (the liberal structure, that is) mandate to fulfil, protect, and re-enact the logic of obliteration.) Back in 1999 I was paralised by the Diallo’s case verdict. My dissertation became a book which is only, all, about his and all the other killings. I have no book to write now.
I am trying to finish this piece on global affirmative action. I am trying to finish this piece and procrastinating as we all do, I check to facebook … On Facebook I find the expected, my f-friends going at it, as paralized as I am … they, you, I write … respond, share, reply … Fire engulfs us all … Fire burns words … theses, explanations, experiences, memories … Fires clear the terrain and challenge us to think, to think differently, to think more and better … otherwise; to think away the constraints of thinking, which always finds a reasonable explanation for why that Black person’s killing was found just … this time: What the is the problem? There are so many problems. But now I am concerned with how we think.
Don’t we know that justice fails the racial other in its realisation? Don’t we know that a black family’s loss will be explained away as its own failure because the killing of your father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister will always be explained away as self-defense? Don’t we know that the Blacks and Brown folk (Chicano, Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Cuban, Brazilian, Colombian, or Venezuelan and also jamaican, Trinidadian or Haitian, or Indian, Pakistani … no matter how many generations over born in the US or Europe) will be killed with the protection of the law – self-defence (as I argue in Nobodies: Law, Raciality and Violence) is the other term for racial violence. The state’s … the vigilant’s … Jury’s … justice … self-preservation … Zimmerman is Latino? White latino … we have a whole country filled with them in Brazil … and many of them are black too. His mother says they are Peruvians proud of their black heritage? The thing about blackness, one learns after living in Latin America, the US, Australia, and Europe, is that, as a racial signifier, it floats (Hall said it about race, the signifier), as an excuse and a defense for finding someone deserving or excused for killing … it floats …
For those of us who are Black, the racial signifier blackness never floats beyond the reach of the logic of obliteration … Not long ago, about two or three months ago I was chastised at a meeting of US black scholars because I sounded like I valued black male’s life over women’s – black and Muslim’s – right to walk the streets unharmed whether they wear or do not wear the veil. I was never given a real chance to say that I do not, that my writings about racial violence do not disavowal violence against women. I could not say that, at that moment, in that room, I assumed a certain common view of the range and the particularities of racial subjugation. I had given myself permission to speak about blackness and to highlight racial violence and its patriarchal charge on black males. This is the thing about patriarchy, it has a plan and structures of violence for males and females. I was not given the chance of saying any of that … but I don’t apologise for not qualifying what I said then.
I am still refusing to apologise now. I am writing as the friend and cousin of black and brown young men; I am writing as a daughter, sister, aunt, and (at times) sweetheart of young and older black men … I am writing as a black woman who has been threatened by cops when a teenager … who has spent my whole life – because of the times they arrested my father and when they killed my male relatives – with racial violence … as a black woman who lives with the threat of just-ified killing over my male and female, old and young relatives, neighbours and friends … who live lives fully determined by violence, specially, police violence, that is, racial violence.
This is the thing about existing, living as a Black or Brown person. We live … the thing about blackness, because of its being a construct of racial power, it mandates our obliteration. But blackness does not exhaust black people’s lives, though it t does resolve how our deaths (and how we live) will be accounted for …
Viva black people’s lives and may the fires revive Black people, my the fires burn and revive blackness. May the fires burn everything that only survives by betting on our end …
I am tired, pissed off, and giving a damn to contrived political speeches which stop short of the call.
May the fires this time burn in our minds any illusions of justice from within the liberal text … what is to come awaits our willingness to let it become.
Denise Ferreira da Silva 