Little can be said about Frank B. Wilderson III, that has not been said already. His work, theorizing the world, never shies away from the interrogating unknown or the terrifying. His scholarship has made him one of the most influential and exciting Black scholars of this generation. I recently got a chance to speak with him, to gain insight on how he came to write his newest book, Afro Pessimism and to hear his thoughts on the contemporary Black struggle. You can watch the interview via YouTube here. A transcript of the interview is available below.
Editor’s note: Because the call was through wifi, certain words would get broken up via the connection, these words appear as (inaudible) in the transcript.
QH: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening! My name is Quinn Hughes and I am one of the editors at the Drinking Gourd. It is my immense privilege today to be joined by a very, very, special guest, Dr.Frank Wilderson. Frank is a man who needs no introduction, but it would be inappropriate, it would be impious, to not speak to his many accomplishments and accolades that he has accumulated. He has a B.A from Dartmouth, a masters from Columbia, A PhD from University of California Berkeley. His memoir Incognegro, and his theoretical text, Red White and Black (Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms), along with his numeros essays and poems, established him as one of the most groundbreaking contemporary Black thinkers and writers. He currently holds the position of professor of African American Studies and drama at UC Irvine, but before working as a professor he was everything from a stock broker, to a waiter, to a member of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Frank Wilderson is the real deal. His new book, Afropessimism, is a blend of theoretical and autio-biographical writing in which he speaks to all of his aforementioned occupations, but with the lens and with the insight of the philosophical discipline pioneered by him, known as afropessimism. The book is available everywhere now by Liveright Publishing. Frank, congratulations on the new book, thank you so much for joining us today! How are you doing?
FW: I’m doing fine, nice to meet you in person Quinn. I must that say my favorite people on the planet are highschool and college debaters.
QH: I’m really glad to hear that! I’m happy that we get this chance to talk face to face, your participation and speaking to the debate community has been active so I’m really glad that we get this time to talk! So, 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. So, going in to the book, I have to say, I was a bit, alsmost, nervous because I didn’t really know what to expect. Was the theory going to be heavy handed and overwhelm the auto-biographical portion of the text? Or was the narrative going to act as a substitute for theory? But truly neither is the really case. The theory acts as a lens by which to read the narrative, and that really blew me away. And, I think, another comeling 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 fleshed out by the narrative, lending itself to a very full, and robust, and truly unique text. And so, what I want to spend a little bit of time talking about is how you came to write this book. And why did you feel that this was the moment, in your life, and in the climate of Black studies as a discipline, that this was the time that this book needed to be written?
FW: Well, actually, to be honest with you, I was writing a purely academic monolith, 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. So, you and some of your comrades in debate have read, I have written three articles which are sort of metaphorical interpretations of the Black liberation army, not in terms of their tactics, but in terms of, what does it mean to be Black and insurgent in a world where most people who are insurgents are fighting against capitalism or colonialism but a Black insurgent against 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 that might become my next academic book. I was also working on a novel, and really to be honest with you now ‘Afropessimsim’, which I am very proud of, wasn’t planned. The New Press, in New York, called me and they wanted collection of critical essays for a trade publication, meaning, it has to be put in a language and thinking level for a junior in college, who, they say, who is riding the bus, who does not have a thesaurus or dictionary available, as opposed to what an academic book is pitched at a professor or graduate student level. What they didnt know is that there are debaters who are juniors in college and juniors in highschool who read more abstractly than most professors, they just meant the ordinary junior in college (laughter). And so I though, ‘okay, well a good way to get more exposure and gain a wider audience (in audible), so I began to think about that, and I got an agent. And as time went on, I really just began to meld anecdotes and stories which would help illustrate some of the abstract theories of social death and gratuitous violence. And I was very fortunate to get 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, same histories, but not only that, he had edited a lot of major Black intellectuals over the past 30 years, like Robin Kelly, and Henry Louis Gates, (in audible), and 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’s probably only been one autotheory book on the market, which was Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’ so that’s really it. He was really instrumental in supporting me to not have a subtitle for this book, to make it an emphatic, one word statement, and very few editors, and very few agents understood that, they felt that afropessimsim, a one word statement, is not going to affect with the readers. And 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 up 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. And, I know what stood out to me, and as I’m talking to friends of mine 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 am 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 it can come from music, so I’m wondering where you find inspiration and how you translate that into your work?
FW: Yes, and this is very good for you Quinn, because you are 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, so ‘Red White and Black: Cinneme 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, through connecting the emotions and heartstrings of the reader. And so what we wanted to do was to meld the two together. To provoke and to evoke. And in semiotics, what you have is processes of significitaction. So if you think of Freud’s topos, topography of the mind, there is the preconscious interest, and then unconscious identification, then the structural position of the subject. What you learn in semiotics is that in 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 returing ideas, thoughts, fantasies, to relational logic. In other words, 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 to you through secondary processes of signification. And, that’s really good because it is necessary to communicate, but with secondary processes of signification are part of, what’s called, the combination of conscious and preconscious mind. It is the way you in Evanston, can understand me in Irvine, in Orange County, California. Because, as I’m speaking to you, I am speaking to you through the logic of separation and comparison which is to say that at a minute scale of abstraction, I’m using linguistics, rather grammar to make sure that as I speak to Quinn across the airwaves, I dont confuse subjects, predicates, nouns, verbs, that 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, say in a dream, or with a slip of the tongue, or with a joke, that 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’s also the part of the mind that is least susceptible or least alive, to laughter, sorrow, tears, heartbreak, joy. The other part of the mind of course, is the unconscious, and that is ruled, or governed by primary processes of signification. And primary processes of signification are the ways in which the unconscious uses the tools of the symbolic order to move the unconscious, as quickly as possible, to the most joyous, least painful, place of conceptualization. So, for example, you are up all night, and you’re tired, and you’re 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 of 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’. And all those things can happen, because the processes of division which are necessary to make communication whole and proppor between two subjects completely annoyed-, (correcting himself) I said annoyed instead of annulled that was the primary process of signification! (laughter). And so what you have is a situation in which the unciosus really just wants its fantasies and it wants its pleasures, and it uses its signification to get there as quickly as possible but it doesn’t really care about a future life as, say, a student at USC or NYU, a future life as a professor, as you might be be. It says, ‘right now, I want it’. And so, 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, though the argumentation of categories. But you see, in literature, such as poetry, poetry is the most pristine form, but also novels, you have what’s called (inaudible) facilitation. And facilitation is a kind of language which takes both process of secondary signification and primary signification and makes them into one process. And facilitation shows up least, and almost not at all, in mathematical equations and it shows up the most in say, what psychoanalysts call, dreamwork. And so, those are the two poles, and when you bring them both together, you have what’s called facilitation and (inaudible) what it allows for is 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, and that can be, if you get it right, a very powerful kind of annunciation, because the listener or the reader can both understand why, the listener and the reader can both understand and laugh and so I was really alive to how do I orchestrate facilitation and you’ve told me I did a good job so I accept it. (laughter)
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, like, Nina Simone, when she is writing these extremely powerful protests songs that are animated by this type of spirituality, this type of physical place that is only accessed by, what you describe as primary signification, something that’s deep within. And so, I’m wondering if there are inspiration in either Black musicians, Black filmmakers, visual artists, that help you get to that space? Or, what are the tools that you’re using when youre sitting down to write, to really be able to access that perfect moment when you find yourself in a state where you can be writing consistently at that leve?
FW: That’s very perceptive, you’re absolutely right about that. I was fortunate to go to college from 74 to 78. Of course, you know, reading the book, I got kicked out in 78, I had to come back and finish the rest. Technically I went to college from 74-80, with two years of expulsion in between. But you know, Nina Simone used to come and rock up on 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. So for me, the primary person is Sarah Vaughan, and you viewers can (inaudible) 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 kind of gravitas, the way that 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 and its because of her reightster which somehow hits my register, her words go on make me want to write.
QH: I think that is done really well in the book, I think that the time it is most salient for me is when you are writing about your childhood and you are writing about growing up. And I think for myself, and for readers in general, I’m draw back to a place where I was young and im coming into the world and beginning to have this understanding that the people moving on the TV screen or the people talking on the radio have some type of relationship to myself and it’s not just noise. And I think that your ability to write not with the perspective of yourself as an adult, but also knowing where the text is going in terms of where it is going theoretically and setting yourself up and writing about your childhood is really done intentionally and is really beautifully. And you have a section of the book to read and this scene with you as a child, with your grandmother, watching the news with the footage of the riots after the assasniation of Martin Luther King and I’m wondering if you could give us a little bit of context to this passage and read it aloud of us.
FW: Ok well 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, (have) and I thought to myself, ‘wow, what was I doing when I was 17?’ (laugher). Yeah, that is a very interesting passage. It was 1968, April, and Martin luther King had been assassinated. This was, as most of your comrades know, a tumultuous year. ‘68 is like the year that things change. When you all read Derrida, when you read Foucoult, if you read Lacan, and Levis Strauss, this is the year that the engine of critical theory really takes a turn. And it takes a turn because of all the stuff that is happening in the world. Less than 12 months before, Che Guevara has been assassinated in Bolivia. About three months before this episode, the Americans have finally awoken to the fact that they are not an invidicabal army, that the Tet Offensive has actually moved the territorial capture of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamise Army to several miles outside of Saigon, that’s how far south they were driven. The (inaudible) Chief of Staff have woke, the next year in January of 69, somewhere in there, when Nixon gets sworn in, will tell Nixon that his request to mobilize 500 thousand more troops to vietnam simply can’t happen because there are revolutionaries in the streets right now. White college students have bombed 3000 state and corporate establishments across the country, if you can imagine what this year is like. The American Indian Movement starts up in Minneapolis, urban unrest rocks the country, you know, it’s very much like this year, in some ways, except more overt political direction and the powers that thought their entire edifice was about to crumble. So I am 12, it is 1968 I have been living in this all white neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota for the past six years, since ‘62, and it has been hard, and not fun, and my grandmother has come up form New Orleans, she’s about my age, she is about 64 at that time and we are watching the riots.
(excerpt from the book Afropessimsim)
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 base- ball, 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 grand- mother 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; Balti- more; 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 cau- tiously 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.” (How she knew that was a mystery to me, for I don’t recall ever telling her what went on at school.)
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 Afro Pessimism. But Afro Pessimism isn’t a church to pray at, or a party to be voted in and out of office. Afro Pessimism is Black peo- ple at their best. “Mad at the world” is Black folks at their best. Afro Pessimism 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 per- petrated 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 vio- lence 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 pre- requisites 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: Thank you so much for that. What I love about this excerpt is the phrase afropessimism is Black people at their best, and what I like about this as a sentiment that it undercuts the idea that afropessimsims 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 I feel that to me, afropessimsimis a theme and a life force, that animates the Black radical tradition and it is truly Black people at our best. And so I am wondering how you came to this phrase and what it means to you?
FW: Well the first thing I should say is, I should take you on the road with me! (laughter)
QH: Listen, I’m available. As soon as they lift the ban, we’ll go city to city! (Laughter) A travelling show.
FW: That would be cool, I sometimes lack-, because I do so much of this, I sometimes lack the framing narrative, which you just gave, which is really wonderful. What phrase? What are you asking me to say? Where did what come from, the word ‘afropessimsim’?
QH: The phrase ‘afropessimsim is Black people at their best
FW: Oh, where did it come from?
QH: Yeah, and what does that mean to you?
FW: Okay, so what it means to me is that, you and I exist in a cartographic, which is spacial, and temporal carcerality, which is to say we are always in prison. And the hydrolics of the prison experience, is going to be different for you, as a highschool student in a college town like Evanston, than me as a professor in an (inaudible) part of Irvine, than it is for someone literally behind bars. The actually first principles of that incarceration are the same, just the experiences of someone in a sweatshop is going to be different than the experience of a middle manager or a professor in Stockholm, but the first principal of capitalism is extract surplus value from the labor time of the laborer, are going to be the same. So what that means specifically is, coming also to your question, is that we are never in a space in time when we can speak freely. We always have to negotiate what can the non-black listener take? In other words, what can they take emotionally? We have to know that. So it’s part of our linguistic and preformative DNA. It’s like, we don’t have to know it consciously, in fact, if we knew it consciously, then 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. And so, we don’t carry the structure of grammar in our minds, but we know that there are real consequences, (emphatically) real consequences, for (inaudible) if you are signing a contract, you know, or talking to the police. So one of the things about being Black is 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 Normail 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 somthing (inaudible) his experience, and if it went beyond that, Mailer would become irritated and, you know, there are all kinds of things that Baldwin needed, from Mailer. He needed the little cabin in the back of Mailer’s house way up against the (inaudible) 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-balck 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 want to go out-, 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, you know? I don’t get to do that. But, when the First Gulf War starts in January 1991, and the Navy Ships off the coast of Iraq are sending guided missiles to bomb (inaudible) they get to jump up and down with joy at, what’s called the-, as CNN was talking about, the pleasures, of what was called 1,000 points of light. So, they get to have joy, and any expression, and this is what Davis 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. Thats 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 good reasons. My mother comes down to police her mother and me, for what she thinks are good reasons, because at that point little Bobby Seale has just been the first Black Panther murdered in Oakland and so we are getting gunned down in the streets for uttering these things, not even for putting them into actions. So, I think that we are not going to get to a revolutionary praxis until we are able correctively to not take account of what our non-black listeners can handle when we speak, not take that into account, 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 at that moment is when you talk about that kind of dangerous act, that radical act of what afropessimsim does is pushing that as possibility. It’s interested when you talk about instrumental music that also kind of gets at that rage that’s there but it kind of goes, almost, undercover, or it kind of 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 when its, you know Black music.
FW: Yeah!
QH: Or Jazz clubs, like the Cotton Club in New York City when its a Black band and white people dancing to it and I think that’s really astute. And, I think when you talk about language and when you talk about grammar, afropessimsim and theory in general, is a large part, a language and it’s a grammar to articulate violence, and in the book you write about rhetoric and you write about how langues 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, rage, grew to shape afropessimism as a discipline.
FW: Thats a good question, and I’m not sure- what do you think about that? I can work my way to an answer but why don’t you give it a stab?
QH: One thing that I think about is when you talk about this idea of, you know, afropessimsim allows Black folks to speak to what had only been whispered. And, I think when there are these moments of- for me, before, when I speak to my personal experience, 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 Arthud Jafa, the filmmaker, the moments that I see on the news, or the moments that I might read in a book, or the moments that I might hear in music that get at the same themes of afropessimsim, 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 are coming 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, that I think once it becomes condensed is shocking. But I think it’s not necessarily shocking in the sense that it is being presented with something new, but rather its shocking in the sense that its that fear that-, exspcially the reaction on non-Black folks, that, 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 it’s the fear that that subconscious, or that primar 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 may be.
FW: I like that answer, very much.
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. And so, when you write in the book, and I’m kind of paraphrasing in the altercation that happened between you, and your partner Stella and the engagement in the complex that happens in Minneapolis that escalated to violence kind of reaches it climax, 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 say quote; “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.” And so my question is, I am wondering how, 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 for someone who writes their own narrative in tandem with the theory, I’m wondering what it’s 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, I’m wondering what that process is like for you.
FW: Yeah, thank you very much I really like what you brought me back to, in both reading parts of the book as you did and your own framing of it which is most important. One of the things about afropessimsim as a critical theory is that, you all know, but maybe other people listening,(inaudible) coordinators might not know, what I’m really saying and Saidiya Hartman’s really saying and Jared (Sexton) is saying, is that what afropessimsim claims and argues is not the totality of Black experience but it is the truth of Black experience, the truth of Black life. So this is very difficult for someone other than yourself to accept and get through, but most Marxists understand that kind of logic, its just that they are resistant to bring it over to Blackness. I mean, they actually understand that if you read, volume one of ‘Kapital’ and you see that value is not organic, it’s not real or concrete that it is the creation of extraction of the capitalist of what’s called socially necessary labor time from a certains species of people. So, every person who’s a worker is this species, who puts in what’s called, ‘especially necessary labor time’ to produce surplus value. And no Markist, worth his, her or their salt, would say ‘well, that’s going to be different for a sweatshop worker, than a professor of Stolkholm’. 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 themself, 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 you say ‘regardless of whether someone is Candice Owens, as a Trump Supporter, regardless if someone is Quinn Hughes as a- do you have a summer job I can name off, or something like that?
QH: I don’t, but, I get what you are getting at.
FW: 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. And 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 makes sense of violence. That is at the core. The absence of the ability to make sense of violence. And what I, as a person who has trained in neurotology, and trained as a fiction writer with and MFA from Columbia, one of the things I would have (inaudible) is not success of slave narratives, not the success of protests novels from the 1950s and the 1960s, even through I am (inaudible) because without those writers, I couldn’t be what I am, but what I am more interested in is the failures. And what do I mean by the failures? And 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, and he talks about people being whipped at night, when people are just yanked out of bed for whippings. He talks about the Epp’s so that in the evening, he can hear whales, up and down that little stretch of the Mississippi River. He talks about Marry Epps and Edwin Epps and their children going for a picnic and on their way coming to the slave quarters and yanking people out of the slave quarters to do family whippings. He talks about the 10 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 becomes performing the labor of a chorus saying ‘you’re a for goin’ boy’ as he is whipping the very people the old man is going to have to come back in the night and sleep with and put salve on their back. 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’ is a movie, we know from little snippets from the first volume of ‘Kapital’ when Marx is reflecting on his time as journalist for the New York Herald, he can’t get it through his head! The logic of violence against slaves. Because, as Marx says, its counterproductive! It’s actually counterproductive! It just-, it makes no sense, people are not able to do the kind of work necessary to industrialize this part of the economy, given the (inaudible) of violence that he sees taking place when he is in America. And so, the narrative of Black writers also fails to make (using air quotes) ‘nonsense’ of that by reporting on that and not (inaudible) on it. And then you get the book to the movie, and the movie’s even worse corruption, even though there is a lot I like about the film, in which they actually have to juxt oppose the inability to pick 500 pounds of cotton in a day, with the whippings. No! 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 to fall into the trap of imposing the logic of contingency onto anti-balck 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, this is why afropessimims is so disturbing the logic of debate, because debate, the question and the answer and the answer works through the narrative of contingent violence and sense-making of oppression. I wanted to find a way-, because I’m, look I’m seduced by narrative 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 thats why theres not denouement at the end.
QH: That’s really interesting to me, and I think, especially when you talk about this, impulse to contingency. And I think when Black narrative becomes Hollywoodized, to a certain degree, that is really done in a really violent way. I think when you talk about the slave woman who is forced into relations with the master and it’s because she is (air quotes to emphasize the white articulation of why relations occur) ‘beautiful’, right? I think that is one of the most pernicious and violent articulations that we see regularly. And, I think my question for you is, how do we engage in Black story telling, 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 (laughter)! I’m just trying, I don’t really… you know. 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 it’s 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, one of the tournaments against the Harvard team, that that was the first step. What we’re seeing now is the Blackening of national debate. And it’s going on now 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. So, y’all are doing that work. By saying, ‘we are not going to go affirmative or negative’, but by saying ‘the question is a murderous juggernaut to Black existence and here is how we are going to interrogate it’, and hats off to the judges who allowed that to happen. I must admit, you are in the thick of the woods of one of the universities, Northwestern, who wanted to make that kind of conventional illegal and some professors there, they wanted to have a whole nother debate society, if you weren’t going to make it illegal to interrogate the question so, you know, I’m stumble-bumbling through your answer because I don’t have a concrete answer for that. But, what I do personally, is, I 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. Its kind of a turning point, because its the first book in which the book itself makes an argument that the, I won’t say it celebrates, it brings into view, our struggle 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 I say to myself, ‘okay, so you got a book like Bladwin’s ‘Tell Me How long the Trains Been Gone’ you got a book like Assata Shakur’s autobiography, you got a book like Solomon Norhtorp’s ‘12 Years a Slave’ and what are the places that the book could have gone, but the writing was so afraid of, that it turned back onto the (inaudible) making of what it would be like if the writer was not Black. 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, I remember we started this conversation by saying our speech in always under coortion, normally when you are in a writing process of a book it is the editors and the publisher who put the kabosh on the kind of open ended, non-reconciliation. So, they make you, like, ‘you won’t publish this unless you show us some way that things are going to get better’. So, we are just not allowed to imaging that on the page. And so, I feel that it’s my duty to go further that 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 who you referenced, specifically James Baldwin, he’s got this essay ‘Sonny’s Blues’ in which he talks about, it’s this fictionalized narrator talking about his brother who is a drug addict and a jazz player and, they always had this tension between them because the narrator is a school teacher and he has lived a straight path, with his family, but he goes and he see Sonny play and he talks about going to the Jazz club and being washing in water when he is listing 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. And, I think that 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 Epss 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’. And when you talk about his gratuitous violence and this pleasure as entangled with one another, the term that you use to describe this is ‘jouissance’. And so, I am wondering if you would be able to speak a bit to how, first, how joissance operates in these scenes, but I’m really really interested to hear how you talk about why jouissance and violence are necessary familial fixture to whites and civil society.
FW: You got all of them today huh? (laughter) (exhales) Oh boy! (more laughter) Umm yeah I should have known when I signed up with a debater (laughter) 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 Beginners Guide to:)Lacan, that’s all it’s titled. And the writer is (Lionel) Bailey B-a-i-l-e-y, and it’s also an audiobook. Because whenever I do the psychoanalytic stuff, I kind of have to go back and so some of the things I’m going to say are not completely flesh out. Part of the problem with the word ‘jouissance’ is that its a French word that doesn’t fully translated into english, and so its a mode of pleasure from the unconscious, but one feels it in the body. But English translations typically translate it as enjoyment, but in French, it kind of means that, but it’s much more nuanced. But 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 really crude. Part of why I want people to know that book is you have to understand how an English language translation-, what sense it makes of that word, what sense Lacan makes of that word, and what does it really mean 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 uncious and bring in what Lacan means because he is borrowing from legal statutes also that 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, because where Black people exist in a kind of day-to-day life, your a student, I’m a professor, your 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 and… 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 witness as an ontological entity.
FW: In chapter 6 of ‘Black Skin White Masks’, Fannon makes the argument that the Black imago is an image, so a property image, that is available to resolve all the conflicts of white philiation. And what he means by that, is that living in a nuclear family has a kind of oppressive hydraulics, or a better word would be repressive hydraulics, because we don’t want to think too negatively about the hydraulics, because repression used in political circles is a bad thing, but repressionsued 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, so grammar is a major major repressive apparatus. There is word that I have trouble pronouncing, conseguity, which this the rules of engagement in a family, who can marry whom, in some cultures you can marry a second cousin, in some cultures, like, you know, the royalty of Russia, Germany and England, up into the fist 30 years of the 20th century, you can marry first cousins, I mean, you had to do that so that royal blood stayed around. So there are rules of what you can do, who you can have sex with, who you can marry, what are the rules of power sharing, within the nuclear family. And just like what you can do with a verb, what you can do with a noun, what you can do with a predicate, they have rules, and see, these are all repsressive apparti which allow for communal existence. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing, that just a thing that allows for communal existence. But, it also puts anxiety into the unconscious modes, processes of signification, because unciousis 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, because I just made a generic argument, and now you bing in politics and power and you circle back through Fannon’s chapter six, where you have a naturally occurring apparatus of repression, called the nuclear family, or any family, but in that naturally occurring apparatus of oppression, you have situation in which you have a heavy power imbalance so that the name of the father, the patriarch, has most legitimacy and the least the daughter, and the son somewhere in between. And what it means, is that that’s going to make everyone a nice happy smiley family on the outside, and inside there is going to be in the unconscious, various modes of rebellion. And, inorder to get past that rebellion so that rebellion doesn’t destroy the structure, lets just work on the western family right now, the wester white family has to work through what’s called the ‘process proppor edipolization’, where girls learn how to become good mothers, boys put aside the desire to take the father’s place now at the age of 3, 5 and 6, because they know, 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 (inaudible) 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 they ways it is is shared, then there could be an internal combustion. And so, that aggressivity that is typically what Fanon- it is experienced in all children but let’s just stick with the girl child because its experienced most severly in the girl child, needs a grounding wire, like an electrical grounding wire, and it needs a destination to take out the rage, that it doesn’t even know it has, but it feels, that would otherwise be 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. And so, that objecthood is available for that kind of aggressivity and the the performance of that aggressivity can also, at that same time, can produce a sense of ‘ahhhh’ elation. I’m crude here, that’s why I want you comrades to read the book, you know, its an orgasmic feeling that comes from whipping somebody, an orgasic 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, to send that agressivity to 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 the moment- 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 that you described in the second portion when you write, in the book, you write this part 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. And so, I am thinking about Saidiya Hartman’s latest work in which the talks about these communities of love and care that come out of waywardness, and I’m thinking a bit about Chritina 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. And so, I’m wondering, if you think-, if this war in the imago that is happening within the Black imtermural, if you think that that can be altered with care and if you think that that can be changed with social life and if you think that is a paradigm that can be altered with that articulation of love and community, or if you think that is a necessary integral social life formation that allows the Black intramural to exist in the first place?
FW: So what is the-, let me say what I think and I didnt get the second part, say the second question, if you would, again?
QH: You establish that the Black self if 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 this is a paradigm that is happening within Black communities within the Black self, if I’m understanding you correctly, and so within these writers who are talking about love and care and these new epistemologies and these new possibilities for subjectivity that exist within moments of social life and care that happen in these 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 that as (inaudible), so they need to happen and they do something. But I’m cautious, and this is where I might differ from some of the writers that you mentioned, and I’m not entirely sure, I’m cautious to-, I would never say what they do, because, once you say what they do, that assumes something that I don’t believe to be true, which is to say that you can think now about Blacks as different from what it is now. You can act now in a way that resists the pigeonholing of the imago, and those are, you know, very important. I started ‘Wayward Lives (Becutiful Experiments) and then I gave it to a Black woman who needed it for her own, you know, personal growth and what she was going through, so I have to buy it again and get back to it, so let me not talk about that right now. But I don’t believe-, I think that in Hartman’s ‘Scenes of Subjection’, what she argues is that merriment, stealing away, which is to say yourself as piece of property, going to the next plantation to marry someone, or just have fun, these are all-, playing an intument like Solomon Norrthrup did, and dancing, these 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 that you all might have seen between (Jared) Sexton and (Fred) Moten, when Sexon wrote ‘The Social Life of Social Death’. I would call them provisional and important, but we can’t really say that they are essential. And, 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 is, by its very nature, its 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 so this is the actual inverse of Black elaborations. Black elaborations is the actual inverse of that. We are elaborated and positioned by gratuitous violence, and then the words get piled on after that. And so, if you’re going to be very rigorous or precise, then 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, but I don’t know really- and it will only come into being when we have, kind of, cataclysmic revolution which makes for the next day where there are no Blacks, and no humans, and a different paradigm will come into existence. And, 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 regarding the responses to this violence. We talked about earlier, 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, if I understand you correctly, you said, dismantling the police is a necessary measure, police are killing Black folks in the moment, and I would agree with that, and I also recognize that there is a tension between civil society being terminally anti-black, so I’m really curious as to how you read these steps in dismantling what present themself as the state or violence within this context.
FW: I don’t have a point for point pilgrim’s progress as to how that would come about, because afropessimsim, to get back to your earlier statement, is a big ear trumpet, it’s a listening device which hears Black speech in those moments, when it is not beholden or concerned about its-, here’s the speech of Blackness right before death, in other words what would you say if-, like for example George Jackson’s last words, you know, that’s afropessimsim. It’s like, if you speak Black, you better be prepared to die. So, what you do is you really dont speak as Black, you speak in a kind of qualitative careful mode and I can’t say how you get from that to a change that I could actually say what it looks like, because all the discourses that you are dealing with as debaters, weather you are running the post colonial K, or the marxist K, or the femminsit K, just as rhetorical apparatus, they come with two gestures. One is the descriptive gesture, one is prescriptive gesture, which answers (inaudible) question of weather it be done, which is why they lend themselves so nicely to debate tournaments. But, afropessimsim only comes with the description of Black suffering. It doesn’t really come with a prescription, or a vision of what that would look like on the other side. Precisely because, all of those other discourses have the subjects of oppression, being those subjects after they’re liberated, but in a liberated zone in a liberated way. The emacaptatory dream, or possibility of apropessimsim undos or, there is no more Black and there is no more human, it’s a total cataclysmic-, there are sentient beings, what will they be? So, that’s part of it. The other part is, I’m kind of lying by omission when I say, because my speech is coerced even though people think I speak freely, right, if I-, 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 spacialization that has its book on the neck of the Indian. Its the kind of temporality that has its boot on the neck of the worker, it’s not the end of the capacity of spacialization, 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 full back to my grandmother, the end of the world not the end of the certain construction of an antithetical world but the end of world breaking capacity as we know it, and-, am I getting at all to what you are asking?
QH: I think it’s definitely helps a lot, it helps me a lot because I think the articulation that stands out to me-, and I think what you just articulated that really really helps me a lot is, just what you said, you describe this stance of aforpessimsim as being the stance of the capacity to turn endless duration into event the, capacity to turn space into town,into city, and so I think that what this makes me think of, for me personally, I am for police abolition, just as I am for geographical abolition, or just as I am for clock abolition, or just as that is all part of the movement of things that ought to be abolished if are aboltiong the world as you described it.
FW: I want for you and your folks to write down this woman; Teija, T-e-i-j-a, Mcdougal, and 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, and so very few people, she is writing a afropessimist dissertation on this, and what she is finding is that, conceptually, for the past three centuries, the conceptualization of temporality meaning moments on the clock, are intertwined with the vocabulary of worlds like ‘slave’ and ‘slave master’. It’s very very fascinating.
QH: What I’m curious to hear you talk about is how we move to the other side if that is possible, if that movement is possible and how you envision that taking place.
FW: Yeah I think that I would like to say something about that, I don’t really know, I mean, I’m the guy with the stethoscope, I’m doing the diagnostic. I would look to, especially your age group, people like you, to answer the question about praxis, and forward movement. And I think we should never trust a professor of any race, who wants to tell you about revolutionary praxis. By the time are are part of the academy, especially if you are in it 20-sum years like me, we are such milktoast, non-confrontational, in my case (inaudible), that we are worthless, with respect to, you know-, 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. And this is what the young people in Minneapolis knew, and I look at that as-, that burning of the police station, not as a political process, but as a gesture I can celebrate that moves towards what I’m talking about. How it does, I don’t know. But the only thing I do know is that where that connects with afropessimism, is that 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 principals of the imagination of others and that was a really important moment. I can’t say what that looks like on the other side. I mean even in paradigms that are based upon contingent violence, 400 years ago, I don’t think any philosopher any critical theorist, I mean, the intellectuals were ecclesiastes, they were monks of the church, and they didn’t- I dont think anyone could imagine that, ‘woah Jack, in another hundred years, feudal peasants as a thing that structures society, will be kicked to the curb, we are going to have this new species called worker and capitalist’. It took the revolution to make the imagination to instantiate the new paradigm and begin about the new species. What I will say, is that kind of violence is a prerequisite to thought. People think that Fanon, in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, is a war monger 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, violence is a prerequisite to thought, you simply don’t have a new world, which is new categories, which is new thinking, new ways of subjugation, 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 that they are being radical, when they use the word defund the police, as opposed to the phrase abolish the police, this is what they are really-, they are suffering from what Sexton calls the anxiety of antagonism, they-, “ugggh” they say, “this world is bad, but god damn” (laughter) “but what if- so let me tinker with it a little bit, you know because I don’t want-, you know” and as Saidiya Hartman told me when I was writing my dissertation, she was an intellectual brains on my committee, that 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, they will be free. No one wants to be that free. We don’t want to be that free, but it’s imposed upon us as someone 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 afropessimsim (laughter) beating Black kids by calling them slaves and the whole nine yards. So, I’m wondering how you read these moments.You speak about them in the book, towards the end, I’m wondering how you read that?
FW: Well you all might have heard of Patrice Douglass (inaudible) don’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, and she asked me in a graduate seminar when she was still doing course work, ‘how do we keep afropessimsim Black?” And, it was a very shocking question, because, at the moment, I had to realize, we cant. I would like to, but just as our bodies and out music doesn’t belong to us, you know, what Hartman is saying is, when you do make merriment on the plantation, or when you steal away to the next plantation to see a loved one, those are you know, modes of the Black intramural, but they’re have not changed the general structure which is to say that which all you are are simply extensions of the master’s prerogative. And so, it happens much more slowly in written as analytical writing, as we are talking about here, but you get some high power, cracker jack 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 hard core rap. In psychoanalysis 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 that 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 afropessimsim, using a K from afropessimsim, to articulate some kind of suffering from another group, but the sad thing about it is, is that afropessimsims belonged to them anyway. Just as we belonged to them. Now it, 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 staged 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 very last thing before we have to take off, is I would like to know what gives you hope?
FW: I don’t know (laughter). To die not violently (laughter) 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, because, what I’m trying to do is to not look at things. Whats happening, because I know I’m going to have to look at them, you know, like the murder of people who are Black. Because, I know I am going to have to look at them to write, and so, 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. You know, I wasn’t like that when I was your age, through my thirties, and part of my foruties, but I’m kind of winding down. I’m physically less able to. There was a time when I was 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.
QH: That’s really beautiful, I really appreciate that. My guess this evening has been Dr.Frank Wilderson, his new book, Afropessimsim, blends critical theory and memoir for a truly special piece of writing. Afropessimsim is published by Liveright publishing and is available now. Thank you so much for joining, it’s really been a pleasure to talk to you.
FW: Likewise Quinn, I hope we can meet in person one day.
The Drinking Gourd 