Moten, The Case of Blackness

While non­coo­pe­ra­tion is figu­red by Fanon as a kind of sta­ging area for or a pre­li­mi­na­ry ver­sion of a more authen­tic “objec­ti­fying encoun­ter” with colo­nial oppres­sion (a kind of coun­ter-repre­sen­ta­tio­nal res­ponse to power’s inter­pel­la­tive call), his own for­mu­la­tions regar­ding that res­ponse point to the requi­re­ment of a kind of thin­gly qui­cke­ning that makes oppo­si­tion pos­sible while appo­si­tio­nal­ly dis­pla­cing it. Noncooperation is a duty that must be car­ried out by the ones who exist in the near­ness and dis­tance bet­ween poli­ti­cal conscious­ness and abso­lute patho­lo­gy. But this duty, impo­sed by an erstw­hile sub­ject who clear­ly is sup­po­sed to know, over­looks (or, per­haps more pre­ci­se­ly, looks away from) that vast range of non­reac­tive dis­rup­tions of rule that are, in ear­ly and late Fanon, both indexed and dis­qua­li­fied. Such dis­rup­tions, often mani­fest as minor inter­nal conflicts (within the clo­sed circle, say, of Algerian cri­mi­na­li­ty, in which the colo­ni­zed “tend to use each other as a screen”) or mus­cu­lar contrac­tions, howe­ver much they are cap­tu­red, enve­lo­ped, imi­ta­ted, or tra­ded, remain inas­si­mi­lable (231). These dis­rup­tions trouble the reha­bi­li­ta­tion of the human even as they are evi­dence of the capa­ci­ty to enact such reha­bi­li­ta­tion. Moreover, it is at this point, in pas­sages that culmi­nate with the appo­si­tion of what Fanon refers to as “the rea­li­ty of the ‘towel­head’ ” with “the rea­li­ty of the ‘nig­ger,’ ” that the fact, the case, and the lived expe­rience of blackness—which might be unders­tood here as the trou­bling of and the capa­ci­ty for the reha­bi­li­ta­tion of the human—converge as a duty to appose the oppres­sor, to refrain from a cer­tain per­for­mance of the labor of the nega­tive, to avoid his eco­no­my of objec­ti­fi cation and stan­ding against, to run away from the snares of recog­ni­tion (220). This refu­sal is a black thing, is that which Fanon car­ries with(in) him­self, and in how he car­ries him­self, from Martinique to France to Algeria. He is an anti­co­lo­nial smug­gler whose wares are consti­tu­ted by and as the dis­lo­ca­tion of black social life that he car­ries, almost una­ware.