Movement like this isn’t parallel but off and out ; tangent as much as crossing ; asymptotic, appositional encounter. As soon as we call this line we’re on derailment we’ll begin to study how all this out root goes. Train circle, then bridge, then fall.
Lu
The work of blackness is inseparable from the violence of blackness. Violence is where technique and beauty come back, though they had never left. Consider technique as a kind of strain and consider the technique that is embedded in and cuts techniques – the (Fanonian as apposed to Artaudian) cruelty. The internal difference of blackness is a violent and cruel re-routing, by way and outside of critique, that is predicated on the notion, which was given to me, at least, by Martin Luther Kilson, Jr., that there’s nothing wrong with us (precisely insofar as there is something wrong, something off, something ungovernably, fugitively living in us that is constantly taken for the pathogen it instantiates). This notion is manifest primarily in the long, slow motion – the series of tragically pleasurable detours – of the immediate (of improvisation, which is something not but almost nothing other than the spontaneous), a re-routing that turns away from a turning on or to itself. The apposition of Fanonian and Artaudian cruelty is an itinerancy that bridges life and blackness.
In the trick of politics we are insufficient, scarce, waiting in pockets of resistance, in stairwells, in alleys, in vain. The false image and its critique threaten the common with democracy, which is only ever to come, so that one day, which is only never to come, we will be more than what we are. But we already are. We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around. We’re more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic. We surround democracy’s false image in order to unsettle it. Every time it tries to enclose us in a decision, we’re undecided. Every time it tries to represent our will, we’re unwilling. Every time it tries to take root, we’re gone (because we’re already here, moving). We ask and we tell and we cast the spell that we are under, which tells us what to do and how we shall be moved, here, where we dance the war of apposition. We’re in a trance that’s under and around us. We move through it and it moves with us, out beyond the settlements, out beyond the redevelopment, where black night is falling, where we hate to be alone, back inside to sleep till morning, drink till morning, plan till morning, as the common embrace, right inside, and around, in the surround.
So you pause at the recitation of lost names and the mumbled jargon where the rest of Uncle Toliver’s utterance remains unheard. In the space that jargon opens (a space off to the side or out-from-the-outside ; an appositional spacing or displacement of the encounter in the interest of a subjectivity whose presence remains to be activated ; a space not determined by the zero encounter that ruptures the subject or the nostalgic return to an other subject before the encounter ; a space where Uncle Toliver speaks through Tom and Henry—the sons of the master—and through the Workers of the Writers’ Project of the Works Project Administration of the State of Virginia, and through Leon Litwak to us : piercing and possessing, disabling and enabling mediation and meditation) the rest is what is left for us to say, the rest is what is left for us to do, in the broad and various echoes of that utterance, our attunement to which assures us that we are “in the tradition.
The black radical tradition is in apposition to enlightenment. Appositional enlightenment is remixed, expanded, distilled, and radically faithful to the forces its encounters carry, break, and constitute. It’s (the effect of) critique or rationalization unopposed to the deep revelation instantiated by a rupturing event of dis/appropriation, or the rapturous advent of an implicit but unprecedented freedom.