The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 3

Last week I was in dialogue with McKenzie Wark at the BMA. We hadn’t met before—in fact I’d just became familiar with her work over the summer. Particularly given how short the event was (it started just a bit after 6:30 and ended at about 7:30) I wish we could’ve two or three parted the entire thing. No way we could get to her ideas about black accelerationism and Detroit techno for example, which connects in some ways to my own ideas about techno vis a vis black nihilism. Nor, somewhat relatedly did we get a chance to talk about techno as a soundscape particularly rich for transbodies (Wark suggests, and I think she’s right, that techno in as much as it eschews vocals and sounds that evoke certain types of relationship forms and affect enables dancing without an endpoint so to speak). And we could only touch on her ideas about race and capitalism.

But what we did talk about a bit was the friend/enemy distinction she referenced in the video she created before she transitioned featured in the Dis.Art collective BMA exhibit, a distinction she also talks about in General Intellects using the work of radical democratic theorist Chantal Mouffe. As Wark notes the friend/enemy distinction is a fundamental element of both 2016 presidential challengers. For Trump the friend/enemy distinction is domestic white citizen vs non-white immigrant. For Sanders the friend/enemy distinction is worker vs. owner/corporation. What Wark wants to do is destabilize this dichotomy, breaking down two categories into four—from the friend-enemy we get the friend/enemy/non-friend/non-enemy. On the one hand I can see this, although I’d think of it more as the friend/enemy/frienemy (the figure that is both friend AND enemy)/non-friend/non-enemy distinction.

On the other though, I still think the friend/enemy distinction works. It is particularly helpful I think in helping us understand the figure of the squeegee boy.

For my folk who don’t live in or near major cities, the squeegee boy is the kid (black and mostly male in Baltimore, your mileage may vary) who stands at major intersections in the Spring, Summer, and Fall with a squeegee, waiting to wipe windshields, in exchange for a few dollars. Maybe, if you don’t give him money when he asks, give you a bit of shit for not doing so. The squeegee boy played a prominent role in the turn in NYC towards broken-windows policing, and in 1985 as Baltimore’s population started to decrease while their black population percentage started to increase, they generated a moral panic. In response to the panic, lawmakers criminalized them. Black residents, recognizing that a law preventing kids from wiping windshields was racist, fought against it. Lawmakers responded by removing the criminal penalty—while retaining the illegality. Police could still stop you for it, they just couldn’t sanction you for it.

Over the past few weeks new concerns about the squeegee boys arose. A group of business owners wrote to Mayor Bernard Young about the boys, and Young responded by increasing policing—three days ago while taking my daughter to the Baltimore Public School headquarters I saw a police officer approaching a group of four boys on MLK to stop them from approaching cars—and by coming up with a crack committee to figure out how to “solve” the squeegee boy problem.

While we can and should trouble the friend/enemy distinction somewhere in the middle—the frienemy for example operates squarely in the middle of the distinction, while the non-friend/non-enemy figures lie outside the line—something like the squeegee boy really does define society by being placed outside of it.

How do we fit someone like the squeegee boy within the conceptions of capitalism that Wark proffers? Wark, suggests something like Wang’s carceral capitalism, which makes sense for two reasons. First because Wang is particularly interested in the role race plays in capitalism. Second because in developing the concept of carceral capitalism for the book Wang relies partially on Baltimore. However I think that while Wang’s work does a lot of the work here, there’s a gap. Given that the squeegee boys are only policed—again there’s no longer an explicit penalty associated with being found in violation of the rule—there are no fees and fines explicitly associated with the dynamic. However in as much as the squeegee boys are viewed as somehow disrupting the circulation of capital, they become viewed as a sort of pestilence that has to be shunted away or moved from the central areas in which high end workers produce and consume. If we include this group’s parents (at the very least their mothers) we’d find ourselves with a very large voting base politically. But it’s hard to imagine a group of said mothers writing a letter to Young and getting the same type of response as he gave capital.

Anyway, it was far too short. Far far too short. But I enjoyed the conversation, and enjoyed learning about Wark and her work. Capital is Dead should be dope. I kind of wish it were true.

Got to go. In case you've stumbled on this through a Russian bot, my name is Lester Spence, and this is the (lightly edited) Counterpublic Papers.  

See you next week.