The Counterpublic Papers vol. 6 no. 8

February 01, 2021

My friend Jodi Dean had three things on her mind in the wake of the new administration. I want to use a bit of space to talk about them in turn.

1. In what ways are some of us on the Left (from the liberal mainstream through the socialists and maybe some anarchists but for the most part I don't think this applies to them) attached to our hatred of Trump? For over four years, however disgusting and exhausting they have been, we have developed media habits that centered on his outrages. We enjoy -- have a locus for -- our antipathy, our sense of the country's failure; it's so much easier to transfer all blame to a single person than it is to take on the whole damn system.

I think the bulk of us have suffered from a particular disorder that likely, although I’m not that type of doctor, will sooner or later have a clinical term attached to it. When I wrote about my insomnia over the last few weeks (but really it’s been far longer) I wrote that a friend of mine who’d been in violent states called it trauma, and until that moment I hadn’t thought of it as such. In the case of the black left (with the same caveats Dean made) I don’t think we are as attached as our white counterparts were. We shared the media habits, yes, and we had the visceral reaction, but with one difference. For us it felt as if we were living in the closest thing to Jim Crow, and that the state was actively out for murder. We knew Trump was that figure, but we knew that pretty much half of the country voted for him. And a big chunk of the state supported him. There is an attachment here but there’s a sense with the Biden election that we fought him off.

2. My next thought or worry is that the impeachment is going to make getting over and beyond Trump hard to do. He and his actions will still be a focus of attention, of affective engagement, of outrage. 

I think for those of us on the black Left, I think the most important thing for us is that we delegitimize the approach to governing that Trump represents. We do this to prevent him from coming to power again. We do this to make it difficult for someone like him but actually smarter and more interested in governing and sane, to come to power. We do this to build political capacity for another tendency. I don’t know how we get there without impeachment. 

3. Which leads to my third thought: recognizing the threat of fascism as extending far beyond Trump -- and as actually having little to do with Trump except to the extent that he explicitly mobilized extra-legal violent fascist groups in an attack on the Capitol in order to block or overturn an election process -- recognizing this, grappling with it, studying it, investigating it, and mobilizing against it is the means for weaning ourselves away from Trump and addressing the much more fundamental problems of which Trump was just a symptom. We've got to stop "enjoying the symptom," end our captivation with the image, and deal with the structure.

So one of the things I did when I couldn’t get rest was play video games. I haven’t written about this much here, but I’ve been playing video games for over forty years. I probably haven’t gone more than a year or two without having a system in my house. I used the insomnia to finish a game I’d bought years ago, Shadow of Mordor. The game itself isn’t important, but playing it took me back to the end of The Lord of of the Rings. After Sauron, the great evil of the Third Age is defeated, the four hobbits (Frodo, Sam Gamgee, Merry, Pippen) return to their home (the Shire) only to find it overrun and devastated, not by Sauron, but by Saruman (a once great but by the time the series starts, corrupted wizard) and his henchmen. The last battle of the Great War wasn’t in Mordor but in their home. Academics writing about this note that here Tolkien came closest to writing about his World War I experience—he came home victorious only to realize his home had been devastated by industrialization.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the past week or so. Our problem is and for the last few decades has been one of institutionalization—the lack of it. The institutions we have to mount an insurgency are weak, although they are growing in number and to a certain extent in reach. But our problem is also that we may ignore the broader tendency that Trump represents. And here I’m not simply talking about fascism, I’m talking about the rise of a certain type of corruption within black circles made possible in part by the increased attention to a certain type of anti-racism. Our challenge isn’t on the right, not directly. It’s coming from the corrupt black center. A few days after the 2016 election, a colleague plotted a coup of an academic center that we still haven’t gotten over. That colleague was able to cloak the coup in language of anti-racism and pluralism but in effect it represented the same type of corruption that Trump would later become known for. 

The fascist struggle is largely an intra-racial one with significant inter-racial aspects. 

The struggle we (the black Left) wage is largely an intra-racial one with significant inter-racial aspect.

…..

Kwame Kilpatrick was one of the people Trump commuted with his last act. Kilpatrick who was in year 8 of a 28 year sentence, was arguably Barack Obama before Barack Obama. Chris Rock’s Head of State was loosely based on Kilpatrick’s career. 

Although I consider myself am abolitionist, I was probably one of the few people who thought he should serve that time. Not for punishment—I agree that the sentence he received does not compare to the sentence others in the same circumstance received, largely because Kilpatrick was young, black, and audacious. 

But for protection.

The type of crime Kilpatrick was guilty of—corruption—is not the crime individuals age out of. They have to be actively rehabilitated to not commit that type of crime again. I don’t see Kilpatrick as being rehabilitated at all. Given this I think it likely he does something similar again. And in as much as his constituency is and will always be black, If he does this he’ll likely do it to a black public. If there’s one thing prisons do, as horrific and problematic as they are, it’s cordon off. Prisons cordon off individuals who are deemed to be threats from the communities they are deemed to threaten. 

I hope I’m wrong.

…..

The semester began last week. I teach Urban Policy and The Right to the City. My thought is to combine the classes somehow, final project wise. We’ll see how that goes. 

My friend Jodi Dean had three things on her mind in the wake of the new administration. I want to use a bit of space to talk about them in turn.

1. In what ways are some of us on the Left (from the liberal mainstream through the socialists and maybe some anarchists but for the most part I don't think this applies to them) attached to our hatred of Trump? For over four years, however disgusting and exhausting they have been, we have developed media habits that centered on his outrages. We enjoy -- have a locus for -- our antipathy, our sense of the country's failure; it's so much easier to transfer all blame to a single person than it is to take on the whole damn system.

I think the bulk of us have suffered from a particular disorder that likely, although I’m not that type of doctor, will sooner or later have a clinical term attached to it. When I wrote about my insomnia over the last few weeks (but really it’s been far longer) I wrote that a friend of mine who’d been in violent states called it trauma, and until that moment I hadn’t thought of it as such. In the case of the black left (with the same caveats Dean made) I don’t think we are as attached as our white counterparts were. We shared the media habits, yes, and we had the visceral reaction, but with one difference. For us it felt as if we were living in the closest thing to Jim Crow, and that the state was actively out for murder. We knew Trump was that figure, but we knew that pretty much half of the country voted for him. And a big chunk of the state supported him. There is an attachment here but there’s a sense with the Biden election that we fought him off.

2. My next thought or worry is that the impeachment is going to make getting over and beyond Trump hard to do. He and his actions will still be a focus of attention, of affective engagement, of outrage. 

I think for those of us on the black Left, I think the most important thing for us is that we delegitimize the approach to governing that Trump represents. We do this to prevent him from coming to power again. We do this to make it difficult for someone like him but actually smarter and more interested in governing and sane, to come to power. We do this to build political capacity for another tendency. I don’t know how we get there without impeachment. 

3. Which leads to my third thought: recognizing the threat of fascism as extending far beyond Trump -- and as actually having little to do with Trump except to the extent that he explicitly mobilized extra-legal violent fascist groups in an attack on the Capitol in order to block or overturn an election process -- recognizing this, grappling with it, studying it, investigating it, and mobilizing against it is the means for weaning ourselves away from Trump and addressing the much more fundamental problems of which Trump was just a symptom. We've got to stop "enjoying the symptom," end our captivation with the image, and deal with the structure.

So one of the things I did when I couldn’t get rest was play video games. I haven’t written about this much here, but I’ve been playing video games for over forty years. I probably haven’t gone more than a year or two without having a system in my house. I used the insomnia to finish a game I’d bought years ago, Shadow of Mordor. The game itself isn’t important, but playing it took me back to the end of The Lord of of the Rings. After Sauron, the great evil of the Third Age is defeated, the four hobbits (Frodo, Sam Gamgee, Merry, Pippen) return to their home (the Shire) only to find it overrun and devastated, not by Sauron, but by Saruman (a once great but by the time the series starts, corrupted wizard) and his henchmen. The last battle of the Great War wasn’t in Mordor but in their home. Academics writing about this note that here Tolkien came closest to writing about his World War I experience—he came home victorious only to realize his home had been devastated by industrialization.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the past week or so. Our problem is and for the last few decades has been one of institutionalization—the lack of it. The institutions we have to mount an insurgency are weak, although they are growing in number and to a certain extent in reach. But our problem is also that we may ignore the broader tendency that Trump represents. And here I’m not simply talking about fascism, I’m talking about the rise of a certain type of corruption within black circles made possible in part by the increased attention to a certain type of anti-racism. Our challenge isn’t on the right, not directly. It’s coming from the corrupt black center. A few days after the 2016 election, a colleague plotted a coup of an academic center that we still haven’t gotten over. That colleague was able to cloak the coup in language of anti-racism and pluralism but in effect it represented the same type of corruption that Trump would later become known for. 

The fascist struggle is largely an intra-racial one with significant inter-racial aspects. 

The struggle we (the black Left) wage is largely an intra-racial one with significant inter-racial aspect.

…..

Kwame Kilpatrick was one of the people Trump commuted with his last act. Kilpatrick who was in year 8 of a 28 year sentence, was arguably Barack Obama before Barack Obama. Chris Rock’s Head of State was loosely based on Kilpatrick’s career. 

Although I consider myself am abolitionist, I was probably one of the few people who thought he should serve that time. Not for punishment—I agree that the sentence he received does not compare to the sentence others in the same circumstance received, largely because Kilpatrick was young, black, and audacious. 

But for protection.

The type of crime Kilpatrick was guilty of—corruption—is not the crime individuals age out of. They have to be actively rehabilitated to not commit that type of crime again. I don’t see Kilpatrick as being rehabilitated at all. Given this I think it likely he does something similar again. And in as much as his constituency is and will always be black, If he does this he’ll likely do it to a black public. If there’s one thing prisons do, as horrific and problematic as they are, it’s cordon off. Prisons cordon off individuals who are deemed to be threats from the communities they are deemed to threaten. 

I hope I’m wrong.

…..

The semester began last week. I teach Urban Policy and The Right to the City. My thought is to combine the classes somehow, final project wise. We’ll see how that goes.