the self

radical self-care and alienating the self

pointing to the importance of healing and care in the discussion of revolution will be the inception of last revelations of the liberation of self. Sarah Ahmed writes, “The impression of the table is one of negation… It is through such painful encounters between this body and other objects including other bodies that ‘surfaces’ are felt as ‘being there’ in the first place. To be more precise the impression of a surface is an effect of such intensifications of feeling.” This quotation by Ahmed represents the oppressive constructions of the state, while still in the ultimate life-death binary, as a negation until it is made manifest against the body engendering some recognition by the body that there is a surface there. The abstraction of race is a surface. It does not exist and only manifests when called for its subjugating utility to other someone else. This flexibility of these oppressive conditions proves a relativity of their existence. They do exist, but they do not have to harm. They harm when forced upon in the physical, but can be negated in the subconscious. Such harm and trauma is constantly reinforced to maintain compliance to the system. But the power that one does have is the erasure of the conception in their subconscious, to not allow it to pervade and alter. Similarly, I can sink back into myself and be an object, omnipresent perspective of the person that is “Tyler White.” My body feelings and act in a manner deeply foreign from myself. Once I am “impressed” by another can I be ushered back into this body I occupy in it’s materiality. 

I write that to say that all pain acts in a similar manner. We understand pain to be an internalized bringing back into the body by an external stimuli. All pain of any sort, even that that is internal is often a product of something that was brought into it. By shunning out that colonized form of thought and process there is an immediate resistance of that pain as no longer existing. The phenomena of the bodily system is a carefully curated system of timed, looped, and programmed biological functions. We encounter the presentation of this pain through the surface. Rather it be a scar, or a feeling of ache, our internal is attempting to communicate with our external world and selves that there is discord occuring in a rather idealized, high-level biological system. The determinants of health outcomes, stressors, emotion, response, fear, and all other expressions are the manifestations of the pain of the oppressive system entering into the body. As we are not ‘being there’ in the world, our body has no other way but to immediate external visage for there is a recognition and hopefully, a reconsciousing to track that experience in the memorial code. Surfaces then become not only objects of harm and trauma causing pain but the only possible path toward healing. 

The intensifications of our pain augment a process of inherent biological healing (scarring), constructed external psychotherapy (from seeing an actual specialist to talking to a trusted person), prayer and ritual (an externalized showing of thought and devotion to an externalized force for the healing of the external or the internal; as well as, the working and casting of ill feeling and sensation by physical movement). The surface of other surfaces in people or movement allow us to transform the same source of how we incurred pain into how we seek to heal. In contradiction, some may say that there exists internal dialogues and self-healing but the manifestation of emotion on our surface is how we, intentionally or unintentionally, display that we are in pain. Therefore, the internalization of this harm cannot be a suitable solution. Instead of being released it is cast up, and built up. Our impression was not made from the internal. The external hurt us, so it must also heal us. 

In our memorial code of experiences where we draw comparison and lesson from, it becomes integral to understand the complexity of how we utilize that code. Surfaces become known to us both externally and internally by the canonization of experience we have and build “an intimate relationship [with]... ‘materialisation’ -- the effect of boundary, fixity and surface.” Within that boundary of this constantly evolving external surface, the materialised realm we interface with becomes the truth we substantiate as our personified and embodied history of pain and our potentiality to heal. Healing as understood as maximizing the external as cause for the internal is a place of conception that uses the means of liberatory engagement to remove the external pain, and the maintenance of the self desire, self freedom, and self choice as the foremost goal of essenceship, in concert with others. Thus healing is an enterprise of reinvigorating that which was dominated, and realizing the continual quest for self-actualization through exploration, exposure, and openness of the body to the surfaces that are unfixed and boundless. 

the collective

The Occupy Movement

Largely understood as an awakening of consciousness, The Occupy movement prides itself on sparking an international reinvigoration of the rights and autonomies that are being blocked by the continual relegation to the death of choice, opportunity, mobility, and the life of exploitation, overworking, economic struggle. In their organizing, the Occupy movement addressed and superseded the Spectacle in accurately realizing their status for themselves and the world, “[occupy movement] is also transforming how we, the 99% , see ourselves. The shame many of us felt when we couldn’t find a job, pay down our debts, or keep our home is being replaced by a political awakening. Millions now recognize that we are not to blame for a weak economy.” Accurately, affirming the truth of the system, ridding themselves of shame, and exposing the rampant exploitation of the impoverished was the success of the 99%. 

Raising the consciousness of those experiencing this life of exploitation, the movement has been associated with redistribution and reordering as a basic philosophy of the revolution necessary. Fanon claimed from the onset of The Wretched of the Earth that marginalized persons within repressive societies in their consciousness recognize an inherent need for the revolution of their society. Bringing disorder and disorganization in the heavily compartmentalized world of the dominant is the agenda of this change. And through disorder, the rightful restoration of the already known humanity of the marginalized is centered and ordered. This important revolutionary doctrine is the dispossession of possession, and the end of the institutions, and power relations that govern it. Focusing in on this perspective of change, The Occupy movement stood for the reordering, not restructuring as it conveys a sense of recognizing the previous structure as valid in some form necessary to be shifted to work better, of the capitalistic system beginning with Wall Street. Understood to “liberate Main Street from Wall Street,” one of the first steps to liberate the collective 99% is to “Reverse the process of bank consolidation and rebuild a national system of community-based, community accountable financial institutions devoted to build community wealth. Break up mega-banks into independent, locally owned financial institutions back by tax and regulatory policies that favor community financial institutions.” The breaking up and reordering of the institutions of banks is one prescriptive task of revolution that can be further deepened by “the Social Solidarity Economy is an alternative to capitalism and other authoritarian, state- dominated economic systems. In SSE ordinary people play an active role in shaping all of the dimensions of human life: economic, social, cultural, political, and environmental.” The practitioners of this work are those at the frontlines enacting this radical disorder in the embodiment of their identities as state antagonisms, taking the life-death binary into building their own institutions, operating in their own autonomous sovereignty, redefining and reenacting the use of power, and invoking the subjugated knowledges.

The latter-- the subjugated knowledges-- is the last contribution of the proof of the theoretical framework. Foucault describes the recent shift of knowledge in modernity as a product of local criticism that“in reality is an autonomous, non-centralised kind of theoretical production.” His description here prioritizes the epistemological right of existence to everyone, and particularly to that stems far from the preluding dominance of intelligence as a form of subjugating power. This transition and evolution of the axiology of knowledge extended to those communities whose humanity had been marginalized by the systemized hegemony of white supremacy. Foucault continues, be characterizing this kind of emancipatory knowledge production as the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges. By subjugated knowledges I mean two things: on the one hand, I am referring to the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemisation.” The importance of knowledge and education as a form of power-relation subjugation is the first level of the unconscious socialization of people to a propagated ideology. 

the 'citizen'

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter stands as a testament to the evolution of black civil organization being championed and centering the experiences of the most vulnerable populations within the racial community. Black Lives Matter follows in this transformation of traditional revolutionary politics. The movement holds no official leader, there is no central spokesperson, the chapter structure disaggregates cohesive choice in political action, and centers the needs of black women, trans folx, queer people, and the disabled. “BLM’s #WhatMatters2020 will focus on issues concerning racial injustice, police brutality, criminal justice reform, Black immigration, economic injustice, LGBTQIA+ and human rights, environmental injustice, access to healthcare, access to quality education, and voting rights and suppression,” is the what matters of “black lives matter.” While noble and expansive this movement is one that seeks to reckon the aforementioned extensions of the ‘citizen’ to the periphery of black folks whose existence is the basis of state antagonism. As further solidification, the movement is registered as an “Inc.” which is to prove their status as a formal organization and their choice of maintaining activism through legitimate, valid forms of civil disobedience. Moreover, the recent protests while understood by many in a variety of evaluations of radical to reformist, the usurpation of the once publicly denouncing call of ‘Black Lives Matter” is being used as prop for capitalist commodity share, political spectacle, and perverse form of cultural presentation. What radical principle, even if truly representing a revolutionary aim be properly commodified? While recuperation is rampant post-political demonstration, this particular form of rampant movement of this concept from a fringe leftist rallying call for black nationalists, this definite co-option of these principles as in commercials, products, political staging, and other representations of state show of power is profoundly a case for the inability of this concept to any longer to be seen as revolutionary. Inhabiting the Foucauldian notion of the plurality of resistances Black Lives Matter effectively and consistently appeals to the importance of intersectional political aims. Yet, the basis of their work can only be understood as raising awareness through state sanctioned means of dissent, with the ultimate goal of becoming full subjects of a more inclusive ‘citizen’ not far from its oppressive origins. 

Disturbingly, the maintenance of an overarching theme as the salient representation of all of its chapters and those who take its affirmation, even in spectacle or advertisement, adheres all associated bodies to the totality of Black Lives Matter. Such a universalist approach is limiting and fails to realize the importance of entropic organizing that builds upon itself, does not enforce Foucault’s notion of bureaucracy as anti-revolutionary. Recognition of the inherent contradiction of this form of revolution of the ‘citizen’ for non-white folks, and other productions of state antagonism asserts that there is no making of the ‘citizen’ for these members of society under a state system. “To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power,” is impossible as the very inception of the movement of Black Lives Matter was the death of someone deemed ‘criminal,’ ‘threatening,’ and having no ability over their own mortality. This devoid of power in the state system disallows any member of periphery, especially black folks to be  “posited as full subjects capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation.” The death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor affirm in their relinquishing of the explicit ability to live, and the lifetime of socializing them into positions that solely erode their choice, agency, and autonomy. In this recognition, it can be understood that from birth the life of the antagonist of the state is in a process of slow, burning death. No battle against for criminal justice, equal rights, voting rights, employment, etc., will ever accomplish the feat of extending itself fully, as the shortness of this right to its ‘citizen’ is only accessible as a status with the death of periphery. What rights would there be to extend if black and brown folks already had them? There is no existence of the prison, welfare, pharmaceutical exploitation, without the overrepresented in prisons, unemployment, fatal medical conditions, and all those other measurements of life? 

Such questions further prove that the ‘citizen’ is not only impossible for the black community, but is the parallel counterpoint to which the rights are maintained as a privilege separate from that which is to not have the rights or privileges: the second-class status of black persons. As the inception point and greatest measurement of sustained death within the productive life-death binary, slavery was the ultimate institution of  economic enterprise that required and needed a carceral apparatus to continually dehumanize the motives and facets of the international, capitalistic regime. Arun Saldahna, quotes theorist Christina Sharpe’s assertion that “blackness is a hole in human ‘being’ itself, the reduction of a part of humanity to thinghood.” This notion of the limiting humanity of the black body under this system defines blackness as a fabrication antithetical to whiteness and through this fabrication the human self is eroded until it fully assumes its role as a thing. No ‘thing’ could be a person or member or ‘citizen’ of the society in any push of policy, activism, protest, or resistance. Sharpe is understood by Saldanha to continue in this line of thought, abstracting this event of mass colonization followed by racialized, chattel slavery “not as a past event but the anchor of the structure of (Euro- American) society, which is in itself ‘antiblack’ in that it is premised on the total suppression of black subjecthood.” Formulating the entire international system, as quoted by Robinson, as inherently ‘anti-black’ establishes an indisputable reality of the axiology, epistemology, and ontology of white supremacy as merit for ‘citizen,’ and the whole of the totality of the currency of access or agency to life being a racial production. Under this global system the status of rights, legitimacy, humanity, and value of existence is predicated on one’s distance and distinction from blackness. This exponentially separating paradigm cements black people and blackness as the source product of the state, and where it does not exist or make itself known, as the power to subjugate others to a definition of life over death. 

Moreover, the inability for Black Lives Matter to ever serve as an adequate movement to liberate the impossible and nonsensical welcoming of the periphery into the center’s ‘citizen.’ Invoking the paramount experience of those active in this work, the compelling account of the Cincinnati chapter of Black Lives Matter affirms the lack of transformative principle of the movement,  we can no longer use or identify with the name Black Lives Matter — a rally cry that still has meaning, even if perverted by those pushing it as a brand… The continuous shift towards electoral and liberal Democratic Party politics and away from revolutionary ideas is too great. The consequences for Black, brown, and poor people are too great.” The criticism is not solely the commodification of black death for corporate gains and political legitimacy, it is the perversion and life of what Black Lives Matter stands for that is cause for greater concern. Following both the conception of the Spectacle and evolution of ‘diavolution,’ Brighenti describes this form of radical capitalism as such, “Revolutionary images and symbols are routinely expropriated to nostal- gic militants and appropriated by advertisement and merchandizing, becoming part of the ongoing deterritorialization and subsequent reterritorializations which constitute the quintessential movement of capitalism.” The Cincinnati chapter continues in the vein of espousing the co-optive nature of the branded notion of “Black Lives Matter” functioning in traditionalist and structuralist manners, similar to former revolutions but more importantly, how this practice is similar to state action: “BLM is a small fraction in a larger pie of the Black liberation movement, nationally. There are many organizations and individuals doing work with no affiliation to BLM and with many different names. All the powerful sacrifices of autonomous families and groupings around the country are continuously attributed to works of BLM.” Cincinnati’s belief in the plurality and multiplicity of movements as sovereign is an important reality to affirm here, as it further functions to uphold the importance of entropic, non-centralized motions of resistance.