dark mode

maven voyage

Greetings, o people of the Stack. I don’t really do this or any platform particularly well. Frankly I’m not a fan of how readily we surrender our cultural labor to the digital overlords. Easily Slip Into Another Datacenter. But anyway I checked in and just felt compelled to take a moment to Do My Thing over here.

Last Friday I was somehow invited to give the keynote for this conference. Here is its sort of sheepish beginning section, maybe the verbal equivalent of a doomscroll. Felt astute, might delete later.

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We all like to tell ourselves we have radical imaginations, and to be honest, although I am always honored to be included, honored to be thought of at all, there’s an underlying unease I often feel in movement spaces, as though I were a kind of impostor. Once back in 2016, I was hosted by [my fellow conference speaker] the brilliant Dr. Neferti Tadiar for a talk at Barnard-Columbia. The talk I gave was titled “Resistance as Music.” In that talk I tried to attend to the tempos, rhythms, polyphonies, vocalities, and improvisational character of social movements, to highlight their inherent musicality, to posit that this might offer a productive way to understand moments of change. Afterwards, Dr. Tadiar invited me, more than once, to publish the talk in a journal she was co-editing. But the piece felt wrong, or inadequate somehow, so much so that I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t even bring myself to respond. Belatedly, I’m indebted to Dr. Tadiar for her encouraging affirmations, and wish I’d found a proper way to heed that call at the time. Today, I am going to try again.

What I can say is that as a music-maker I’ve been around musicians and other artists whose concepts, insights, actions, and utterances have, at times, shaken me to my core. Today I speak to you from that place. I want to start by acknowledging the moment, and bringing in one of the catalysts in my life, the late Imamu Amiri Baraka (1934-2014): “There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.”

I confess that I’ve still found myself somewhat at a loss about what I might have to offer today. What is left to say, after what we’ve seen and found out — both the level of shameless abdication of progressive values by liberal elites, and as one horrified clergyman described his visit to the occupied P4lestinian territories, “a vast ecosystem of genocidal methodologies”? What we now know about the systems that hold us only amplifies what we knew all along. To paraphrase the hackneyed William Gibson quote by way of Alberto Toscano: Fascism is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.

In Late Fascism, Toscano draws from the firsthand accounts of George Jackson and Angela Davis to articulate the longstanding, indeed foundational presence of fascism right here in the U.S. — such that it can coexist quite consistently with a pretense of liberal democracy. As Baraka once asked, “Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying / Who talk about democracy and be lying?” Who, indeed, engaged in and profited from chattel slavery while articulating a new transcendent category of political freedom? Whose freedom always depended on your confinement?

If some of us on the left have dreamed of abolition, a rather different demolition project has moved swiftly and merrily along over the last half-century, carried out by a global network of child trafficking billionaire war criminals. The fraudulent five-year plan known as DEI, the bait-and-switch of affirmative action, the pseudo-democratic legislative interregnum formerly known as civil rights, the false sanctuary of the U.S. university, the demonic western lie of a rules-based international order, the board-game fantasy of the nation-state as a geopolitical unit – each of these empty promises has been scrapped by mere whim, all of a sudden, in service of a few hundred ruling elites.

The long war on terror turned out to have served both as a project serving the defense and fossil fuel industries, and as large-scale cover for the slow-motion voluntary surrender of your digital autonomy. This massive systemic betrayal was somehow accelerated by the pandemic, a time when tech-industry elites, able to hold us housebound and fully captive on our devices, readily abandoned their facades of liberal benevolence. Leaning into genocidal fascism proved much more effective for maintaining their hoarded wealth and their controlling interests in global power.

Guilt is no longer a social force that we on the left can use. Accountability doesn’t work anymore. You can’t shame the shameless. But what is new, as I mentioned at the outset, is the level of exposure. Yes, we’re bathed daily in the grotesque, we’re broken and unmade by the routine horror, to the point that we must keep slapping ourselves, shaking each other awake, to resist becoming hardened or jaded. But generations of people cannot unsee what they’ve seen. Global anti-Blackness, global anti-Islam, global anti-labor, anti-indigenous, anti-woman, anti-trans, anti-youth – the disingenuous, violent, arbitrary nature of these schemes is now painfully apparent to a critical mass of humanity.

These cycles have produced a structure of feeling that we on this continent have known for at least a full decade, if not a quarter century, or indeed a quarter millennium. It manifests as an endless drip of panic, disgust, and dread – itself the result of a systemwide strategy of containment, a manufactured public mental health crisis of existential stress: staging violent confrontations between state actors and ordinary people; relentlessly dismantling public goods, legal frameworks, and safety nets; assuming control of the country’s media; criminalizing dissent; erasing histories; continually fanning the figurative and literal flames of communal hatred and of planetary destruction; maintaining a facade of incompetence while seizing more power than any regime in the history of the world; exacerbating lived precarity at every opportunity. This is their game plan, and it always was. Genocidal fascism is here.

I offered this opening reminder because this is what artists do. We are not here to redeem you, or even ourselves. We are here to remind you of the abyss and the expanse, the squalor and the abundance, the nothing and the everything – the world beyond your world. At the close of What Is Philosophy, Deleuze & Guattari summarize D.H. Lawrence’s essay “Chaos in Poetry” as follows:

people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent…

There are certain sounds that, to use Bloch’s phrase, “rip open the times” like this for me. The weight of a human heart, sonically transduced in an instant, a single gesture redolent of all that is carried within a being, a hologram of all that comes to pass among beings. Not an escape, but a surmounting; not a victory, but a defiant livingness.

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Thanks for reading. Catch you soon.

v.