Performance and Policing: Jefferson Pinder's Prowl

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Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

Michael Brown

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How can we survive genocide? We can only address this question by studying how we have survived genocide.

In the interest of imagining what exists, there is an image of Michael Brown we must refuse in favor of another image we don’t have. One is a lie, the other unavailable. If we refuse to show the image of a lonely body, of the outline of the space that body simultaneously took and left, we do so in order to imagine jurisgenerative black social life walking down the middle of the street—for a minute, but only for a minute, unpoliced, another city gathers, dancing. We know it’s there, and here, and real; we know what we can’t have happens all the time.

Imagining what exists requires and allows analysis.

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When my brother fell I picked up his weapons. I didn’t question whether I could aim or be as precise as he. A needle and thread were not among his things I found. —Essex Hemphill, “When My Brother Fell”#

When we walk down the street We don’t care who we see or who we meet Don’t need to run, don’t need to hide ’cause we got something burning inside we’ve got love power

1. Essex Hemphill, “When my brother fell,” in Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (Washington, DC: Red Bone Press, 2007), 135–36.

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it’s the greatest power of them all we’ve got love power and together we can’t fall. —Luther Vandross, “Power of Love/Love Power”%

At times, this land will shake your un- derstanding of the world

and confusion will eat away at your sense of humanity

but at least you will feel normal. —Vernon Ah Kee, from Whitefellanormal &

These passages bear an analytic of the lost and found, of fallen- ness and ascension, that comes burning to mind in and as the name of Michael Brown. First, that there is a social erotics of the lost and found in fallenness’s refusal of standing. We fall so we can fall again, which is what ascension really means to us. To fall is to lose one’s place, to lose the place that makes one, to relinquish the locus of being, which is to say of being single. This radical homelessness—its kinetic indigeneity, its irreducible queerness—is the essence of blackness. This refusal to take place is given in what it is to occur. Michael Brown is the latest name of the ongoing event of resistance to, and resistance before, socioecological disaster. Moder- nity’s constitution in the transatlantic slave trade, settler colonialism and capital’s emergence in and with the state, is The Socioecological Disas- ter. Michael Brown gives us occasion once again to consider what it is to endure the disaster, to survive (in) genocide, to navigate unmappable dif- ferences as a range of localities that, in the end—either all the way to the end or as our ongoing refusal of beginnings and ends—will always refuse to have been taken.

The fall is anacatastrophic refusal of the case and, therefore, of the world, which is the earth’s capture insofar as it was always a picture frozen and extracted from imaginal movement. At stake is the power of love, which is given, in walking down the street, as defiance to the (racial capitalist,

2. Luther Vandross, “Power of Love/Love Power,” Power of Love, by Luther Vandross, Marcus Miller, Teddy Van, ©1991 by Epic Records, Epic 3473778, CD single, Cassette. 3. Ah Kee also writes in Whitefellanormal (DVD, 30 sec, 2004): “If you wish to insert your- self into the black man’s world, his history, in his colour, and at the level at which you currently perceive him, then know that you will never be anything more than mediocre.”

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settler colonial) state and its seizures, especially its seizure of the capacity to make (and break) law. Against the grain of the state’s monopolization of ceremony, ceremonies are small and profligate; if they weren’t every- where and all the time we’d be dead. The ruins, which are small rituals, aren’t absent but surreptitious, a range of songful scarring, when people give a sign, shake a hand. But what if together we can fall, because we’re fallen, because we need to fall again, to continue in our common fallen- ness, remembering that falling is in apposition to rising, their combination given in lingering, as the giving of pause, recess, vestibular remain, cus- todial remand, hold, holding in the interest of rub, dap’s reflex and reflec- tion of maternal touch, a maternal ecology of laid hands, of being handled, handed, handed down, nurture’s natural dispersion, its endless refusal of standing. Hemphill emphatically announces the sociality that Luther shel- ters. Fallen, risen, mo(u)rnful survival. When black men die, it’s usually because we love each other, whether we run, or fight, or surrender. Con- sider Michael Brown’s generative occurrence and recurrence as refusal of the case, as refusal of standing. You can do this but only if you wish to insert yourself, and now I must abuse a phrase of Ah Kee’s, into black worldlessness.' Our homelessness. Our selflessness. None of which are or can be ours.

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The state can’t live with us and it can’t live without us. Its violence is a reaction to that condition. The state is nothing other than a war against its own condition. The state is at war against its own (re)sources, in violent reaction to its own condition of im/possibility, which is life itself, which is the earth itself, which blackness doesn’t so much stand in for as name, as a name among others that is not just another name among others.

That we survive is beauty and testament; it is neither to be dismissed nor overlooked nor devalued by or within whatever ascription of value; that we survive is invaluable. It is, at the same time, insufficient. We have to recognize that a state—the racial capitalist/settler colonial state—of war has long existed. Its brutalities and militarizations, its regulative mundani- ties, are continually updated and revised, but they are not new. If anything, we need to think more strategically about our own innovations, recognizing

4. I want to thank Rachel O’Reilly for bringing Ah Kee’s work to my attention. See her “Compasses, Meetings and Maps: Three Recent Media Works,” Leonardo 39, no. 4 (2006): 334–39.

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that the state of war is a reactive state, a machine for regulating and capi- talizing upon our innovations in/for survival.

This is why what’s most disturbing about Michael Brown (aka Eric Garner, aka Renisha McBride, aka Trayvon Martin, aka Eleanor Bumpurs, aka Emmitt Till, aka an endless stream of names and absent names) is our reaction to him, our misunderstanding of him, and the sources of that mis- understanding that manifest and reify a desire for standing, for stasis, within the state war machine which, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t confer citi- zenship upon its subjects at birth but, rather, at death, which is the proper name for entrance into its properly political confines. The prosecution of Michael Brown, which is the proper technical name for the grand jury inves- tigation of Darren Wilson, the drone, is what our day in court looks like and always has. The prone, exposed, unburied body—the body that is given, in death, its status as body precisely through and by way of the withholding of fleshly ceremony—is what political standing looks like. That’s the form it takes and keeps. This is a Sophoclean formulation. The law of the state is what Ida B. Wells rightly calls lynch law. And we extend it in our appeals to it.

We need to stop worrying so much about how it kills, regulates, and accumulates us, and worry more about how we kill, deregulate, and dis- perse it. We have to love and revere our survival, which is (in) our resis- tance. We have to love our refusal of what has been refused. But insofar as this refusal has begun to stand, insofar as it has begun to seek standing, it stands in need of renewal, now, even as the sources and conditions of that renewal become more and more obscure, more and more entangled with the regulatory apparatuses that are deployed in order to suppress them. At moments like this we have to tell the truth with a kind of viciousness and, even, a kind of cruelty. Black lives don’t matter, which is an empirical state- ment not only about black lives in this state of war but also about lives. This is to say that lives don’t matter; nor should they. It’s the metaphysics of the individual life in all its immateriality that’s got us in this situation in the first place. Michael Brown lived and moved within a deep and evolving under- standing of this:

if i leave this earth today atleast youll know i care about others more then i cared about my damn self. . . .

But we have to consider how, and what it means that, his testament is transformed into an expression of mourning and outrage such as this upon the nonoccasion of the nonindictment:

Go on call me “demon” but I WILL love my damn self.

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I suffer with but also through this expression of our suffering. For this expres- sion of our disavowal of the demonic—however brutally the police and/or the polis, in their soullessness, ascribe it to or inscribe it upon us—is erst- while respectability’s voluntary laying down of arms, its elective demobili- zation of jurisgenerative force. Meanwhile, Michael Brown is like another fall and rise through man—come and gone, as irruption and rupture, to remind us not that black lives matter but that black life matters; that the absolute and undeniable blackness of life matters. The innovation of our survival is given in embrace of this daimonic, richly internally differentiated choreography, its lumpen improvisation of contact, which is obscured when class struggle in black studies threatens to suppress black study as class struggle.

How much has black studies, as a bourgeois institutionalization of black study, determined the way we understand and fight the state of war within which we try to live? How has it determined how we understand the complex nonsingularity that we know now as Michael Brown? It would be wrong to say that Michael Brown has become, in death, more than him- self. He already was that, as he said himself, in echo of so much more than himself. He was already more than that in being less than that, in being the least of these. To reduce Michael Brown to a cypher for our unfulfilled desire to be more than that, for our serially unachieved and constitutionally unachievable citizenship, is to do a kind of counterrevolutionary violence; it is to partake in the ghoulish, vampiric consumption of his body, of the body that became his, though it did not become him, in death, in the reductive stasis to which his flesh was subjected. Michael Brown’s flesh is our flesh; he is flesh of our flesh of flames.(

On August 9, like every day, like any other day, black life, in its irre- ducible sociality, having consented not to be single, got caught walking— with jurisgenerative fecundity—down the middle of the street. Michael Brown and his boys: black life breaking and making law, against and under- neath the state, surrounding it. They had foregone the melancholic appeal, to which we now reduce them, for citizenship, and subjectivity, and human- ness. That they had done so is the source of Darren Wilson’s genocidal instrumentalization in the state’s defense. They were in a state of war and they knew it. Moreover, they were warriors in insurgent, if imperfect, beauty. What’s left for us to consider is the difference between the way of Michael Brown’s dance, his fall and rise—the way they refuse to take place when

5. I’m thinking, here, of a collaboration between Theodore Harris and Amiri Baraka, Our Flesh of Flames (Philadelphia: Anvil Arts Press, 2008).

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he takes to the streets, the way Ferguson takes to the streets—and the way we seek to take, but don’t seem to take to, the streets: in protest, as mere petitioners, fruitlessly seeking energy in the pitiful, minimal, tempo- rary shutdown of this or that freeway, as if mere occupation were something other than retrenchment (in reverse) of the demand for recognition that actually constitutes business as usual. Rather than dissipate our preoccu- pation with how we live and breathe, we need to defend our ways in our per- sistent practice of them. It’s not about taking the streets; it’s about how, and about what, we should take to the streets. What would it be and what would it mean for us jurisgeneratively to take to the streets, to live in the streets, to gather together another city right here, right now?

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Meanwhile, against the dead citizenship that was imposed upon him, the body the state tried to make him be, and in lieu of the images we refuse and can’t have, here is an image of our imagination.

Michael Brown Sr. yells as the coffin of his son, Michael Brown, is lowered into the ground at St. Peter’s Cemetery in St. Louis, August 25, 2014. Photo courtesy of Richard Perry/The New York Times/Redux.

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This is Michael Brown, his descent, his ascension, his ceremony, his flesh, his animation in and of the maternal ecology—Michael Brown’s innovation, as contact, in improvisation. Contact improvisation is how we survive genocide.

we didn’t get here by ourselves. black takes like black took. we were already beside our selves, evidently. eventually, we were upside ourselves in this wombed scar, this womblike scarring open scream tuned open, sister, can you move my form? took, had, give. because he wasn’t by himself he’s gone in us. how we got over that we didn’t get here is wanting more than that in the way we carry ourselves, how we carry over our selves into we’re gone in the remainder. here, not here, bought, unbought, we brought ourselves with us so we could give ourselves away, which is more than they can take away, even when its more than we can take.

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