Hydrocarbon
[SPEP Webinar, "Black Philosophy for Turbulent Times"]
[As I finesse another dispatch from my seminar on Digital Ethics, I submit some (amended) words that I shared in April for the inaugural webinar of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.]
The panel’s title evokes a couple bars going viral lately by Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul:
In order for me to write non-political poetry
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.
The last line I’ve also seen translated as “I must silence the plane.”
At any rate, in today’s turbulence, who’s black? Those forced on planes? Those forced off? The cargo? The ground-crew filling the tank?
Frank B. Wilderson III has a metaphor that prompts thought. Slaveness is a grammar of suffering that functions as rebar for the world. The black, suffering in terms of Slaveness, is load-bearing by way of absorbing stress to the world’s frame.
But isn’t rebar, technically, inside the house, as are stringers to a plane’s fuselage? For Wilderson, and others of his tendency, neither the slave nor its capture is in the world. Slaveness, however, is, as a kind of latent operational logic. Slaveness—capture, exhaustion, nullification—is how the world deals with its substrate, how it metabolizes its environment.
If the world’s a plane, blackness is hydrocarbon, so says Zakkiyah Jackson, Hortense Spillers. We combust the black to keep the plane in the air; it lingers after as exhaust. We cannot seem to get rid of it, even when we don’t use it anymore, or at least in the same way.
I don’t know about y’all, but I gather that the world order is nosediving, not least because the pilot’s neglecting air traffic control, tossing aircrew and passengers out the exit, ripping oxygen masks off faces, and leaving the cockpit to play games on his phone.
But when we see colleagues, students, beloveds getting snatched on and off these planes, it’s not irrational to ask: is there new gas? Though we must remember that what’s black isn’t only the ship’s cargo, its fuel, but also the hull’s wood.
Or, to keep the plane motif, we make the seats out of blackness. We eat on black trays, then dust ‘em off for our laptops, to write papers on blackness. We drink water from bottles made of blackness. Now we’re wondering if the blackness be leaching into the liquid, into the food.
We type into search questions like, is it true I’m eating a credit card worth of blackness a week? Are these particles of blackness the reason why we’re not having enough kids, a thought that emerges despite there being, by some accounts, too many passengers on this plane?
Blackness might be data. Planes run on data. To enter the plane, your body must be computed as such. When people say data’s the new oil, they might have it backwards, and there’s a tradition of black thinkers—Du Bois, Kelly Miller, the late Dionne Price—who felt the ambivalence of a prominent data ethical dictum, “those who get counted, count.”
As we’re asking what we make of those forcibly ejected from this plane, we ought to similarly think un-accounting. Have we new slaves, those without accounts, who are unaccounted for, undocumented, such that we can do whatever it is we please with them?
Last month, the Atlantic guy was added to the group-chat. Everyone framed the issue with that in terms of technology. But Signal, the messaging app, isn’t uniquely vulnerable; in fact, it’s state-of-the-art encryption. I would even suggest you download it, especially as the block’s getting hot.
But like blackness, Signal enables. It affords workarounds [autodeletion, opacity] with which US officials can skirt Presidential Records and Freedom of Information Acts. To center Signal’s vulnerability, we pose the scandal as one of national security: e.g., the jeopardy of valued US military. To center Signal’s affordance, the scandal’s an obstruction of justice.
Those who make that point often fail to mention how the real injustice is not broken rules, but broken, unvalued bodies.
On March 15th, F-18 jets, MQ-9 drones level the apartment of a supposed Houthi commander’s girlfriend—obliterating plausible innocents. Under the rubble are an unaccounted few—with complex roles, responsibilities, wants, relationships—who aren't even afforded the indignity of accounting, of reducing their intrinsic value to a casualty statistic, to data.
When we ask the question, what permits this, the answer's neither Signal, nor them drones, but this nose-diving plane we're on. The dead are so without value that our co-pilot reads this information and types back "Excellent." To which the response is: Fist, Flag, Fire emoji.
If Arab noncombatants die in a bombing and nobody’s there to count it, does it matter?
If Africans get snatched, yet somebody’s there to count it, does it matter?
The pessimist finds this to be a difference that makes a difference, but, what are we to do with that information? Type back, “excellent?”
The cited pessimists would not. They are not pessimistic of those called black but rather the plane and its implicit logic that renders black stuff into malleable material, toxic yet vital. For this tendency, the plane must crash for that black stuff to mold itself, however it wishes. Yet the risk isn’t bracketed. How could it be? When the plane crashes, hitting the ground, the same destination as the ship, we all go up with it.
Today more and more people are being put on game, so we really ought to ask ourselves, what are we to do with all this information?
What are we, for instance, to do with the fact that one of our own was snatched? We can’t really claim responsibility for Mohsen Mahdawi. Kid might just be built like that, but isn’t it our vocational duty to develop minded bodies who question? Who question their programming? Who ask: are we cool with this? with the fact that we permit this?
Sometimes it takes an outsider to say, “damn y’all live like this?” But Mahdawi, and others like him, aren’t outsiders. Inasmuch as we enable what brings them here, sends them packing, shoots them out the sky, they’re as much on the plane as we are.
Black philosophy, or better yet, thinking proper, is guided by a complex rule, a prohibition put best by George Jackson: just keep going, straight ahead, right on. Some of SPEP’s favorite thinkers have aped this insight.
My read of this line: incessantly reconstruct the past in light of the present, such that both are recomposed anew. The past isn’t past; it’s now. Much of the world wants to return to what’s past, but in such a way that keeps us stuck, and makes us think stuff that’s still going on is old.
When Frantz Fanon says, body keep me questioning, that’s the prohibition. When Jackson says, “I may run, but all the time that I am, I’ll be looking for a stick;” he’s suggesting that we enable ourselves, or as Du Bois says conserve ourselves, so as to not get utterly annihilated when the plane hits ground.
A longstanding motif of black thinking is that keeping the plane in the air gives black folk asthma. It exhausts the black by making it hard to breathe, to run; it slows us down. The prohibition, in turn, is to organize ourselves such that we stop whatever’s in us, all of us, that’s making that the case.
And it’s a veritably political imperative. If these folks don’t just outright kill us, they’ll let us die, starve us out, not give us welfare. These days more and more are catching strays.
The year begins with fires burning, without centralized relief, as international aid is cut, which according to the United Nations will sacrifice millions of people, if all remains the same. Academia and industry personnel are snatched, raising the question of who will man the farms that feed the whole, the factories that build the whole, the hospitals that heal the whole, and the only true answer from the cockpit is “automation.” Inasmuch as no machine gets built in this country without resources from elsewhere, what are we talking about?
Within and without the plane, it may become ever more, in the most substantive sense, unaffordable to keep moving.
But a final word of caution. Black philosophy will probably always be deemed nonsensical, emotional, upsetting, overly erotic, depoliticizing, not respectable, unjustified. From my understanding, however, black philosophy is most chiefly receptive, centrally concerned with listening. Such a vantage can be as humble as it is stand-up.
When you hear the question “what are you to do with that information,” to think that you, the individual, have all the answers stinks of mastery. “Nah, you right” should be a regular part of your lexicon, even when you think that you’re right. You actually must hear folks out. And if something is getting in the way of you really listening, you have to find out what that is, call that out.
To think clearly, is to listen clearly, and to really pick up on what others are putting down, the plane must be silent.