The Black Atlantic’s Submarine Cabling
Break it down… Roll it up…
Pass that shit… What the fuck…
I’ve been reflecting on the argument made in my Sonic Faction essay a lot these past few weeks: an argument for ‘double-cupping’ cultural forms and modes of production in the twenty-first century.
There, the focus is on the seemingly divergent tendencies of a label like Hyperdub – or rather, between Hyperdub and its sublabel Flatlines – and the resonances nonetheless found between them along hardcore (dis)continuums.
The essay (appropriately) has no central point or foundation, swimming around in the middle of an accumulative moment, but I have since been reading outwards from the essay’s brief discussion of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, in light of comments made by Kode9 in a 2022 interview for The Skinny:
Hyperdub started as a kind of umbrella term to talk about the electronic music of the Black Atlantic that had converged into the 90s musical singularity of jungle. In a counter-parallel to how English had been the lingua franca of the modern world, the lingua franca of electronic dance music is the music of the Black Atlantic.
That network, spanning the Americas, Europe and Africa, is composed of lots of different continua. The hardcore continuum (hardcore, jungle, garage, grime, dubstep, UK funky, UK drill etc) is one UK lineage, and other important musical hubs on that network have their own, such as Chicago (house, ghetto house, juke, footwork etc), Detroit (Motown, electro, techno, ghettotech etc), New York (disco, garage, hip-hop etc), Jamaica (ska, reggae, dub, dancehall etc) or South Africa, which has its own lineage that goes from Kwaito and evolves more recently through gqom and amapiano and so on.
There are loads of these local scenes which innovate their own new traditions. The internet and social media has led to a viral, cross-contamination between a lot of these musics. What’s been interesting in recent years is that the traditional sources of influence of British dance music are no longer just America and the Caribbean, but also from the African continent. And that reflects in the influences on many artists we’ve been working with on the label for the last 15 to 20 years. All those localised continua have become even more tangled up with each other.
Revisiting Gilroy’s book in the spring sun whilst holidaying in London, I was thinking again about the (dis)continuum felt between The Face magazine and Noah Davis, and the ‘place’ of the internet between them. Indeed, when wondering where my youth culture is in the midst of these engagements with the subcultural, I wonder if the difficult of representing it at all is due to the fact that these forms are similarly scattered through the cultural Atlanticism of the online.
This certainly seems to be the case for Ccru and the blogipelago that emerged out of it. I’ve even begun to see how Gilroy’s 1992 text holds a far more significant place in the corpus of Ccru than it is often given credited for. It may only be Ron Eglash who mentions it explicitly on the old site, but the hybridity of Ccru / Hyperdub’s sonic forms, the depersonalising and machinic (un)nature of jungle, the (dis)identity politics of race, the dance of creolisation – all of this comes together in Gilroy’s text as he attempts to find a productive (if somewhat disjunctive) synthesis between essentialist and pluralist positions of black culture.
Provocatively, Gilroy moves “against the ethnic absolutism that currently dominates black political culture” to consider black American and black English cultural fervours that escape national (and indeed racialised) particularities, in an attempt to name “processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse and avoid capture by its agents”, “new analytic possibilities with a general significance far beyond the well-policed borders of black particularity”, and the ways in which “the peculiarity of the black English requires attention to the intermixture of a variety of distinct cultural forms”, which is most visible in its linguistic creolisations and recombinatory musical (sub[marine])culture(s).
Already, I used Gilroy’s work in the Sonic Faction essay to link the “double consciousness” of a black radical (dis)continuum and the more psychedelic double-cupping of footwork. But to go a step further, it’s worth highlighting how W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 conception of “double consciousness” has been further split and fragmented in twenty-first-century philosophy, with José Medina, most notably, discussing the “kaleidoscopic consciousness” of our present era, phase-shifting a Du Boisian uncanny and reversing its polarity into more psychedelic tendency.
This is useful as “double consciousness”, generally split along a white/black binary within black subjectivities, has since been further broken down and rolled up to consider the double consciousness of whiteness itself, or dissolved further into other racialised subjectivities. But just as this term has never been cleanly cleft from quotidian discourses, “kaleidoscopic consciousness” also wins Oscars; Everything Everywhere All At Once dramatizes this phenomenon magnificently to explore the surreality of cross-generational Asian-American experiences.
All of these tendencies are already found in Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic, taken as “the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation” of contemporary subjectivity, which he understands as the motor of “the specific counterculture of modernity”.
The distinctions between modernity and Modernism are integral here. For Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, reflecting back on their 1976 book, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930, in 1991:
The experience of modernity and modernization was not obscure. It happened in the streets, the homes, the factories, in the political and economic system, on the battlefield and in the world order. The experience of Modernism was, and to some degree remains, rather more obscure. It was an art that frequently began in sensation and outrage, or else displacement and exile. Much of it resisted aspects of the modernizing process, and a good part of it was, for various reasons, silenced, banned or suppressed.
Modernism’s fraught relationship with modernity was already a kind of double-cupping in this regard. Modernism was a response to the disorientation of modernity itself: “it was often a gamble with history and consciousness which depended on the expectation that one day — but not yet — its intentions and forms would be gradually understood”; a gamble that “has in fact paid off … It has become what it hardly have expected ever to be: a useable past, leading into the present and the future.”
The same could be said of Ccru’s online activities, finding far more traction long after the unit was disbanded, but the kaleidoscopic consciousness of post-modernity also complicates things. We seem less occupied by useable pasts than the sheer malleability of a useable present, which is at once a disorienting swamp and a prime position for immanent critique.
Resituating Gilroy in this context nonetheless, we could understand the various interventions of the Ccru as an emphasis on the then-new digitality of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, and particularly in Goodman’s post-Ccru manning of the good ship Hyperdub. Indeed, the ship is also Gilroy’s “chronotope”, following Bahktin, for the Middle Passage, but also all other transatlantic forms of trade; “an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the cultural system from which they spring”.
The ship, although closely related to the image of the slave ship – particularly that supplied by J. M. W. Turner – is, for Gilroy, also an emblem of black culture’s oceanic drift through international waters:
The contemporary black arts movement in film, visual arts, and theatre as well as music … have created a new topography of loyalty and identity in which the structures and presuppositions of the nation state have been left behind because they are seen as outmoded. [But i]t is important to remember that these recent black Atlantic phenomena may not be so novel as their digital encoding … suggests. Columbus’s pilot, Pedro Nino, was also an African. The history of the black Atlantic since then, continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people – not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship – provides a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory. They all emerge from it with special clarity if we contrast the national, nationalistic, and ethnically absolute paradigms of cultural criticism to be found in England and America with those hidden expressions, both residual and emergent, that attempt to be global or outer-national in nature.
To argue for an alternative chronotope might well erase some of the more specifically racialised concerns of Gilroy’s text — and his image of the ship remains integral for the ways it questions the novelty of the digital era to understand how a cultural transatlanticism is centuries old — but as a kaleidoscope consciousness further asserts itself in the popular imagination, exploring resonant but distinct vectors, I am left thinking about the Drexciyan focus on the submarine, and particularly the submarine communications cables that have accelerated a black-Atlantic scrambling of identity (for better or worse), decentring any single (or collective) subject-position.
White Rappers and the Other Side of Double Consciousness
The first iteration of Hyperdub – as music blog; not yet record label – investigates the early-twenty-first-century complications wrought upon Gilroy’s transpositionality explicitly. For instance, there’s an interesting 2001 essay from the Hyperdub blog by Mark Fisher (under his Mark De’Rozario pseudonym) on the pernicious double-consciousness of Eminem’s whiteness.
It is an essay that may well be a little dated; opinions on the figure of the ‘white rapper’ have never really settled. But whereas most disparage the white rapper for the ways in which they make hip-hop somehow more palatable to white audiences, appropriating black aesthetics, I think it is interesting how early Eminem, far more uncertain of his position in the culture, seemed interested in further exacerbating hip-hop’s surrounding moral panics by being far more puerile and shocking than was customary for the white rappers of the previous generation.
In light of this, Fisher’s interest remains with the slippery nature of pop-cultural identity and the forms it takes on this side of the millennium. “Like Presley, the Beatles, Madonna, Bowie and anybody else who has done anything interesting in pop, Eminem scrambles the codes”, he writes. “All expectations and assumptions about ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender – that is to say, about identity itself – go into the mix, and are melted, warped.”
This is most notable with regards to Eminem’s early splintering of his own identity, as Fisher argues:
Against the dictates of a confessional culture that insists that you be yourself, Eminem conjures a dramaturgical proliferation of personae, or simpersonae – a seething population of virtual selves, fictional potentials given actualization. Shady both is and isn’t Eminen, who both is and isn’t Marshall Mathers… All of them are, at one level, the ‘same person’, but what does that say about notions of sameness and personhood – i.e. identity? Instead of managing and selling him/his self, as the self-help gurus and therapists of managerialism exhort us to, Eminem is the chief barker in a carnivalesque dismantling of identity – a dismantling that includes the dismembering of ‘Eminem’ it/him/self. No-One is in charge of the factory of id/entity production on the Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers LPs: ‘Eminem’ is nothing more than the (brand) name for a revelling in ontological confusion and implex, whose deep schizophrenic truth is that there is no truth but the version, that there is no transcendence.
Before long, Fisher turns to Gilroy (by way of Foucault):
Foucault long ago established that to define and proclaim your identity is to do power’s work for it, and to define yourself in terms of sexual preference is to overtime for the identicops. Gilroy’s recent transposition of Foucault’s arguments from sexuality to race shows that, since, like sexuality, race is not a natural category but a social production, the issue is the way certain groups are racialized: that is to say, turned into an effect of a represented category. And the way the (often socialist) media smuggernaut machine treats the white proletariat – especially those who dare to get above themselves, like Pamela Anderson or the Beckhams – is a clear case of racialization. This is, of course, not only a matter of lampoonery – we’re not in the pampered master-class world where the worst thing that can happen to you is that someone calls you a name – but of insults reinforcing a social structure which systematically denies life chances to the (silenced) majority.
These problems of identity haven’t gone away, although they have certainly been maligned following the advent of social media. Even in the case of Eminem, he has now been elected to the position of relatively pampered master class; the latter stage of his career seems to be defined by a far more fragile egocentric position, compared to where he started. Indeed, Fisher’s conclusion to this twenty-four-year-old essay is strange to read now, considering how 2000s rap has calcified and accepted its own facialisation:
The invisible, faceless drones who take away your garbage, who fry your burgers, those who are served up nothing but cultural shit and told that they are responsible for it, it’s their voice that Eminem speaks in: “and there’s a million of us / just like me / who cuss like me / who just don’t give a fuck like me” (‘The Real Slim Shady’). The white trash are well aware who and what the enemy is: the management class, the busybodies who want to organize their – and other people’s – lives around dubious (comm)unities (whether that be gay identity, moral majority, whatever). Fight Club showed the dangers of a too full-on military campaign against these managerialists – the terrifying possibility of anger calcifying into a nihilistic fascism – but this isn’t the inevitable consequence of white trash rage finding expression.
Fisher often wrote about the fact that this slide into fascism was not inevitable, although it is a difficult argument to maintain today, given that many of those he once backed — Kanye West, Russell Brand — have given into their more fascistic tendencies. But all the more reason that we have a lot to learn from 2000s theorising in this regard.
Class First
The conversations surrounding Ash Sarkar’s recent book release, for instance – at least those repackaged in the reductive terms of the liberal media – have suggested that a “class-first” perspective is coming back into vogue, eliding the failures of identity politics to resist the pressures of the social-media age, whilst continuing to flirt with red-brown allegiances that Sarkar has struggled, in the media at least, to extricate her argument from.
Indeed, although not in disagreement with this “class-first” argument in principle, I remain suspicious of how it has long been co-opted by reactionaries, overrepresented on Twitter, and further boosted by more conservative Marxists to disregard social-justice issues, as it is a discussion that seems to permeate the attention economy and the so-called “culture war”. Unfortunately, all interventions that claim to give a voice to the voiceless, more often than not, end up giving an essentialised face to the faceless as well, such that “class-first” politics slides contradictorily into a twisted identity-political posturing of its own.
This posturing runs in two directions, however. I should probably acknowledge that I too have been taken in by a misleading media narrative around Sarkar’s book. I have found much of the discussion unpalatable and murky — whether that’s due to reductive or seemingly contradictory statements made by Sarkar herself or the framing that her book has been given by her interlocutors — but I am also yet to read Minority Rule… It may have been reduced to a culture-war issue, but it’d be rich to suggest a personal immunity to the affects of this.
Shon Faye has an interesting post on how things are not what they seem in this regard, discussing the book’s context collapse and the ways that the arguments made on the book tour are somewhat different from those made in the book itself – if only because the book is far more nuanced than podcasts allow for. Intriguingly, it’s also a post that goes back to Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” essay, focussing on its relationship to Fisher’s interest in (dis)identity politics. Faye writes:
For Fisher, what distinguished this “bourgeois-liberal perversion” of material struggles against sexism, racism and heterosexism (which are important, he acknowledges) was its lack of class consciousness and obsession with reifying identity instead of seeking a total abolition of the class system which would liberate people from identity categories.
On that, I think Fisher was right, but it is worth echoing Faye’s nod to his acknowledgement of the importance of material (feminist) struggles, which he focussed on far more forcefully afterwards – something I wrote about for the New Statesman (and reproduced here on the blog).
The comparison is also interesting given the suggestion that both Fisher’s essay and Sarkar’s book have suffered from context collapse in similar ways – and I wonder to what extent this kind of “context collapse” is particularly difficult to avoid when one tries to represent a disidentity politics in the media. After all, for all these flippant dismissals of identity politics in general, the mainstream media is the primary mechanism through which these ideas are facialised and made reductive, highlighting the central paradox of their posturing.
The final paragraph of Faye’s post brings everything nicely into alignment in this regard:
As Richard Seymour notes, “[i]dentity is also work. The endless labour of producing an identity, a version of oneself that one finds worthy of respect, is not in and of itself a desirable thing.”
We might add a note about the endless labour of producing an identifiable argument here too, which Faye gestures towards when she continues:
[Seymour] rightly points out that “racism, sexism, and transphobia, for instance, all force a burden on those subject to ascriptive denigration, to explain, account for and validate themselves.” A politics of coalition and solidarity – where we do not have to be the same to work together and collaborate – is not the same as an imposed class consciousness (rooted in anti-intellectualism) that rolls its eyes at any discussion of social and economic reality as it is shaped by sexism, racism and so on. Identity politics is dead, but identity itself is still being inscribed upon many of us against our will and with deathly consequences. Sarkar’s actual book makes this very point, of course, which leaves me questioning if liberal media — in all its distortions — is the best vehicle for building a movement at all.
A more general point of interest here is that “an imposed class consciousness” more often than not transforms class into its own identity marker. Particularly in the UK, class — rather than referring, as it should, to one’s material conditions — is expressed through cultural signifiers divorced from those conditions. Indeed, in light of this, there should be more emphasis on class — that is systems of classification — but alongside that, what is needed is an even more rigorous materialism, and that is something that many critics of identity politics themselves lack, instead viewing economic and social relations are atomised forms of categorisation, rather than understanding the ways in which the economic is also social and vice versa.
How, then, to hybridise these discourses? Or, what’s more, how to acknowledge the ways in which they are already hybrid? Here again, Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic is of use to us.
Essentialism vs Pluralism
Whilst what I have been pulling out of Gilroy’s book risks decentring the particular attention Gilroy gives to our understanding of race, I want to reiterate that this is something that the book itself encourages, in emphasising the syncretic formation of categories of blackness in the West as such, leading Gilroy to reject “the ethnic absolutism that currently dominates black political culture.” And I would like to suggest that what current discussions of class are lacking – whether amongst Twitter’s class-first Marxists or in the context of Sarkar’s book tour – is a similar understanding of working-class polyphony.
This is something felt personally, in light of the current controversy engulfing Repeater / Zer0 Books – which has very much derailed the intended trajectory this series of posts was on, coming to the fore as I was writing a third part that was very different to what it has become, but such are the breaks.
Daniel Tutt and his “class-first” coterie, for example, love to question the working-class bona fides of their opponents, who apparently betray a “pseudoliberal position [that] reveals nothing less than the tyranny of the private academy and its commitment to censorial practices”, its “motivations” being “market driven” and “concerned with image maintenance, reputation management and purity testing which makes its rationale somewhere between spontaneous narcissistic censorship and private state censorship, even though they do not have any state power” — an ironic accusation, given Tutt is the only person to have asked for the suppression of speech online and his siding with the tyranny of Watkins’ venture-capitalist ownership in suppressing pro-Palestinian solidarity. (As I first wrote on this blog two years ago, critique of what he says isn’t an argument against his right to say it; he has the right to be wrong [and he is wrong].)
This was something discussed on Twitter in another context recently too, when Beatrice Adler-Bolton addressed the claims of one of Tutt’s interlocutors, Tyler Austin Harper, commenting on a book about Covid that, he says, contains “a frank discussion of how the Laptop Class championed policies — lockdowns and school closures — that primarily impacted the Have Nots, while the Haves enjoyed remote work, online shopping, booming stock portfolios, and groceries delivered by the poor.”
This classic shallow argument runs cover for real ways that the response to the Covid pandemic has been all out class warfare, and is the perfect example of lazy, superficial “class analysis” that ignores the basic material conditions which actually define class under capitalism.
The people who peddle this “Laptop Class vs. Working Class” nonsense faux class analysis are always either profoundly unserious or profoundly dishonest. A real class analysis starts with capital—who owns it, who profits, and who is forced to labor under what conditions and why.
[Harper,] with all their self-proclaimed wisdom, is taking great pains to intentionally side step or somehow fail to recognize the fact that class isn’t about aesthetics of Zoom or the perceived moral failures of “Laptop Class” workers. It’s about how people relate to capital […]
If you can’t or refuse to see how that relationship works—how the health of everyone (including the most exploited) depends on limiting mass exposure—then you’re not doing class analysis, you’re performing self-satisfied identity politics under guise of “working-class solidarity” […]
The working class isn’t just people forced into in-person work. It also includes disabled people, immunocompromised/sick workers, caregivers, and millions of others whose lives were made more precarious by reckless reopening. Class isn’t just “who has to leave the house” […]
In short: this tweet, this book, and every repetition of this shallow “what we learned from the pandemic” argument is a perfect encapsulation of class-ignorant, bourgeois hand-wringing that mistakes the appearance of “work-from-home” privilege for meaningful political critique. […]
First—class isn’t an identity or a cultural marker—it’s a relation to capital. Workers don’t become capitalists because they worked from home. Bourgeois capitalists, owners, managers, bosses & landlords are not working class champions bc they demanded ppl return to in person work
Tutt drudges through similar arguments often, and soon enough, the two positions erected as opponents – in this instance, a “working class” and a “laptop class” (which are they exactly?) – are immediately talking past each other, as he lumps everyone who disagrees with him and his own self-promoting, reputation-managing concerns into a singular mass, whilst claiming that the “ideological commitments” of those, like himself, “in proximity to dissident anti-woke leftism … are not uniform and they are not always formed around gurus, Internet warlords or parasocial cult leaders.” He thus asserts a pseudo-pluralistic stance against class pluralism, and as such, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between us, and the project that many of us have been trying to promote to the contrary of the class essentialists, which I think Gilroy does a good job of analogously ironing out – albeit, again, in the context of blackness specifically.
Most intriguingly, given Tutt’s animosity towards Deleuze-Guattari (or rather, the legion of “Deleuzian left-liberals” he inexplicably refers to in his recent screeds), Gilroy begins the section of his book in question by noting how, in the first English translation of Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourses, “his translator excise[d] Glissant’s references to the work of Deleuze and Guattari … presumably because to acknowledge this exchange would somehow violate the aura of Caribbean authenticity that is a desirable frame around the work” – something Gilroy describes as a “typical refusal to accept the complicity and syncretic interdependency of black and white thinkers”.
It is this example that leads Gilroy to consider collisions between warring “essentialist and … pluralistic viewpoints”, which “are in fact two different varieties of essentialism: one ontological, the other strategic.” I think it is a similar kind of conflict we find in many contemporary discussions of class, and so — without wanting to slide into wanton relativism — lets proceed through this section of Gilroy’s work with an analogous reading of the dichotomy between essentialism and pluralism in mind, whilst trying to avoid any erasure of the specific concerns of his argument
From the perspective of an ontological essentialism, Gilroy asserts that “the black intellectual and artist” is seen “as a leader.” This position often
registers incomprehending disappointment with the actual cultural choices and patterns of the mass of black people. It has little to say about the profane, contaminated world of black popular culture and looks instead for an artistic practice that can disabuse the mass of black people of the illusions into which they have been seduced by their condition of exile and unthinking consumption of inappropriate cultural objects like the wrong hair products, pop music, and western clothing. The community is felt to be on the wrong road, and it is the intellectual’s job to give them a new direction, firstly by recovering and then by donating the racial awareness that the masses seem to lack.
In contrast, “a pluralistic position … affirms blackness as an open signifier and seeks to celebrate complex representations of a black particularity that is internally divided: by class, sexuality, gender, age, ethnicity, economics, and political consciousness.”
Here we have an analogous dichotomy to the class-first Marxists and those whose thought is supposedly overdetermined by identity politics. Gilroy, however, takes issue with both; although he admires the intentions of the latter, given his own theorisation of the Black Atlantic as a syncretic culture, he also notes its shortcomings. He continues, on the pluralist perspective:
There is no unitary idea of black community here, and the authoritarian tendencies of those who would police black cultural expression in the name of their own particular history or priorities are rightly repudiated. The ontologically grounded essentialism is replaced by a libertarian, strategic alternative: the cultural saturnalia which attends the end of innocent notions of the essential black subject. Here, the polyphonic qualities of black cultural expression form the main aesthetic consideration and there is often an uneasy but exhilarating fusion of modernist and populist techniques and styles …
As an aside, think here — to the contrary of the excessive attention given to Fisher’s “Vampire Castle” essay — of his far more consistent “popular modernism”. But there is nonetheless a tension in Fisher’s work here, and it is one that Gilroy notes also:
The difficulty with this second tendency is that in leaving racial essentialism behind by viewing “race” itself as a social and cultural construct, it has been insufficiently alive to the lingering power of specifically racialised forms of power and subordination.
An additional problem, however, is that essentialism does not offer a satisfactory correction for this either. Both sides of the debate, taken individually, ultimately fail “those who seek to comprehend cultural developments and political resistances which have had scant regard for either modern borders or pre-modern frontiers” — something that was forcefully perused by Fisher and many others within Ccru.
Returning to the ontologically essentialist perspective, then, Gilroy offers the following critique:
At its worst, the lazy, casual invocation of cultural insiderism which frequently characterizes the ontological essentialist view is nothing more than a symptom of the growing cleavages within the black communities. There, uneasy spokespeople of the black elite – some of them professional cultural commentators, artists, writers, painters, and film makers as well as political leaders – have fabricated a volkish outlook as an expression of their own contradictory position.
I see all of this in the enduring debates about what are the right-and-proper forms of solidarity we must take with the working class. How often do Tutt and his peers complain about leftist disunity, despite their contrariness itself being indicative of and a major contribution to this(!)?
Furthermore, the essentialism of Tutt and his associates similarly leans into volkish posturing, often based on the selective bolstering of certain (identitarian rather than material) conditions they experience, and at the expense of others — more syncretic — that muddy the picture somewhat.
By the same token, however, it is true that many of those who lean into a pluralistic perspective can often overlook materialism in favour of a competing ideological position that, by its very nature, attempts to produce solidarity across identity categories. But so can the essentialists. Class is itself often reduced to an identity category — reduced, that is, to vibes and cultural signifiers with no attention paid to material conditions.
To repeat: I am not simply saying that we can replace all mentions of blackness in Gilroy’s text with ‘working-classness’. Each is already comingled with its other. They are all social categories, even if measured in very different ways. These differences are important to attend to, of course, but they are dead-ends in and of themselves, and must therefore be overcome for a solidarity without similarity — this, after all, is the rallying cry of disidentity politics.
Intersections at Sea
This is not a politics of intersectionality. Intersectionality is an inapt name for a politics in/of motion.
David McNally:
Intersectionality emerged through efforts to comprehend the multiple oppressions that constitute the social experience of many people, particularly women of color. Yet, from its beginnings, intersectionality struggled with the spatial metaphor that defines it. An intersection, after all, is a space in which discrete roads or axes cross paths…
Dissatisfaction with the idea that all of these “axes” or “vectors” of power are independently constituted has propelled a number of analysts to amend the notion of intersecting relations with a vision of interlocking ones. Patricia Hill Collins, for instance, has proposed that we think in terms of interlocking systems of oppression that comprise a “matrix of domination,” one which constitutes a “single, historically created system.” […] More recently, Rita Kaur Dhamoon has suggested that the term interactions is preference to intersections. All of these theoretical moves rightly seek to overcome the conceptual image that has haunted intersectionality theory: that of reified, preconstituted identities or locations that come into some kind of external contact with each other. But at the same time, these modifications continue to be plagued by the ontological atomism inherent in the founding formulations of intersectionality theory: the idea that there are independently constituted relations of oppression that, in some circumstances, crisscross each other.
Here too we find, at the heart of a still-dominant current and attempt at pluralistic theory, a kind of strategic (and, in some senses, also ontological) essentialism.
What Gilroy instead attempts to produce, to the contrary, pulling something provocatively positive from the crisscrossing motion of slave ships across the Atlantic — further noting how these ‘ships’ in motion lurk behind notions of, for example, more static notions of citizenship — is a truly Marxian dialectic that considers the insights of both an essentialist and pluralistic perspective; that seeks to uncover subterranean or submarine currents that elude the failings of essentialism and pluralism both.
But how, then, are we to overcome these divisions to produce a solidarity that can overthrow the common enemy of a capitalist class? A rethinking of class itself is necessary, and it is a rethinking not be found among the essentialists.
As Tithi Bhattacharya has argued, we must overcome the “narrow vision of a ‘working class’ in which a worker is simply a person who has a specific kind of job.” Economic relations are social relations. Turning to Marx:
His contribution to social theory was not simply to point to the historical-materialist basis of social life, but to propose that, in order to get to this materialist basis, the historical materialist must first understand that reality is not as it appears.
The “economy”, as it appears to us, is the sphere where we do an honest day’s work and get paid for it. Some wages might be low, others high. But the principle that structures this “economy” is that the capitalist and the worker are equal beings who engage in an equal transaction: the work’s labor for a wage from the boss.
According to Marx, however, this sphere is “in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.” In this one stroke, Marx shakes our faith in the fundamental props of modern society: our juridical rights. Marx is not suggesting that the juridical rights we bear as equal subjects are nonexistent or fictive, but that such rights are anchored in market relations. The transactions between workers and capitalists take the form — insofar as they are considered purely from the standpoint of market exchange — of exchange between legal equals. Marx is not arguing there are no juridical rights, but that they mask the reality of production.
If what we commonly understand as the “economy” is then merely surface, what is this secret that capital has managed to hide from us? That its animating force is human labor. As soon as we, following Marx, restore labor as the source of value under capitalism and as the expression of the very social life of humanity, we restore to the “economic” process its messy, sensuous, gendered, raced, and unruly component: living human beings capable of following orders — as well as of flouting them.
The issue, long taken with Tutt’s engagement with a “post-left marketplace of ideas”, is that he engages only superficially with the surface-level appearance of various economies — economic, attentional, et al. When he was criticised for his boosting of a collection of essays published by Theory Underground, for example — see previous link — the less explicit basis for this was TU’s essentialist fetishization of the particular jobs their spokespeople hold (the figure of the philosophe-Amazon-warehouse-worker), which are championed above the actual content of their theoretical work itself, which consists of platforming TERFs and a persistent engagement with Nick Land in spite of his racism. Indeed, Tutt views many of these figures as “juridical” equals, we might say, championing his paltry voice of dissent in an attention economy that is also not as it appears.
His (and Wildermuth’s) recent alignment with the owners of Repeater at Watkins puts a far sharper point on this. Workers who take the decision to flout their boss’s orders are seen as censors, rather than comrades attempting to bring to the fore the “messy, sensuous, gendered, raced, and unruly” background of workers’ agency in — in this specific instance — left-wing publishing. Indeed, the visibility of those who have managed the media channels at Repeater / Zer0 — who are ascribed some illusionary power through their visibility, despite being precarious workers at the beck and call of the invisible capitalists at its helm — leads to the obscuring of their material conditions under the ‘professional’ masks they are forced to adorn. (A mask Adam Jones used to embolden dissent at the imprint, which was then picked up and used cynically by the ownership themselves.)
Rather than join in this struggle, Tutt and co., feeling maligned by struggles that look beyond the egotism of any individual’s author(itative) status, revert back to an essentialist discourse that is so reductive it isn’t even about class anymore, and which asserts no challenge to the materially constituted financial power of Watkins Media, now looming over everything.
What the former workers at Repeater Books — authors, presenters, admin, etc. — are attempting to highlight right now, after 18 months of threatening suppression, the flexing of legalese, and its accompanying contracted silence, is “the ‘economic’ as a social relation: one that involves domination and coercion, even if juridical forms and political institutions seek to obscure that.” The horror of this moment — and here I am speaking personally as an author who has enjoyed the (perhaps questionable) sense of home provided by Repeater as an imprint — is that, far from being an independent voice on a blog who has branched out to publish books to reach a wider audience, the compromise of the (publishing) contract, the fear of breaking it, the desire not to throw those fully employed by these institutions under the bus, has clarified the processes of domination and coercion that I may have previously — and naively — assumed did not apply.
Tutt’s perception that I have held more power at these imprints than I have in actuality is, of course, a common one in this regard. This blog, the Acid Horizon crew, and Repeater in general are blurred together, with our differing material positions overlooked.
Speaking personally, I was only ever a freelancer without contract, checking the punctuation and grammar of forthcoming titles; I am friends with Acid Horizon but uninvolved in their operations; I receive paltry royalties every six months from Watkins, based on a contract that entitles me to a fraction of the overall profit accrued from two of the books published with them (I receive no royalties for Postcapitalist Desire). If my goal in life was to financially enrich myself, I’d have spent the last ten years very differently…
An obsessive commitment to posting for free on this blog, often stealing time back from employers by writing posts on the job, actually led to me being fired from two pre-pandemic jobs, as I always did the absolute bare minimum required of me in order to spend more time at my desk writing here. Financially speaking, I spent my twenties doing very little that was actually in my own interest — and it’s not like I have any familial wealth to fall back on, as an adoptee estranged from two families, never mind one.
I hope, now in my thirties, I can drag myself out of a persistent precarity, but not at the expense of my principles. My outspokenness has been pursued with little thought paid to the contracts I’ve signed, and with far less caution than others who have previously been closer to the daily operations of the imprint, who remain dominated by them even now. It is truly a sad situation when writers, whose voices are reduced to commodities, are left feeling like they cannot speak freely. What Tutt has described as my “censoriousness” has in fact been fuelled by a wanton disregard for self-censorship. I loved Repeater because I too am alive and I too do not agree, and Watkins’ recent statement is an affront to my loyalty to the imprint on that basis, showing how even a tagline — just seven words, never mind the tens of thousands that make up their individual titles — can be bastardised by those who claim legal ownership of it.
Where is the Worker?
Bhattacharya:
What is the ideal situation for the worker? That she pulls all the way in the opposite direction and annihilates surplus value altogether — that is, she only works the hours necessary to reproduce her own subsistence, and the rest of the time is her own to do as she pleases. This is an impossible solution, in that capital will then cease to be capital. The struggle for higher wages, benefits, and so on in the workplace, against a boss, or even in a series of workplaces and against specific bosses, then is only part of the pivotal struggle of capital in general versus wage labour in general. The worker can even “leave” an individual boss, but she cannot opt out of the system as a whole (while the system as it stands exists)…
Marx:
The worker leaves the capitalist, to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, as soon as he no longer gets any use, or not the required use, out of him.
But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labor-power, cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own existence. He does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class; and it is for him to find his man — i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class.
Bhattacharya:
If we take our lead from Marx himself, then it is utterly unclear why only the economic struggle for wages and benefits at the workplace must be designated as class struggle. Every social and political movement “tending” in the direction of gains for the working class as a whole, or of challenging the power of capital as a whole, must be considered an aspect of class struggle…
We should then reconsider our conceptual vision of the working class…
The question of “difference” within the working class is significant in this respect… Marx gestures toward differently “produced” sections of the working class in his discussion of the Irish worker, where the English worker is “produced” with access to a better basket of goods … while the Irish worker remains as a brutal level of existence with only “the most animal minimum of needs.” Obviously Marx did not believe that the value of the labor power of the Irish worker was a constant that remained below that of her English counterpart due to ethnicity. Instead it was a result of class struggle, or lack thereof, and it was English workers who needed to understand the commonality of their class interest with the Irish against capital as a whole.
Marx:
[Workers] must now learn to act deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation. They must aid every social and political movement tending in that direction. Considering themselves and acting as the champions and representatives of the whole working class, they cannot fail to enlist the non-society men into their ranks. They must look carefully after the interests of the worst paid trades, such as the agricultural laborers, rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions.
When the core team at Repeater Books sought to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause, this gesture towards the emancipation of the downtrodden was subdued. It has been further subdued by Watkins’ insistence on Repeater’s economic failure to meet its capitalistic standards. It seeks to separate the economic from the non-economic in a manner wholly predictable of the capitalist class.
What is left for the authors to do? This is not simply a dissenting movement that seeks to distance our books from those distributing them — a selfish, ignoble and impossible task. We must take mallets to the machinery. We must blow up the production line. The boycotting of Watkins is not, in economic terms, in the interest of any author – although the gains are so miniscule given the amount of work that goes into writing books; unless you crack a bestseller (10,000+ copies), you work accrues far, far less than what would constitute minimum wage – and those of us being particularly outspoken about this obviously run the risk of alienating our peers. But solidarity with Palestine is more important to us. At this point, I would much rather all this work produced be cleaved from its capitalist apparatus and disseminated freely online.
This is my personal opinion. What happens next is unknown. But far from this being a selfish and myopic concern, it is one that is fuelled by a desire to free up the information, the tactics, the ideas accrued for purchase and divest from an infrastructure that now only serves Watkins. The complete emancipation of this body of knowledge is concomitant, even if only in a small way, with the emancipation of our principles, of workers, of thinkers. It necessitates the sacrifice of a collective identity under the heading of Repeater / Zer0, and that act feels far more liberatory right now than any alternative. If Watkins refuse to acknowledge our desire to align ourselves with the dispossessed, then we must dispossess them of the value they accrue from us.
A Reckoning
This moment has felt like a reckoning. I have known about Repeater’s removal from the Publisher 4 Palestine petition for over a year. I have been through the grief that this betrayal occasioned. I have come to terms with the foreclosure of an imprint I loved. Many others are only just starting this process. But I am enlivened and excited about what might come next. I am determined to give further life to the last eight years of work — again, speaking personally – in a way that allows for a realignment with the facelessness of the online and the submarine currents of disidentity that lurk there…
Detour over. In Part 4, a return to intended programming, which will nonetheless be attuned to all of the above…