Metabolic & Modal in White Reconstruction

By definition, security means the freedom from danger, fear, and anxiety.
   —Safiya Bukhari, The War Before 

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells... Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible.
     —James Joyce, Ulysses—Proteus Episode

Proteus had the ability to change shape and avoid capture.

An example of “The ineluctable modality of the audible” is Black liberation movement ancestor Safiya Bukhari’s radio broadcast voice in its revolutionary refusal to cede the language of security to the uninspired logics of the oppressors.

In September 2000, I drove with my grad school friend, a James Joyce scholar, in a 1989 red Ford Ranger from New Brunswick, New Jersey to Northampton, Massachusetts for the Rethinking Marxism Conference. I recall few things from that trip. We were amazed at our seemingly speedy arrival, until we realized we’d gotten off at the appropriate numbered exit but in Connecticut instead of Massachusetts.

After arriving at our actual destination, I met Dylan Rodriguez for the first time. His lecture on imprisoned radical intellectuals explored the problematics that would become his first book. Rodriguez’s talk was a rare meld of forcefulness, rigor, and openness. Put another way, his principled and kind demeanor synthesized the left hook with the hug. Such characteristics of character persist today. What follows are thoughts pertaining to my sense of Rodriguez’s method, rhetorical strategies, and implications pertaining to metabolic and modal in White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Genocide (WR), which won this year’s Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award.

There are two texts I teach every school year: György Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1920, 1962) and Dylan Rodriguez’s essay “The Meaning of ‘Disaster’ Under the Dominance of White Life,” published by the South End Press Collective in What Lies Beneath (2007). Two turns of phrases from the 1962 preface from the former crystalize my esteem for the latter. First, in a somewhat unfair self-excoriation, Lukács proclaims, “[T]he author of The Theory of the Novel had a conception of the world which aimed at a fusion of ‘left’ ethics and ‘right’ epistemology (ontology, etc.)” (21). Second, Lukács offers a non-polite refusal of reformist consolation. In relation to the outbreak of the first World War, Lukács shares the following anecdote: “I recall a conversation with Frau Marianne Weber in the late autumn of 1914. She wanted to challenge my attitude by telling me of individual, concrete acts of [soldier] heroism. My only reply was: ‘The better the worse!’” (11).

I think Lukács alongside Rodriguez’s work because both signal a willingness to push past good insurgent intentions to their underlying logics. Lukács and Rodriguez theorize how the admirable, the heroic, and the well-intentioned not only get absorbed by hegemony but also about how that hegemony depends on this dynamic to keep its wheels spinning (“The Better the Worse”) all the while not foreclosing radical transformative alternatives.

White Reconstruction, like Rodriguez’s earlier Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime, Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition, strips bare social and ecological phenomena and systems, digging down into their epistemological undergirding. These texts are at their best where the phenomena in question are taken for granted, where they have been naturalized and subsumed as Gramscian “commons sense”: prison regimes, hurricanes, volcanos, carceral practices and pedagogies, insurgent praxis, cultural work, the naming and codification of genocide, and the relationship between reform and revolution. Rodriguez subjects all of these to his rigorous analytic to excavate their presumptive logic. The product of this analytic is a trove of insights and a reminder to consider the epistemological inheritances and foundations propping up any query, research, or plan of action.

White Reconstruction signals “the capacity to engage the problem of genocide as an anti-Black and racial-colonial problem… delimited by a white supremacist epistemological circuit” (147). Such pairing logics animate WR’s joint discussion of aporias and limits of the Reconstruction-era Freedmen’s Bureau and the war against Philippines sovereignty—periodized as colonial pacification of the Philippines (1904–1946). WR’s chapters discuss the author’s immersion in Barry Goldwater’s white supremacist archive, LAPD’s recruitment tactics, settler colonial tactics and rhetorical evasions vis-à-vis Palestinian struggles for self-determination, and the 1948 codification of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as well as its appropriation by Black radical organizations, as in William Patterson’s We Charge Genocide, Malcolm X’s internationalizing struggles for Black Revolutionary Self Determination, and the December 12^th Movement.

The chapters of WR flex an interesting rhetorical pattern: Ever-adapting, improvisationally-adept oppressive structures are faced down by reformist tactics that cannot meet the occasion and share the epistemological foundations of what they oppose. Yet, as soon as the closed circuit of oppressive no-exits starts to cohere and militate against hope, Rodriguez’s analytic activates Black radical and anti-colonial poesis as techne that shakes up, re-orders, and defies hegemonic designs, potentially crafting novel escape routes. To this end, Rodriguez works through insights from Antonio Gramsci, Cedric Robinson, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Stuart Hall, Robert Allen, James Turner, Hortense J. Spillers, Clyde Woods, C.L.R. James, Manning Marable, and Sylvia Wynter, routinely clustering these thinkers in new and revealing ways. WR’s insistence on a methodological militancy that doesn’t allow for consolation lauds the creativity, political organization, and Black radical and anti-colonial poesis and shatters the seeming perpetuity of hegemonic logics with the radical motion of Black invention.

White Reconstruction as a text is thus perpetually becoming; its elasticity and adaptability—its metabolic instead of independent relation—evokes George Jackson’s definition of people’s war: “improvisation and more improvisation.” Its method is threefold. First, it employs “symptomatic readings of specific historical moments, archival texts, and political-cultural geographies within the contemporaneous, ongoing half-century of White Reconstruction’s most recent (and current) emergence…” (Rodriguez, 19). Second, it puts forth a “…re-periodization of the projected white/multiculturalist subject(s) of White Reconstruction” (19). Third, WR performs a genealogy, a “theorized historical tracing that [dispenses] with the constituent subject… to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework” (20). Here, WR engages Michel Foucault’s sense that “Genealogies… are, quite specifically, antisciences…Genealogy has to fight the power-effects characteristic of any discourse that is regarded as scientific” (20).

With this methodological orientation, WR defends the thesis “that the core value of protecting and sustaining White Being’s ascendancy not only defines the post-U.S. apartheid social formation, but also permeates the historical totality of white-nation building and white supremacist globality” (19).

I submit that WR can be conceived as a consummate metabolic relation (a “Stoffwechsel,” a la Marx’s Capital Volume I). In “The Meaning of ‘Disaster’ Under the Dominance of White Life,” Rodriguez mobilized Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s understanding of global white supremacy and racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death.” In that light, Rodriguez refused the designation of Katrina and the 1991 explosion of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines as “natural disasters.” The “living time” of Hurricane Katrina is “an ongoing material history of rigorously organized, state-facilitated, and militarized white racial domination”(133), and the eruption of the volcano is intimately wed to the deprivations of US militarism and occupation. Hence, Rodriguez offers a principled refusal of the temptation to exempt human beings and their attendant systems as causal agents of hurricanes and volcanos. In that vein, consider the following from WR:

In the preceding chapters, I have conceptualized White Reconstruction as an ensemble of cultural and political projects, narrative structures, ideological tendencies, and state formations that exhibit the resilient, reformist qualities of white supremacy as an aspirational logic of sociality (Civilization) while reproducing the distinct and dense national, hemispheric, and global violences of anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power. As a contemporary ensemble, White Reconstruction attempts to rescue and fortify the ascendancy of White Being in response to persistent, thriving late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century liberationist insurgencies that not only seek to extinguish and/or radically transform discrete institutionalizations of gendered anti-anti-Blackness and racial-colonial violence, but also envision and plan the abolition of White Being as such. …The period of White Reconstruction is yet another iteration of White Being as the militarized template for a Civilizational modernity that rests on the capacity to expropriate, assimilate, liquidate, and alienate all other beings as the premise for its peculiar renditions of progress, reform, social coherence, rationality, and order.

(Rodriguez, 216)

Compare WR’s approach to Marx’s reflection on the problem of studying human history in Capital Volume 1::

Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology reveals the active nature of man to nature, the process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations. Even a history of religion that is written in abstraction from this material basis is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernel of the misty creation of religion than to do the opposite, i.e., to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms which these have been apotheosized. The latter method is the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical process, are immediately evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed by its spokesmen whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own specialty.

(Marx, 493–494)

For Marx, “Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls metabolism (Stoffwechsel) between himself and nature” (283). This insight helps us both to understand what WR is accomplishing and how WR helps us revise Marx’s conception of the metabolic. Metabolic relation, as opposed to independent relation, facilitates analysis of complex co-determinant systems of imperialism and global capital, for which people’s relationships to nature and economic systems can be theorized in terms of interdependent causalities. Capital as system mobilizes processes of production, distribution, consumption, and actualization metabolically interdependent; yet Capital as study isolates these processes in its expository logic. WR is so powerful as a study because it grants its systematic object of radical critique—White Reconstruction—its own metabolic dynamism. The combinatory power of WR historically is comparable to insurgent political and methodological projects such as Caribbean Federation, Revolutionary Pan-Africanism, and Mao’s analysis of primary and secondary antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions. As responses to insufficient singular-determinisms/models, each of these tries to answer hegemonic combinations with liberationist ones.

In short, WR contributes a new way of conceiving the metabolism of today’s world. What, then, of the modality? In a fascinating citational turn, WR omits the concept of modality, replacing it with “embodied social experience.” The point of reference here is Stuart Hall et. al in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, who write “Race is the modality in which class is lived. It is also the medium in which class relations are experienced. This does not immediately heal any breaches or bridge any chasms. But it has consequences for the whole class, whose relation to their conditions of existence is now systematically transformed by race. It determines some of the modes of struggle” (394). WR offers the following construal:

To paraphrase Stuart Hall, race is not reducible to class relations, nor is it an epiphenomenal reflection of a social formation’s economic substructure or mode of production. At the very least, race is the embodied social experience “through which class is lived,” and “the medium in which class relations are experienced.” Extrapolating Hall’s formulation, race not only signifies the material historicity of the body—its contested physiology, social agency, historicity, and non-uniformity—within particular socialities and economic orders, it also determines the geographies and systemic logics of social formations in ways that are generally (though not always) symbiotic with logics of economic determination.

(Rodriguez, 37–38)

In reflecting on WR, I keep returning to this—and to Miles Davis. What if we let modality return? Recall Dylan’s sense of genealogy as “theorized historical tracing that [dispenses] with the constituent subject… to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework” (19–20). Modality’s Oxford English Dictionary’s 8th political definition is “an arrangement or condition; a procedure or method; a means for the attainment of a desired end. Aspects of a thing related to its mode, or manner or state of being, as distinct from its substance or identity; the non-essential aspect or attributes of a concept or entity.” Yet there is also Modal Jazz: lacking a centering harmony; playing around with all the possibilities and permutations organized around a tonal center; horizontal rather than vertical; centering improvisation instead of chordal emphasis. To my mind, theorizing a supposed lack of tonal center has something homologically to say to WR’s genealogical dispensing “with the constituent subject.” In both Miles and Rodriguez, there is shared revolutionary dynamism. The modal of modality “in which class is lived” has something to say to the metabolic dynamism of White Reconstruction as well as the theoretical and praxis-fortitude to destroy it.

I’m so delighted Rodriguez’s book is the winner of this year’s Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award. Salute!

Jeremy Matthew Glick

Jeremy Matthew Glick is an Associate Professor of African Diaspora literature and modern drama at Hunter College and the new editor of Situations: A Journal of the Radical Imagination. He is completing his second book project entitled Coriolanus Against Liberalism/ Lumumba & Pan-Africanist Loss and co-writing a book on Abandonment Neurosis with Robyn Marasco.  Professor Glick has recently received the Nicolas Guillen Philosophical Literature Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association for his 2016 book, The Black Radical Tragic. He writes essays for A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought and Boundary 2. He is a longtime member of the Unity & Struggle Collective based in Newark, NJ.