Niggaz in The Anthropocene

Niggaz
In The Anthropocene
David A.M. Goldberg for POLS-672
Niggaz In The Anthropocene

David A.M. Goldberg

Niggaz In The Anthropocenei is a preliminary meditation on the relationship
between Blackness, anti-Blackness and climate change/global warming, inspired by
my engagement with Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future
Coexistence. Morton is looking for ways to think, feel and be that are more deeply
related to the on-the-ground, in-the-head, and potentially spiritually-rooted crises of
the Anthropocene than current politics and various popular science and humanities
discourses seem capable of. “Don’t like the word Anthropocene?” he asks. “Fine.
Don’t like the idea that humans are a geophysical force? Not so fine.”
Despite his sarcasm Morton recognizes how difficult it is to present data or
evidence that overwhelms the politics and logic of entrenched denialist positions, or
elicits more than a feeling of helplessness (raging or otherwise) in those who might
be more receptive. In addition to stubbornness and ignorance, he identifies two
other rather startling and counterintuitive grounds upon which the concept of the
Anthropocene is challenged if not denied: colonialism and racism. In the first
instance, exploited non-Western humans are lumped together with those Western
humans who produced the Anthropocene. In the second case, white Westerners are
explicitly identified as being responsible for global warming. If only properly and
justly attributing responsibility could fix the climate! In both cases one group of
humans is presumably (politically? ethically? morally?) “excused” from global
warming because they were/are being victimized by another group. This position
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further complicates the actual differences between white Moderns who segregated
and colonized, and the non-white ones that didn’t. Unfortunately there is no
currency–social, political, or otherwise–to exchange between these two groups
besides domination, subordination and resistance. Everyone must confront global
warming however. No one is excused. No one escapes.

“Black people 200 years ago didn’t have a prayer. Beat our skin off our bodies. Kill
and rape our mamas in front of us. We didn’t have a prayer. Now we the head of
international courts, president of the Unites States, sitting on the United States
Supreme Court, president of universities, CEO of American Express, you name it.
Some Black person is it. But the price of that. Is to lose this precious insight into
something that connects you to something human… and bigger than white folks or I
don’t give fuck what color the folk is, something bigger than that. We’re losing that
connection. Because we are buying this other shit. I know that. I know that.”
Hortense Spiller, Dreams Are Colder Than Death, 2013

This paper argues that the oppressed, the formerly-colonized and the
formerly-enslaved do have some responsibility for global warming, but perhaps not
in the sense of the debt that those who oppressed, colonized and enslaved are
somehow expected to pay. It is hard to say if Black people would act differently from
white ones if they were granted reparations for slavery, or given their long overdue
(and obviously already-stolen) forty acres and accompanying mule. Further, the
politics of the day being concerned with the matters of Black life punctured and
processed by police violence and mass incarceration necessarily obscures broader
ecological concerns. Though I am confident that Morton would recognize the
complex co-existence of the hyperobjects that climate and racism are, he would
nevertheless argue that Black people are no less Mesopotamian than white people,
and therefore will continue to perpetuate what he calls agrilogistics:
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A specific logistics of agriculture that arose in the Fertile Crescent [This is why he
considers all humans who follow agrilogistics to be culturally Mesopotamian.] and
that is still plowing ahead. Logistics, because it is a technical, planned, and perfectly
logical approach to built space. Logistics, because it proceeds without stepping
back and rethinking the logic. A viral logistics, eventually requiring steam engines
and industry to feed its proliferation (Morton, p. 42)

Hortense Spiller would probably acknowledge Morton’s effort to trace the
roots of the problem somewhere, if only to assemble a narrative with a certain basic
coherence. I imagine that she would also see agrilogistics as a sterilized framework
that potentially discounts and erases the experiences that she is alluding to. Morton
undoubtedly recognizes the horrors of slavery (Atlantic and otherwise) but he sees
agrilogistics as a more fundamental system that “underlies all ‘civilized’ forms [of
human organization] thus far, from slave-owning societies to Soviets (46).”
However, Spiller sees value in distinguishing those Black Moderns who are
participating in the Anthropocene with greater agency (the various Presidents of
Things), from those descended from raped and beaten flesh who haven’t managed
to escape the long term effects of living without a prayer.
Morton’s grouping of all Moderns under the heading of “Mesopotamian,” and
thereby obscuring existing political and cultural differences, probably isn’t meant to
replicate the agrilogistic authoritarianism that he decries. Neither is the teleology-
in-rewind that the historical aspects of his argument relies on. Quips like the one
about viral logistics “eventually requiring” steam engines flirts with a chicken vs.
egg loop, but it is excusable for two reasons: 1) it is one among dozens of Morton’s
striking images, nano-thought experiments and mini-arguments designed to dissect
agrilogistics through small moves and reversals instead of massive theoretical
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frameworks; and 2) more importantly perhaps, the turbulent and outrageous flow
of his ideas has a refreshingly defiant and almost careless attitude that might
encourage readers to question the categories they already have stakes, and possibly
even the stakes themselves. I actually recognize a little gangsta in Morton, and
believe that his ideas deserve to be enriched through a deeper and more specific
engagement with the experiences of those who seem to have no stake in what
direction the climate and biosphere head. And there are those speaking for the
subaltern, with great force and moral authority, who are less interested in deferred
dreams than they are in forcing a re-cognition of a world that is “bigger than white
folks.” When Fred Moten talks about the point of Black Studies being the critique of
Western Civilization with the goal of ending it, he is working in a space that is highly
compatible with Morton’s Dark Ecology. Moten’s thinking is deeply invested in
Blackness and Black people, to a degree that has attained an incredible academic
intensity over the past decade. He might have little interest in the politics of
alliances, but he is certainly down with co-existence.
I agree with Morton’s assertion that the past is present and future, but I am
not prepared to surrender Blackness in particular to a virtual Mesopotamian
identity. Instead, I will look at the rich network of possibilities that emerge when his
four stages of affect (guilt, shame, melancholy and horror) are used to read the
ecology of images, voices and positions presented in the cinematic work of Arthur
Jafa and Khalil Joseph. I find that these filmmakers are negotiating with the reality of
the Anthropocene–but not necessarily in a fashion that is explicitly tied to global
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warming. Consider for example their visual engagements with Los Angeles: a city
whose long association with automobiles, sprawl, smog, fantasy, military industry
complexes, racism, and violence makes it an important figure of the Anthropocene
(see Figure 1). Morton would trace LA’s “being” back to humans’ seeming inability to
relinquish core metaphors involving land to be mastered, securing a domesticated
bio-labor forced to work it, and using violence to police, surveille, and defend all of
it. Flood plains and gang turf wars, cattle and slaves, (im)migrant peasants and
mercenaries overseen by warrior kings, and wombs as a heavily guarded resource.
Blackness and anti-Blackness, as it is imaged by Jafa and Joseph, occupies all of these
categories. Working closely with the texts and thoughts of Black scholars and
entertainers, their projects: Dreams Are Colder Than Death (Jafa, 2013) and m.a.a.d
(Joseph, 2015) present related but distinct narratives that invite the spectator to
follow experimental lines of identification into their respective storyworlds. Jafa and
Joseph are deeply concerned with imaging Black life and thinking it through as far as
cinema (in these cases at least) can take the effort, but not at the expense of losing
the humanity of Blackness to some acceleration or denaturalization headed–at least
from the view of the bloodied street–toward nothing but more whiteness. At the
same time, Morton’s effort to dissolve the anthropocentric position that ranks
humans above dolphins and stones is worth mixing into, under the assumption that
cinema, having captured certain imprints of the human, is itself a kind of non-human
life.
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Figure 1: Car Culture. Clockwise from top left, stills from: Dreams Are Colder Than
Death (Arthur Jafa, 2013), m.a.a.d. (Khalil Joseph, 2015), Alright (Colin Tilley, 2015),
Koyaanisqatsi (Ron Fricke, 1983). Dreams and ma.a.d. wrap Black stories in the LA
Anthropocene landscape. If one can feel the impact of simultaneity captured in the
Koyaaniqatsi still, and the multiple layers of justice represented in Alright, then one
can begin to grasp the specificity and scope that Joseph and Jafa pursue in their
respective projects.

Arthur Jafa’s Dreams Are Colder Than Death is a 53-minute documentary that
presents the thoughts and reflections of Black artists, educators and academics such
as Charles Burnett, Nicole Fleetwood, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Hortense
Spillers in combination with motion portraiture, historical and scientific
photography, ethnographic footage and abstract explorations of texture and light.
Khalil Joseph’s m.a.a.d was originally shown as a twin projection titled Double
Conscience at The Underground Museum in Los Angeles. This 15-minute film uses
music and lyrics from Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 album Good Kid, M.A.A.D City: A Short
Film By Kendrick Lamar to assemble a portrait of Compton, CA that adroitly
negotiates the boundaries of the music video format while translating Lamar’s
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“short film” into actual cinema. Joseph prevents these parallel efforts from
collapsing into or overwhelming each other by alternating between scenes of
quotidian Blackness, the violence that so frequently destroys it, and powerful dance
performances. One only has to ask where and how any of these modes exist: in and
through the suburban and the sprawling, the car-centered, the deindustrialized, to
recognize how neoliberalism imbricates Black urban life in the thermodynamics of
global warming. Any climatic analysis includes but may not specifically identify
Black carbon footprints, water consumption and dependencies on global shipping
logistics. But a specific sociopolitical narrative drops a curtain of politics between
Black and White Mesopotamians, one that segregates shared concerns with
community safety, sanity and sustainability.
Jafa and Joseph “unapologetically” tackle the Black side of the veil with a
profound reverence and urgency. “I know this,” is a frequent refrain in Dreams are
colder than Death, and Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics provide a profound discourse of self-
awareness in m.a.a.d. What the figures in Dreams know is horrific, and as Lamar
works his way through his stories it is clear that he is struggling with survivor’s
guilt. Earlier Hortense Spillers asked about the cost of success, of being President of
Some Thing. Guilt and horror define the entrance and point of departure for a
sequence of affective stages that lead to what Morton calls “ecognosis:” a
thinking/feeling-through that is not based on the three axioms of agrilogistics:
(1) The Law of Noncontradiction is inviolable.

(2) Existing means being constantly present.
(3) Existing is always better than any quality of existing.

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Some examples: one cannot be Black and not-Black (the one-drop rule) and
one cannot be “a Black” and be Black at the same–one Black person always
represents all Black people. One can never forget that one is Black, or be forgotten as
Black. I could go on, but this is really just the fruits of Black studies that goes all the
way back to Du Bois. In any case, all three of Morton’s agrilogistic axioms clearly
describe the structure and conditions of Black Life, so powerfully that they can
either reinscribe the specific identity politics of Blackness, or more interestingly,
make Blackness and all that it has produced under centuries of duress, into the
foundation of being in the Anthropocene. Morton’s affective stages and three axioms
have led me to this paper’s two major areas of inquiry: 1) reading these films in
terms of Morton’s sequence of affective stages that anyone can go through when
confronting global warming: guilt, shame, melancholy, and horror–in order to better
inform, illustrate, and extend Morton’s thought; and 2) looking for a specifically Black
“ecognosis” that joins in responsibility for global warming because it can be argued
that Black life begins with horror.
Morton writes about the Oedipal horror of putting one’s eyes out because
one can see clearly, which is the easy-think Black Tragedy that the best of white
liberals have access to… after which they blind themselves after having gotten a
clear glimpse of Black life. The now-invisible Black spectator looks on, and the
Anthropocentric and Racist subjectivities collapse into each other. Unfortunately the
resulting figure is most easily recognized as US-style racism no matter how
Mesopotamian it might be at root. When Morton, addressing the horrified subject,
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writes “we” in “we try to straighten out loops and find the perfect meta position,” I
find it incredibly difficult to not racialize the pronoun as white. My second inquiry
then sets up a dual challenge that questions Morton’s position on horror and
wonders if Black Studies is not seeking its own ways to straighten loops and find
perfect meta positions.

Figure 2: Eclipses. Stills clockwise from top left: m.a.a.d., Dreams, and m.a.a.d.

Can Jafa’s captured scholars and artists, understood and conceived of as alive
in their “flattened” cinematic dimension see Joseph’s drunk crip swinging a giant
bottle of Belvedere Vodka and break-folding his body into sequenced poses of the
striated and the smooth? Is not the sun (see Figure 2) that is momentarily eclipsed
by blunt-smoking driver of Lamar’s mom’s minivan the same sun that Charles
Burnett’s (and later the above-mentioned crip) silhouette blocks? Everybody’s got a
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little light under the sun, sung Parliament. Joseph runs a shootout in m.a.a.d.
backwards, with occasional inversions in the frame; is that what the upside down
bodies hanging from lamp posts and convenience store awnings see long after our
memory of the edit fades? Here I am the one who must recall the boys’ bodies flying
backwards out of the pool at the beginning of Dreams, seemingly reclaiming not just
the motion but the energy of the dive I will never see.
Each film has an internal ecosystem built out of the rhythms and relations of
edits and framing that are well-classified and more-or-less “understood” by film
theory. But in a functioning media ecology the films would co-exist on their own
terms, not mine, like a crossfade between one and the other that produces new
images. What I am trying to think toward, or virtually witness, is one film
recognizing the other as something other than a metaphor or reflection. The deepest
applications of the ideas in Morton’s Dark Ecology not only expect but demand the
possibility.
I cannot write as cinema does, but John Frow’s treatment of video game
avatars in relation to characterization, narrative and identification (“Avatar,
Identification, Pornography,” 2012) provides me with some very useful tools to help
simulate such an operation. Frow makes a clean distinction between a narrative and
a game: narratives “represent an activity of disordering that moves a ‘world’ from
one state of equilibrium to another” while “games present an injunction to the
player to make this movement happen.” Frow’s understanding of narrative easily
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accommodates film, and both Jafa and Joseph’s works can be filtered for these
disordering moves. But I want to look deeper at the worlds that they create, which
are much more than representations of Los Angeles, Clarksdale, Atlanta’s “Magic
City” strip club, Brooklyn, and many other fleeting locales. I believe the viewer of
these films is expected to do more than integrate sound and image and stitch
together a narrative or an argument. Instead, I believe one is meant to occupy and
inhabit the film, to follow one’s fascination with Blackness (and one’s guilt, shame,
melancholy and horror) to find something else that actually has something to give.
Later we will look more closely at Morton’s interest in play, but it is worth making a
passing reference to how he sees it as a means of navigating, negotiating, and
possibly passing through the horrors and grand narratives of agrilogistics. “But we
all make toys—toy worlds, prototypes, forms to think with, in our heads, on paper,
in wood and plastic… The point would not be to dismantle global agriculture and
replace it with yet another top-down solution. Instead we need many toy structures,
many temporalities” (142, 143).
Figure 3: Synchronicity Toy A. Left: Still from Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977) sampled
in Dreams. Right: Still from m.a.a.d. Note that the respective films are within one second of
each other, revealing a compelling similarity in the composition of their respective frames.
These are many temporalities. This is cinematic co-existence.
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For now I want to imagine characters in Jafa’s film playing characters, and
playing in scenes, from Joseph’s… and vice versa. I am trying to conjure a dimension
of thinking cinema on cinema action (see Figure 3), which is an elsewhere in relation
to discourses of filmmakers’ shared narrative impulses, styles, techniques or
personal histories. It’s a question of whether one filmic body can touch, enter or
mount another, and whether this is a relation of force (colonization) or spirit
(possession.) This is where pornography comes in, and why avatars introduce a
useful figure suspended between the medium, the story, and the spectator/user.
Frow leaves a gap between his analysis of avatars in video games and a compelling
discussion of reader identification with the writings of Sade. He doesn’t get into the
narratives or play mechanics of interactive pornography at all. Instead he uses the
deepest cores of what makes pornography contentious to indirectly address a future
where games and “reality” may be indistinguishable.
This would matter to Morton because agrilogistic thought will come up with
any means it can to avoid the realities of ecological and thermodynamic limits,
including massively orchestrated illusions and the fetishization of the very collapse
it is trying to deny. The perceived hazard of pornography is the threat posed by
equating images and actions, and causally linking sight to behavior. Further,
“traditional” pornography consists of real things being done by real people, under
artificial circumstances, embedded in regimes of seeing and acting that structure
behaviors on both sides of the screen. Knowing that pornography “can invoke a
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corresponding desire in us, inducing in our body a state of physical arousal no
matter what our will or our judgment might wish,” Frow recognizes both the direct
harm pornography can do and how, quoting Beverly Brown, it works “through a
general psychic economy as it orders and disorders conduct.” He establishes
pornography as a narrative and not a game, leaving the reader to imagine what
pornography will do when it adapts (to) the structural conventions of video games.
At the time of his writing, millions of people were already living that future, from
Second Life’s thriving market in sexual animations to furry gonzo anime, and
remakes of Custer’s Revenge produced with Adobe Flash. But the gap Frow leaves in
his argument is actually very useful here, because whatever fills it ignores the
axioms of agrilogistics via the p-not-p violation that avatars represent, issues of bots
and asynchronous play (presence vs. absence), and the constant updating of virtual
existence that are all a part of complex social simulations. Here is Frow:
“Understanding the harms of pornography in this way [as physical, psychic,

and behavioral] underlines the importance of holding together in a single
frame at once the ontological discontinuity which allows us to distinguish a
representational act from other acts, and the ontological continuity that
binds them to each other.”

That “ontological dis-/continuity” shows up anywhere someone is trying to
work against the “orderly” agrilogistic narratives of the Anthropocene, intentionally
or not, from Deleuze to Cara Walker. The points of contention are always how things
move (in) between the two states. Jafa and Joseph negotiate the single-frame
ontological dis-/continuity through the types of images they produce for alignment,
sequencing, lingering and overlay. Their strategies of starting and stopping the
narrative machines that we have grown accustomed to, their cuts that move from
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the most intimate scales to that of the solar system, and the desychronization of
sound and image all “work like porn.” I am making this detour because so much of
Black Life and its representation has been reduced to literal and figurative
pornography, which ranges from commercial rap’s ass-driven videos to what
Hortense Spillers refers to as the total access to Black flesh that white slaveowners
had, and prison wardens and cops have inherited. Where violence in the days of
direct slavery needed no mediation, and its continuity in prisons remains largely
hidden, cell phones record murders in the streets and we are reminded of the short
distance between corrupt white desire and the rape, beating, or killing that follows.
Jafa and Joseph’s images struggle against the gravity well created by that process of
dehumanization. The painful irony is that the content of these efforts to generate
something “new” on behalf of Black people must openly acknowledge, discuss,
engage, and aestheticize death… to control it, tame it, and shift the angles from
which we illuminate it. This is why both filmmakers will use images of lynchings and
long shots of Black people staring back at you from hyperreal moments of Everyday
Life, in the exact sense that Michel de Certeau framed the concept. Kendrick Lamar’s
Sing About Me, Dying of Thirst is his third person voicing of the stories of otherwise
indeterminate various humans who do and don’t want to be represented in his
rhymes, for even monolithic cultures have their pockets of internal resistance that
must be respected. Kendrick “films” these humans with his verses, orders, edits and
renders their stories in and with his voice, becomes an avatar for them in one sense,
and constructs avatars for them in another, as they play (with) each other.
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Gangbanger:
Dumb niggas like me never prosper
Prognosis of a problem child, I'm proud and well devoted
This piru shit been in me forever
So forever I'mma push it, wherever, whenever
And I love you cause you love my brother like you did
Just promise me you'll tell this story when you make it big
And if I die before your album drop, I hope (gunshots)

Prostitute:
I'll probably live longer than you and never fade away
I'll never fade away, I'll never fade away, I know my fate
And I'm on the grind for this cake, I'mma get it or die trying
I'm eyeing every male gender with intentions of buying
You lying to these motherfuckers, talking about you can help 'em
[voice begins to fade out on this line]
With my story, you can help me if you sell this pussy for me, nigga
Don't ignore me, nigga, fuck your glory, nigga...

In m.a.a.d. Khalil Joseph matches neither of these verses with images that
might represent their content. The gangbanger’s excerpt is delivered in about
twelve seconds, and rather than pinning the narrative on a single representation, we
see a series of portraits, mostly of young Black women. When the gunshots sound,
we see a woman look down as if contemplating defeat before we catch a flash and a
dark murky underwater shot filled with what looks like snowflakes. The prostitute’s
excerpt is paired with a scene at a public pool. Shot from a POV in the water, the
camera periodically dips below the surface, temporarily muting the audio track and
introducing pulses of openness that are both sonic and optical. In these two brief
examples we can read Joseph’s recurring use of water in general and swimming
pools in particular as a Black Atlantic symbol for transitioning to the realm of the
dead. Kendrick’s subject matter reinforces the point, but the images that Joseph
chooses make more overt references to the contentious history of public swimming
pools and Black bodies. This reference produces exactly enough gaps between the
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conceptual “tracks” (shifts in sound and image above and below the water, Lamar’s
vocals, plus the music track) to become more open without becoming abstract and
illegible. I would argue that these gaps, or passages allow the viewer to think more
broadly, even while trying to construct the conventional narrative of a rap video. By
immersing (drowning? Baptizing?) the viewer and including the expected change in
audio equalization, the viewer might consider less likely topics such as the
environmental impact of swimming pools in general.
To see “regular” Black people who are young, apparently healthy, and at ease,
partaking in the same reckless luxuries of the Anthropocene borders on science
fiction. But the life portrayed in the image, being about death in Joseph’s formal
grammar, contains its opposite. Lamar’s Good Kid album works similarly. As the
track sequencing coheres into a narrative, Lamar positions himself walking the line
between a “normal” life and that of a gangbanger, and getting swept up into crime,
chaos and violence. Any of the kids seen in this pool sequence could be killed later in
the storyworld’s day, and this is why Jafa’s Dreams opens with the bodies of young
Black people flying backwards out of a pool, with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A
Dream” speech echoing in the far distance, as if being broadcast from Pluto.
This lonely sound of the Black male voice far from the crossroads, is one root
of the blues. You can hear it in the opening words that any of Dreams’ subjects utter,
before they warm up and settle into the interview’s groove. Morton deploys the poet
Baudelaire to represent the state of mind of the modern western individual,
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overwhelmed with media and trapped a deep sense of disempowerment. Let’s listen
to Baudelaire, as quoted in the epigraph to Morton’s “Third Thread” of Dark Ecology:
Flâneur (Beaudelaire)
Nothing’s as long as the limping days when, under thick flakes of snowy
years, ennui—fruit of bleak incuriosity—takes on immortal proportions.—
From now on, O stuff of life, you are mere granite wrapped in vague terror,
drowsing in the depth of a fog-hidden Sahara; an old sphinx unknown to a
heedless world, forgotten from the map, whose savage mood harmonizes
only with the sun’s rays setting.

Mass hallucination, baby
Ill education, baby
Want to reconnect with your elations
This is your station, baby
Pharrell’s hook from Kendrick Lamar’s “Good Kid.”

Baudelaire’s ennui is a product of the wealth and excesses of a Modernism
that was made possible by slavery. To think through and past this ennui, even if you
skip over the centuries of slavery part to deal only with the ill education and
disconnected elation, is to become depressed. Morton wants us to dive deep into
this mass hallucinogenic darkness to search for coexistence well below the
restrictions of agrilogistics, past the guilt, shame, melancholy and horror. “The way
in is the way out. We can’t get to ecognostic society through further agrilogistic
manipulation. We have to step down into things like Baudelaire.” (120)
Not only does this sound like the steps that white liberals go through when
confronting the environmental catastrophes that their lifestyles cause, but it also
sounds like a confrontation with one’s own racism. It’s a Fight Club pursuit of
“hitting bottom,” and though Morton is far from nihilistic, the possibilities of this
pursuit are bought at the expense of those that the idea depresses. I read Dark
Ecology as an attempt to write a species-level blues, a sufferation song, or struggle
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rap. If we treat knowing Blackness (or Black Studies) as a kind of ecognosis: the
study of the complex systems of inhumanity and social death, then these Black
artifacts (songs, images, movies) are meant to be “stepped down into.” To become
more human one must get down, “down and dirty” even, and take the plunge
through Morton’s strata.

Figure 4: Synchronicity Toy B. Left: Still from Dreams. Right: Still from m.a.a.d. A
moment of ontological dis-/continuity, the two clips looping within two seconds of
each other. The strip club sequence that is layered with Saidiya Hartman’s narrative,
the right has vocals from Kendrick Lamar’s Sing About Me.

Morton’s trip begins with guilt. “You have a rigid, crystallized thought about
yourself,” Morton writes. “You try to banish it. It never works” (132). Though what
Morton describes feels accurate to me, the works of Jafa and Joseph have very little
to do with projecting or maintaining guilt. Perhaps because they’re busy trying to
reconstruct a position of relative stability amid norms that produce instability.
However, there is a negation or rejection of guilt powerfully expressed through
Saidiya Hartman’s first voice-over sequence in Dreams: “In the city Black people are
producing modern forms of life. These emergent formations are only recognizable
on their initial appearance as monstrous. There’s a sexual revolution which race
leaders can only name in terms of fallenness.” Parts of her discourse are heard over
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the visuals in the left still in Figure 4, which I have aligned with roughly the same
timecode in m.a.a.d. to see what one film can say to the other. At this moment (the
toy is a loop about 15s in duration) Atlanta’s “Magic City” strip club is connected to
the edge of a Compton home, thanks to a 4:3 aspect ratio that links the darkness of
one space to the formal black border of the other. As Hartman continues to speak of
Black anarchy and “race leaders’” standards for what is “proper” for Black people,
the Gangbanger’s verse from Lamar’s Sing About Me is playing on the m.a.a.d. side.
The temporal dissolution is fierce here, as all the narrative aspects lying outside the
bounds of the toy itself begin to inform each other through this condensation.
Though one can follow the loop as a spectator, one can only navigate it as an
avatar that maps strippers, everyday people, and architecture onto its viewing-
feling body that stitches the two projects together. Outside the toy: the Gangbanger
expresses regret; the bullet that kills him pulls us into a whirling liquid that echoes
the Vaseline blurs of the strip club’s lens (see Figure 5); the Prostitute in Lamar’s
next verse is as matter-of-fact about her sex work as the dancers are with their cold-
casual jiggling under red and blue strobes; and Hartman is telling us about these
“monstrous,” representations of “fallenness.” Any guilt one might identify with
while maneuvering the imagination through this dis-/continuity was brought to the
moment by the user. Toy C is a nexus of judgment certainly, and perhaps a space of
moral experimentation, but this is not about wringing one’s hands.
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Figure 5: Synchronicity Toy C. Left: Still from Dreams. Right: Still from m.a.a.d. The
left still is the aftermath of the Gangbanger in Sing About Me being shot: a dark
liquid space filled with floating material that echoes the dollar bills that are
scattered on the floor of the strip club in the right one, which is similarly murky
and aquatic.

Morton is explicit in describing the gradient that defines his sequence of
affects. Shame, he says, “gets a little bit of a higher-resolution grip on the problem
than guilt. It is because shame is deeply connected to being-with: I feel it when I feel
others looking at me” (133). Again, with so little guilt-matter to anchor it, I find little
shame to identify with in either Jafa’s or Joseph’s projects. Both are sustained by
cultivating and nurturing bell hooks’ “oppositional gaze,” as their imaged subjects
stare directly into to the camera when they are bothering to look at it at all; this is a
style has a mixed genealogy that includes Adrian Piper’s “What It’s Like, What It is”
(1991) and around the 43-minute mark in 1983’s Koyaanisqatsi. If anything opens
routes to feeling shame it is the contradictions that arise when the critical narration
of Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten or Kathleen Cleaver is accompanied by scenes of
Black joy or frank survival instead of Black abjection. Even the possible shame that
is generated by a sequence from Dreams that portrays a moment of everyday sexual
harassment, is awakened through a voyeuristic process that is itself complicated by
the critical narration of musician Melvin Gibbs: “You gotta figure out if the person
20
can see it’s you. You gotta figure out if the person can see that you’re manipulating the
puppet. You gotta figure out if the person can see that you’re manipulating the puppet.
Or if the person is only gonna speak to the puppet.”
Shot in slow motion, a woman passes a group of young men on the street,
twisting her torso to avoid one of them reaching out to physically stop her. She
becomes partially obstructed by the trees and his posture reveals a cartoon image
on his black t-shirt: a woman squatting, legs wide, holding a gun, in a white t-shirt
that reads “cutie pie.” The shirt design expresses an aggressive irony that attacks the
notion of a woman who might advertise her ability to defend herself (real or
imagined,) or dares to use the image of her strength in a seductive fashion. As the
woman dismisses Mr. Cutie Pie’s highly physical advance, one of his friends joins
him in the frame, and they both look at her rear as she passes by. Gibbs again: Her
expression is weary, wary, and dusted with the defensive mask of fake amusement
that many women wear in such situations. Jafa then assembles various short clips of
her in full view, framed at various distances. We see that she is dressed for a job at a
fast food franchise, wearing headphones to presumably block out the world. She
draws a hand down over her face in an utterly exhausted gesture, during which
Gibbs is heard saying “That’s the psychic drain. Because it’s always a question of: time
to deal with the puppet.” At first we do not know if this scene is has been dramatized
or is ethnographic; all we know is that it is common. But as she crosses a street in
the final moments, she looks directly at the camera: oppositional gaze to conclude
Gibbs: “You’ve got this whole thing that you’re dancing with, and it has nothing to do
21
with you. Best case scenario: the person sees that there’s a puppet and they’re like ‘sit
the puppet aside and let me talk to you.’ It’s very rare.” Saidiya Hartman’s discourse
on the monstrous, delivered over the strip club sequence (“the thing that that you’re
dancing with…”) comes next, and we feel the dis-/continuity between different
modes of Black existence.
Of melancholy, Morton writes: “We have been hurt by the things that
happened to us. But, in a way, to be a thing at all is to have been hurt. To coexist is to
have been wounded...Depression is the imprint of coexistence” (135). For Black
people this “coexistence” is one of brutality and terror that for most people has been
repressed in the interest of accruing the benefits of agrilogistics. But it is this
repression that Jafa and Joseph are so committed to tackling. Modern urban working
class blues: coping with everyday sexual harassment can become the logic of
dancing naked under a shower of dollar bills–and the woman on the street trying to
get to work isn’t necessarily not the woman on the stage. Gibbs’ puppet into
Hartman’s monster. This bums me out. When my avatar navigates these lives,
rendered archetypal by Jafa and Joseph, I can only partially relate to Baudelaire’s
struggle with “the limping days when, under thick flakes of snowy years, ennui—fruit
of bleak incuriosity—takes on immortal proportions.” But ennui itself, despite my
deep appreciation for the existential nuance conveyed by the French, seems to have
little in common with an imagination that puts VHS footage of a young Kendrick
Lamar embedded in his uncle’s gang-related lifestyle up against a Black infant
crawling on a rug featuring the visual alphabet for American Sign Language. To look
22
back on either of these matrices of meaning through the power of cinematic editing
is a privilege, not a condemnation. Neither Joseph nor Jafa is making art to pass
judgment, or project shame or guilt on the viewer, white or Black. This is a “dark
celebration” that I think Morton could “get down” with now that we are at the
“upper bound of The Melancholy” and near The Horror, which he engages in terms
of robots, zombies and generally The Uncanny Valley.
“We’re expected to play a role, we have like a function, we’re almost

like computer code in that way. I mean we have this thing that, the
Black man X-Y-Z. And that thing almost operates by itself.”
–Melvin Gibbs, in Dreams

“…the reason that we think about the hold of the ship as almost
iconic of brutality not because it absolutely totally shut down our
capacities… our emotional capacities our erotic capacities our
imaginative capacities. The reason the shit was so bad was because
all of those capacities were still online. That’s how you could feel it. If
all it did was deaden us then it wouldn’t be so bad. We were alive in
that shit. Still thinking. Still wanting. Still desiring. That’s right. Still
singing. Still laughing. Still coming.”
-Fred Morton, in Dreams

“In The Horror we encounter the Uncanny Valley. In robotics design
it’s common to note how the closer an android resembles a human
the more frightening it appears… The Uncanny Valley concept
explains racism and is itself racist. Its decisive separation of the
“healthy human being” and the cute R2D2-type robot.”
–Morton, Dark Ecology (136, 137)

Puppets, machines and monsters, indeed. Robots in the Uncanny Valley,
clearly identified as racializing and racist. Black theorists, artists and educators
come to deep and terrible understandings about Black people, and themselves, on
behalf of Blackness. Though Gibbs and Morton are direct in their comparisons of
Black life to automatism, in Dreams, one can hear other variations on the theme
23
when Kathleen Cleaver speaks of choices leading to deaths during the Black Panther
era, and ongoing Black defiance of institutional authority that carries the same
penalties today. We see this theme of uncanny machine-choice-death in the drive-
through mortuary in the beginning of m.a.a.d., the way that Joseph will slow down
and blur bodies in motion-dance-struggle and throw them into silhouette, and hang
them upside down with arms crossed like pharonic bats, and punctuate it with still
frames like the Amiri Baraka quote: “We used to know we were stronger than the
devil.”
These are all losses in general, operating at the most basic level of Black life
that for Tim Morton is a place few of his philosophical subjects will ever get to. He
knows and recognizes it though, and calls it the “spectral plane,” where “R2D2-like
beings [Gibbs’ functional “Black Man X-Y-Z”] and humans become far less
pronounced.” On the spectral plane where life and non-life comingle and the
agrilogistic Mesopotamians draw the hard line, Morton’s image of Nazis “peeling off
abjection while supporting animal rights” runs in a terrifying parallel to Kara
Walker describing the phenomenological state of her art-making as feeling as her
skin is being peeled off in an affect-image of “retinal detachment…and the skin is
literally pulled away.” Startlingly, she calls this feeling “home,” knows it is not safe,
but that is “a good position from which to look at the ‘underside of race.’” Before
Moten takes us back to the hold of the ship she asks: “What is this kind of existential
kind of horror that one can feel of being kind-of invisible and kind-of (pauses…
laughs…) a heavy presence–a heavy non-presence?” Here we return to the space of
24
Hortense Spiller speaking of those who lived “without a prayer,” deep in the
everyday horror–seen, from here, as White Supremacy–that Morton is arguing “we”
must all get down to if we are to find our way out of the Mesopotamian death trap.
Morton wants us to engage the non-human, the non-living, not by extending
“human” rights but most likely by relinquishing them. That’s basically asking white
people to give up the foundation of their privilege, which in the past this has always
led to Very Bad Things, at least among white Westerners who believed they were
the only human beings anyway. And this, for me is where a long-extant aesthetic and
philosophical program that looks across the Uncanny Valley from the zombie-robot-
nigger side–or more accurately: from below decks–says to Morton: “what took you
so long, my nigga?” But he can’t come into this space along the third thread of this
dark ecology trying to celebrate death and the non-human in the presence of avatars
who have come to grips that they were never human in the first place–no matter
what some minority caste from their midst becomes President Of. This is why King’s
“dream” haunts Jafa’s film, cold and distant, and Lamar’s Backseat Freestyle starts
with “Martin had a dream!” before he wishes for a dick “as big as the Eiffel Tower”
so he can “fuck the world for 72 hours.” Do you now, Mr. Lamar? Would that be a
profoundly horrific (and thereby proto-ecognostic) act of sexual union with the non-
living, trans-human Earth, or just a metaphor for masculinist agency and
possession?
25
“When you say that Black people are just an effect of slavery, you raise a
question: ‘can black people be loved?’ … Not desired. Not wanted. Not
acquired. Not lusted after… Can Blackness be loved? … The way that
Blackness is and how it operates is that it is not and effect of horror. It
survives horror and terror but it is not an effect of these things. So it can be
loved and it has to be loved and it should be defended and it has to be
nurtured. I’ll basically go ahead and say that I know those things are true…
when I say ‘I know this’ I’m saying it in the way that certain songs talk about
Knowing…”
–Fred Moten

No one human can think of or for all humans, let alone all life, because all life
is threatened by global warming, which is being pushed along by all humans… so in
what Morton would call a “weird loop,” skepticism and denial become a negative
empathy that facilitates one of us thinking (mostly ineffectively) of and for all of us.
Doing so bumps the level of abstraction of “the human” up one more notch such that
the “one human race” that is celebrated by progressives is united in its inability to
come to terms with the vast physio-temporal scales of the planet’s myriad energy
regulation systems. The fact that humans have always been enmeshed in these
systems is ignored or denied by invoking anthropocentric privilege, which for
Morton is racism operating at its highest possible level. Thus the Other to be
repressed, dominated, pressed into service or extinction in the Anthropocene
becomes the environment itself, the planet becomes “Black,” and slave, and Nigger.
With the species safe in its privileged position, the racist dimensions of the
Anthropocene must be directly addressed as more than a strategy for denial. If
capitalism is the engine of global warming, and if Atlantic slavery in particular was
the engine of Western capitalism, that means slaves and their descendants bear
some responsibility for the crisis; not necessarily politically or ethically, but
26
definitely thermodynamically. Morton’s critique recognizes that denial of the
Anthropocene comes from everyone having too much or too little power, security or
agency to acknowledge the geophysical impact of the species. The urgency of a
quarterly earnings report, the misery caused by a child being shot in the street, and
the miles between a village and fresh water can all eclipse the equally pressing
crises of climate change. But humanity is mobile and the borders of the human are
porous and stretchy; this is how the zica gets in, the good and bad ideas circulate
through minds and machines, and the radioactive waste gets out.
More important than the term anthropocene is the thinking, feeling and
action that Morton believes is necessary to mount an appropriate response to the
crises. This will require something more than an inversion or detour of the politics
that brought us here, and at this point the reader may wonder how what might look
like mere identity politics might assist in Morton’s effort. Of course he did not call
the book “Black Ecology,” though the journey that this paper takes argues that
perhaps it could have been.
References
Arthur Jafa, director. Dreams Are Colder Than Death. Includes interviews with Fred
Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Melvin Gibbs, Hortense Spillers, and others. 2013.

Khalil Joseph, director. m.a.a.d., 2015. Includes the music and lyrics of Kendrick Lamar, from
Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City: A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar, 2012.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For A Logic Of Future Coexistence, Columbia University
Press, New York, 2016.
27

i Why “Niggaz” though? Why not “Blacks,” “Blackness,” “African American?” The political
failure around Katrina’s large-scale intersection of institutional racism and global

warming’s catastrophic effects prevent me from using such terms. My use of the N-word
evades but doesn’t escape sociopolitical categories. I reject the “-er” spelling used by racists
and the “dropped-R” spelling used in supposed “reclamation” of the word by Black people
themselves.

The “Z” is about attitude, talking back (to Morton,) satirizing (or what he might call playing,)
and standing one’s ground. The “Z” shouts out the lads from Compton, who spelled it in that
way that lots of late 20th century rappers did to better evoke ebonic phonetics. The “z”
defines the network between the white supremacist’s epithet, Emcee Busy Bee’s “sucka
nigga” (“whoever you are [who] didn’t buy my mink and didn’t buy my car”) and Emcee Q-
Tip’s thesis on the word (“See, nigga was first used back in the Deep South…”)

The Last Poets chanted Niggers Are Scared of Revolution, and Gil Scott-Heron’s morbid
sarcasm gave us Whitey On The Moon. How is a nigga’s attitude, forged in racism and
resistance, honed through improvisation, celebrated across the planet for its grace, power,
and efficacy as a hyperobject in its own right, supposed to confront global warming?

I am also deploying the “Z” in Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths terms. In their
alphabetic code “Z,” as “zig-zag-zig” signifies completion and a return to beginnings–with a
difference. “Z” also symbolizes the back-and-forth movement and displacement of change.
Five Percenter Salladin Allah compares zig-zag-zig to the “juke” move in basketball and
football when a player physically misdirects an opponent in order to progress towards a
goal.

The juke is also embodied attitude.

In this sense, I am indeed “faking right to go left” in this paper, bringing a racist concept
(and racism) to Morton’s concepts, shifting in one direction in order to go in another. I do
not abandon him though, for without his ideas mine are nowhere.

I am, in short, "just" playing.

28

Niggaz in The Anthropocene

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Niggaz

Niggaz In The Anthropocene

Niggaz In The Anthropocenei is a preliminary meditation on the relationship

between Blackness, anti-Blackness and climate change/global warming, inspired by

my engagement with Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future

related to the on-the-ground, in-the-head, and potentially spiritually-rooted crises of

Despite his sarcasm Morton recognizes how difficult it is to present data or

be more receptive. In addition to stubbornness and ignorance, he identifies two

Anthropocene is challenged if not denied: colonialism and racism. In the first

humans is presumably (politically? ethically? morally?) “excused” from global

currency–social, political, or otherwise–to exchange between these two groups

besides domination, subordination and resistance. Everyone must confront global

warming however. No one is excused. No one escapes.

processed by police violence and mass incarceration necessarily obscures broader

ecological concerns. Though I am confident that Morton would recognize the

and therefore will continue to perpetuate what he calls agrilogistics:

Hortense Spiller would probably acknowledge Morton’s effort to trace the

human organization] thus far, from slave-owning societies to Soviets (46).”

participating in the Anthropocene with greater agency (the various Presidents of

to escape the long term effects of living without a prayer.

Morton’s grouping of all Moderns under the heading of “Mesopotamian,” and

replicate the agrilogistic authoritarianism that he decries. Neither is the teleology-

striking images, nano-thought experiments and mini-arguments designed to dissect

agrilogistics through small moves and reversals instead of massive theoretical

compatible with Morton’s Dark Ecology. Moten’s thinking is deeply invested in

alliances, but he is certainly down with co-existence.

not prepared to surrender Blackness in particular to a virtual Mesopotamian

the Anthropocene–but not necessarily in a fashion that is explicitly tied to global

complexes, racism, and violence makes it an important figure of the Anthropocene

relinquish core metaphors involving land to be mastered, securing a domesticated

mercenaries overseen by warrior kings, and wombs as a heavily guarded resource.

the humanity of Blackness to some acceleration or denaturalization headed–at least

Spillers in combination with motion portraiture, historical and scientific

photography, ethnographic footage and abstract explorations of texture and light.

Film By Kendrick Lamar to assemble a portrait of Compton, CA that adroitly

collapsing into or overwhelming each other by alternating between scenes of

recognize how neoliberalism imbricates Black urban life in the thermodynamics of

Black carbon footprints, water consumption and dependencies on global shipping

logistics. But a specific sociopolitical narrative drops a curtain of politics between

community safety, sanity and sustainability.

sequence of affective stages that lead to what Morton calls “ecognosis:” a

thinking/feeling-through that is not based on the three axioms of agrilogistics:

(1) The Law of Noncontradiction is inviolable.

either reinscribe the specific identity politics of Blackness, or more interestingly,

that Black life begins with horror.

resulting figure is most easily recognized as US-style racism no matter how

Mesopotamian it might be at root. When Morton, addressing the horrified subject,

perfect meta positions.

images. What I am trying to think toward, or virtually witness, is one film

avatars in relation to characterization, narrative and identification (“Avatar,

a game: narratives “represent an activity of disordering that moves a ‘world’ from

one state of equilibrium to another” while “games present an injunction to the

player to make this movement happen.” Frow’s understanding of narrative easily

together a narrative or an argument. Instead, I believe one is meant to occupy and

passing reference to how he sees it as a means of navigating, negotiating, and

many temporalities” (142, 143).

to discourses of filmmakers’ shared narrative impulses, styles, techniques or

mount another, and whether this is a relation of force (colonization) or spirit

narratives or play mechanics of interactive pornography at all. Instead he uses the

deepest cores of what makes pornography contentious to indirectly address a future

where games and “reality” may be indistinguishable.

it is trying to deny. The perceived hazard of pornography is the threat posed by

artificial circumstances, embedded in regimes of seeing and acting that structure