Being Numerous Read online

  The Babadook (2014), for example, is such a good movie because it refuses to reduce its monster to a psychological posit. We realize we are watching the story of a mother and a son haunted by grief, but the film insists, too, that the monster, qua monster, is real. The Babadook isn’t banished to the psyche, but to the basement—and all the better for the universe of the film.

  In my web of belief, my bathroom ghost sits somewhere liminal; he’s not part of how I typically navigate the world, which requires constant banal prediction. That it remains there, however, is ethically important. Your ghosts, too, your demons, your holy visions, don’t need to exist; you could no doubt account for them scientifically. The bombastic tendency of Western science is to pathologize, and thus to dismiss such things. But the question of what realities are possible should not just be answered by the measurable components of what already has been. Does maintaining the reality of your ghost hurt you or help you? Does a collective commitment to something mystical, outside “reason,” cause more harm than good? My bathroom ghost is a heuristic (again, not a metaphor) for considering what is desirable to allow in our worlds as opposed to that which we should explain away. Because even though I could explain him away, he will still come and scare me. So I might as well make epistemic room for him; it’s more interesting to do so.

  Ontologies are open ethical questions we have to ask again and again. This is no more true of, say, religious ontological commitments than it is of the sciences that foolishly believe themselves to have escaped ideology.

  A few decades ago, there was a critical theory trend for making use of ghosts. Deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida introduced the idea of “hauntology” (which, by no accident, sounds exactly like “ontology” in his native French pronunciation) as a radical critique in order to use temporality to challenge the limits of totalities and ideological dichotomies. Insofar as we always live with presence and non-presence, he suggests, there are spirits. We see this clearly in fiction: all stories are ghost stories, in which reading invokes a return to the present of specters—say, a dead writer, or an idea from the past. Derrida, for his part, focused on the examples of Marx’s “specter of communism” and Shakespeare’s principal tragedy. Tenses are muddled; “The time is out of joint,” says Hamlet. These hauntings occupy an ambiguous ontology between life and death, presence and absence. “They are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet,” Derrida wrote. “Haunting is the state of proper being as such.”

  Though “to be or not to be” remains Hamlet’s most quoted phrase, in the play’s broader context, life or death is not the question at all. The dichotomy is undone from the beginning. For the play begins with a ghost, the king who is and is not —both gone and present, both rightful king and no-longer king. Hamlet fails to understand the hauntological universe in which he lives, where “to be or not to be” fails to exhaust the logical space.

  I like the thought, but Derrida’s intervention in ideological totality seems to posit an ossified world of haunting itself. It reminds me of Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts, and his tormented Mrs. Alving, who says,

  I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts … It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them.

  For Derrida, the possibility of something dead-and-alive, so neither dead nor alive, ruptures notions of a world ordered into presence and absence. We would do well, unlike Hamlet, to notice it.

  Derrida’s ghosts that put time out of joint shouldn’t be so strange to us digital denizens. We live with and through digital selves, and we are beyond the era in which online experiences and relations were deemed and experienced as “unreal.” We have normalized the fact of our enmeshed digital existences and expanded what we allow to be “real” selves, real experiences. How the internet functions is wholly explicable—there’s no spectral mystery as to how we integrate into net-works—but just how our phenomenology has accommodated them is a magic of sorts. It evidences our ability to relate in ways once deemed unreal. It took collective leaps of faith to see online avatars as aspects of people rather than simply pictures of them, to feel an iPhone as a bodily extension. “There you are!” I say as a friend goes green on Google Hangouts. We’ve shifted the possibilities of “there” and “where” a whole lot in recent decades. We don’t call digitally integrated life “mystical” or “paranormal”; tech companies would rather we simply call it “progress” and reap the profits for themselves.

  Still, it took choice and a certain consensus (albeit hierarchically organized by Silicon Valley technocapital) to permit digital reality to become real. That choice was simultaneously one to introduce ambiguity into the real; otherwise, “IRL” would make no sense as a phrase. My ghost is possible by the same logic, although, to his credit, he will not find articulation through capitalist enterprise.

  Remember the dress? The optical illusion, which seemed to split the internet into two camps in early 2015—those who saw one color scheme on a photographed cocktail dress and those who saw another. Gold and white, or blue and black—and maddening either way. Like Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit perception puzzle in which both a duck and a rabbit can be seen, depending on how you look at it (and which, by the by, I have tattooed on my arm), the dress was an aspect perception game: one reading of the image makes the other (equally valid) reading impossible to see. Unlike the duck/rabbit, where most people manage to see both duck and rabbit, the dress was less available for aspect shifting. Most people could only ever see either the gold and white, or the blue and black. We couldn’t force ourselves to alternate between them, even as we begged each other to try to see it our way. Scientific explanations of the phenomena were given, but it didn’t matter, I was a gold-and-white; it didn’t open to me the blue-black aspect. Fuck what the dress looked like in the store—in the viral image we shared, a blue and black dress and a gold and white dress both simultaneously existed, while neither existed at once. And what fun with that we had!

  For Wittgenstein, the point about aspect perception is that it is neither through “the language game of reporting” nor “the language game of information” that such phenomena are best read. The least interesting thing about the dress was that it was actually blue and black, while the explanation of why different aspects can be seen is perhaps equally impertinent. To talk of an aspect’s truth or falsity misses the point, and that is precisely what’s important about these figures. Perception is not just the expression of a subjective experience, but goes beyond the personal: we ask each other, compel each other, to perceive an aspect of an object or an experience that has struck us. There’s an intimacy in inviting each other to perceive anew, to accept the invitation, and to be taken by surprise. We wish to be struck together with, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, an “inarticulate reverberate of a thought.” This closeness is about sharing realities beyond the reach of plain or obvious empirical experience. For if reality is just there, then we all exist together in its sameness, separately and alone, with ghosts no more than metaphors.

  3

  Riots for Black Life

  For less than one week in the summer of 2011, London blazed with riots, which sprawled throughout the capital and the nation. Police had shot dead Mark Duggan, an unarmed twenty-nine-year-old, prompting an eruption of property damage (an estimated $3.5 million worth), arson, and looting. Tabloid ink ran sticky with panic and racist, classist allusions to roaming packs of hooligans. The police cracked down hard: five days of chaos produced 3,100 arrests. The courts followed suit, jailing one student for six months simply for looting bottles of water, worth around five dollars, from a grocery chain.

  And then there were the brooms. In the wake of the unrest, hundreds of well-meaning British civilians took to the streets, armed w
ith brooms, to voluntarily sweep away the debris of the preceding rage-filled days. Keep calm and carry on. The organizers dubbed it “the great clean up”—a blunt puritanical assertion that goodness, nay greatness, fell on the side of the largely white, middle-class citizens who would wipe clean the charred evidence of social strife left by the underclasses.

  Subsequent in-depth studies by the London School of Economics and the Guardian found structural racism, classism, and habitual police brutality to be among driving forces of the riotous rupture. But at the time, a pernicious narrative emerged that pitted “criminal,” “violent” rioters against the upstanding broom brigade who swept away the mess. While then–prime minister David Cameron called the riots “criminality, pure and simple,” there was nothing pure nor simple about the events of that August week. And wrongheaded politicians are not alone in seeking to reduce messy and complex events like mass riots into the “pure and simple” categories of “criminality” and order, violence and peace, goodies and baddies.

  We saw a similar line play out during the August 2014 events in Ferguson, Missouri, after police officer Darren Wilson shot dead unarmed, black eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. Wilson claimed the teen tried to attack him in his car and grab his gun, but eyewitnesses countered this narrative, reporting that Brown was in fact surrendering, hands in the air, when he was shot. Brown’s body lay in the street for four hours before being removed. The protest cries went up: Hands up; don’t shoot; Black lives matter.

  The St. Louis suburb was hit by rioting, looting, and confrontations with militarized cops. Clashes with police and property destruction continued for over a week, erupting anew when a grand jury failed to indict Officer Wilson. The official and media narratives around Brown’s execution, his killer’s impunity, and the furious protests that followed epitomized the (im)moral undergirding of American necropolitics—specifically, the demonization and decimation of black life.

  Later that month, the New York Times published an outrage-provoking obituary describing Brown as “no angel.” The author felt the need to note that the teen—as teens do—would sometimes drink alcohol and smoke weed, and that Brown once got into a fight. “He did not have a criminal record as an adult, and his family said he never got in trouble with the law as a juvenile, either,” the article noted. With just over a thousand words to reflect on Brown’s whole life, an entire sentence was dedicated to the absence of a rap sheet. It would seem bizarre, except within a context that presumed the a priori guilt of black boys as a baseline—which was, of course, the very context of Brown’s death.

  The paper’s public editor criticized the “no angel” designation, but it wouldn’t be the last instance in which Brown’s assigned place in the divine order would play a role in the narrative surrounding his death. Following the announcement that Wilson would not go to trial, the St. Louis county prosecutor made the unorthodox decision to release the grand jury testimony records to the public. The alleged gesture toward transparency only served to reveal a mistake-riddled process, in which judgment was passed not so much over Wilson’s culpability, but over his victim’s very soul. The grand jury heard from the officer that when he shot the teen, Brown’s face (which the cop described as an “it”) looked like a “demon.”

  The literal demonization of Brown as a justification for his killing echoed the white supremacist tradition of reliance on the constructed figure of the black devil—a character accorded not only circumstantial, but also divine and existential guilt. Thus, it must not be taken lightly that a white man, endowed by the state with firepower and authority, used the term “demon” to defend ending the life of an unarmed black teenager. In a sixteenth-century English myth, the devil would take the shape of the black Moor; and in 1584, Reginald Scot’s famous skeptical text, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, noted the contemporary belief that “a damned soule may and dooth take the shape of a black moore.”

  In Othello, written circa 1604, Shakespeare’s most villainous creation, Iago, warns the white Venetian senator Brabantio that the “devil will make a grandsire” of him if Othello, the Moor, is permitted to marry and procreate with his white daughter. It was the same racist allusions of Jacobean religious paranoia that found purchase in that Ferguson grand jury meeting room. And the paper of record joined the demonizing chorus, upholding a narrative that stood on the shoulders of centuries of wretched racism.

  A related moralization concerned the riots that followed, with angels and demons projected onto well-worn good-protester/bad-protester dichotomies. This played out, too, in Baltimore in 2015, when black twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray died in custody. His spinal cord had been snapped during a “rough ride” in a police van. After countless police killings of young black people, even the response to furious, righteous protest has become predictable. The protests, we are told, “turn violent.” Racists and reactionaries call it thuggery (pure and simple). Liberals, believing themselves on the right side of the anti-racist struggle, condemn the “violent” protesters, and stress the presence of good, nonviolent demonstrators, who marched and mourned but didn’t riot or loot.

  With their desire to rescue uprisings from a demonizing narrative of violence and criminality, liberal voices (albeit unwittingly) performed their own violent categorization. Vicky Osterweil put it best in an essay for the New Inquiry after the Ferguson revolt in 2014:

  When protesters proclaim that “not all protesters were looters, in fact, most of the looters weren’t part of the protest!” or words to that effect, they are trying to fight a horrifically racist history of black people depicted in American culture as robbers and thieves: Precisely the image that the Ferguson police tried to evoke to assassinate Michael Brown’s character and justify his killing post facto. It is a completely righteous and understandable position.

  However, in trying to correct this media image—in making a strong division between Good Protesters and Bad Rioters, or between ethical non-violence practitioners and supposedly violent looters—the narrative of the criminalization of black youth is reproduced. This time it delineates certain kinds of black youth—those who loot versus those who protest. The effect of this discourse is hardening a permanent category of criminality on black subjects who produce a supposed crime within the context of a protest.

  Osterweil’s crucial defense of rioting was not a condemnation of the historic contributions of activists engaging in disciplined nonviolence in the tradition of MLK. Rather, she stresses the central role of nonviolent civil disobedience in civil rights struggle, while still rejecting a view that counterposes those who riot and loot as the “bad protesters” failing an otherwise-righteous movement. Rioting is not senseless destruction; on the contrary, it is often (even without explicit intention) a deeply political challenge to property and white supremacy —two concepts intractably entwined in this former slaveholder republic. Only when rendered in the language of capital are the acts of smashing chain store and cop car windows sufficient to see a protest deemed “violent”; but this is the media lingua franca.

  Liberal commentary on riots, especially on those carried out by young, black and poor people, often becomes hypercritical of the choice of targets of damage. There is marginally more sympathy for the act of smashing a Walmart window than a local mom-and-pop setup. Certainly, I’d rather see a retail giant, famed for worker abuses, smashed and burned than I would a small, local business. But above that, I also privilege the political force of a riot over the preservation of shop windows. Collective fury, inscribed onto urban terrain in the form of property damage, can be an assertion of presence and power in the face of authorities who would rather these young people remain invisible, silenced, imprisoned or dead. The disruption and destruction says it all, and it needs little accounting for in this instance. Revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon put it well in his 1961 Wretched of the Earth: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because we can no longer breathe.”

  Looting was an obsessive focus of cov
erage during the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the brutal police beating of Rodney King, as well as during the 2011 London riots and amid the brief but intense unrest in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush in 2013, after cops shot dead sixteen-year-old Kimani Gray. And while it would be easy to demonize looters here, in order to preserve some sort of ideological purity for those vandals who destroy in righteous anger alone, I’ll leave it to David Cameron to deem things “pure and simple.” For the reality is that looting adds a complicated layer to questions about the ethics of rioting.

  Arguments that looters distract focus from rage at killer cops may be valid. But I submit, along with Osterweil, that the very media venues that are so keen to condemn rioting and looting would have paid little attention to a St. Louis suburb’s polite protest of the latest racist police killing. If the public has more concern for the well-being of people than of property, as I hope they do, consternation about looting should pale in comparison to anger at police violence. Both liberals and conservatives decry looting as opportunistic, but I’m not sure opportunism is always such a bad thing, especially for individuals and communities for whom opportunity rarely comes knocking.