On social death

I arrived at Orlando Patterson by way of surprise. My studies in black feminism had been so good, I was under the illusion that I had read everything. This, I think is what happens when a bad student meets a religious teacher. You think, I go to church every weekend and it is exactly as it seems. The alter, the epigrams and the organ pipes. This is the church. There is no basement. 

All churches have a base ment. 

Writing in my customary spot outside on the building’s front steps, passively peering into scenes of domesticity made static and diffuse by window screens [the mosquitoes are coming] I think this is why I am a crumby lover too. You were so good, so like Sunday mass, with a panoply of signs and memories with which to make a lifetime out of, that I forgot oh even love has something more to show. Sometimes I make do with the heat of these thoughts, or better yet, vibrations, that sizzle through the surface of the world and into my core from up my feet. But mostly I bite my finger nails, nervous about nothing. 

Everyone cites Venus in Two Acts and sometime before that, the belly of the world. Its been some time since I last read it. I was still at Elisa’s then, her place like a pristine white box in the sky, and I, a constant moving stain, threatening to make permanent what should have never happened in the first place. This means at the time I was facing towards her kitchenette and a picture of Ina Garden was still memorialized in the case of my old laptop.  [Later, I would write my final sent letter to Harry on its backside. To think anything more of this matter seems unwise]. 

Saidiya was advancing an important black feminist argument within the practice of slavery scholars, a historiographical tradition that had been slow or too misogynist to claim the salience of a gender analysis in bondage. To them, slavery had a phallus. And Saidiya reminds us, even he had a mother. 

Patterson was foundational for his sweeping study of global enslavement, part sociology, part legal philosophy, part statistics, and part angry open letter to American colleagues (and maybe even black people writ large). In the tradition ofDu Bois, Patterson offered a system by which to parse the arithmetics of enslavement and name its elusive constitutive variables. Rejecting the popular thesis that slavery was based on the legal denigration of man and I say man because he did not say woman, into a proprietorial item, Patterson argued that systems of social forced labor were secured through idioms of power and social death. For sovereignty to be idiomatic means to foreground its inherent sociality and referentiality. As in white supremacy is an idiom of power in as much as it possess a logical opposite upon which it stands. His most lasting contribution, Social death, possessed three edges. We will be careful not to cut ourselves in this analysis. 

The first edge runs long: natal alienation. Slavery in the antebellum South, was supported through a system of translational trafficking that displaced indigenous populations from their place of birth. The analysis works deeper if we also consider the procreative onus placed on enslaved women post British abolition, where plantations sought to maintain the demography of their work force through autopoetic processes and after which children were taken from their mothers to be sold off into a larger market. Natal alienation. It's usefulness as a concept isn’t territorially or procreativity defined, the operative word here is alienation. Made foreign. To be foreign in this sense was to be without legacy, memory, or origin. What is a direction that begins nowhere? 

The metaphor of an edge is especially useful because its very existence is based upon the relay of another side that can support its meaning and cliff. An edge without another edge is just a line. We are wielding a sword. While natal alienation constitutively establishes  one elements of the ontological condition that is social death, it is reified by its production and dependence upon the second edge, general dishonor. In the absence of let's say a national citizenship upon which the slave could pursue recourse for violation of its humanity, she is left abandoned and humiliated. This is what distinguishes the southern auction block from modern sports drafts according to Patterson, in that the athlete is not debased by their trade and signing, their honor is kept in place. If somehow injured, they could pursue redress (ostensibly, but I don’t know how compelling this is; I might want to ask Serena or Claudia what they think). Those without honor have no claim towards recourse. They lack the requisite social condition to make such demands, hence their social death. 

Our blade looks like a rectangle, which simply means it is meant to sever, not pierce. And the edge that connects natal alienation to general dishonor, is access to gratuitous violence. For to be natally alienated and generally dishonored need only be conditionally derisive. A parachute child from a chaebol family isn’t a social condition that summons my pities. Tom Brady is not a tragedy. However, what anchors it into social death is how these two edges establish a mode of being that is so available and vulnerable to violence. Police violence. Economic violence. Racialized violence. Social death describes a place in the world defined by what can be taken from it. 

You can see why scholars were depressed and wanted something more. 

Fred Moten says he uses the frame of black social existence as opposed to black social life in an effort to name and include all those things entangled with blackness that have nothing to do with living, and in tern one might argue, [social] death. I don’t know what to make of an existence with such proximity to gun violence, with such access to gratuitous violence. You say, every day I go on my timeline and see someone else, sometimes my age, sometimes someone I know, dead, shot up, gone, naturalized by a trigger. And all I can think about is the frame of social death. The intelligent part of me wants to align with Wilderson and end the argument there. To remain in the hold of the ship. But Rev Jones, Nelson, Joyce, Moten, Saidiya, all those black women writing letters to the future, they demand something of me. You demand something of me. 

Hope. 

The music of the idea holds a treble within the cello, but I don’t always have my headphones. I hear it when you say, I think you’re beautiful and it doesn’t matter what anyone else says. The symphony bellows when you say I have friends who are trans. The concerto rushes along when you say yadi yada. Yadi yada!? As in, you get the point. As in, I'm getting to where I am going and I am not slowing down for you. Or for me? 

Ya 

Di 

Ya 

Da 

Over the edge, blinking.