Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Black
and Blur
FRED MOTEN
The Blur
and Breathe Books
40.
I have been studying how I may compare
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms
“The Blur and Breathe Books.” This is a play on Wittgenstein’s The Blue and
Brown Books, notes composed in Cambridge in the early 1930s that are con-
sidered preliminary to his Philosophical Investigations, a text left unfinished
and, therefore, eternally preliminary, at his death and even after its publica-
tion. Nathaniel Mackey would call it “premature and postexpectant.” The text
remains incomplete as a function of a ceaseless worrying, an endless rub, a
troubling pregnancy, an obsessive overpolishing that eventually blurs always
and everywhere with undoing. Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking
and writing about contemporary art and the phenomenon of blur that some-
times happens both in and between artworks. You could think about it as a
kind partition in refusal of partition; a general assertion of inseparability,
which nevertheless still moves in and as a ubiquitous and continual differ-
entiation; a breaking or cutting or scoring, if you will. Here, now, in this/
that blur, I’m especially interested in the visual artist/composer/pedagogue
Charles Gaines. In the last few years, in Los Angeles, the city where he lives
and works, as well as in other cities throughout the country and the world,
Gaines’s art and m
usic have been displayed and performed in an expanding
duo of exhibitions: In the Shadow of Numbers featured a selection of works
created by Gaines since 1975, focusing in particular on the audiovisualization
of number in his work; Gridworks re-presents work deploying grids, math-
ematical operations and multiple layering that had been completed between
1975 and 1989; that show, in turn, spread out in two directions—Manifestos
2, in which a nine-piece ensemble played a musical score by Gaines based on
a translation of four political manifestos (which scrolled one-by-one behind
the ensemble) in which musical notes and silences w ere assigned to the let-
ters making up those texts; and Librettos, which I want to discuss h ere, a
work involving the superimposition of excerpts from the score of Manuel de
Falla’s opera La Vida Breve over the text of another famous political mani-
246 / chapter 23
festo, a speech delivered on April 19, 1967, at Garfield High School in Seattle,
Washington, by pan-Africanist political activist and theorist Stokely Carmi-
chael. I w
ill try to focus on a certain resistance to focus in Librettos and to
move from there to some suggestions regarding aesthetic indiscretion and
the critique of sovereignty, questions with which Gaines has long been en-
gaged as a theorist, critic, curator, and even a dramaturg of sorts. All of t hese
roles and their implications are operative in Gaines’s The Theater of Refusal:
Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, a now practically mythic exhibition he
arranged at the University of California, Irvine, in 1993, and in the extraor-
dinary essay he wrote for the exhibition catalog. In order to try to talk about
Librettos I’ll have to try to talk about these as well.
41.
At the time of his speech, Carmichael is in the full flowering of his emer-
gence both in and from the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinat-
ing Committee (sncc), a group of young activists crucial to the vast range
of dispersed, differentiated insurgencies somewhat misleadingly known as
the Civil Rights movement. In his speech, Carmichael brilliantly elaborates
a theory of black power that held its own rich and complex critique, rather
than denunciation or disavowal, of violence. Meanwhile, Falla, whose opera,
first performed in 1913, tells the sad tale of a poor young Roma woman, Salud,
whose passion for the well-to-do Paco is unackowledgeable and, therefore,
cannot properly be requited. Just as Paco is about to marry another woman
of his own social class, Salud interrupts the wedding in order to die at the feet
of, and thereby express her otherwise inexpressible ardor and contempt for,
the one who can neither deny nor accept her. What connects Carmichael and
Falla? And what connects Gaines’s staging of their interplay to the history of
his concern with letter, note, number, grid, layer? I want to suggest that at
issue are some fundamental questions of political ontotheology. In these sup-
posedly separate shows and in the purportedly individual works that make
them up, there is a space between the layers, a palimpsestic interval one is al-
ways trying to inhabit, a lateral fascination through which attention passes,
as the appositional sending of (an) air, an exploratory envoy of breathing.
You send air, or you are sent as air through the individual “panel” or blurred
unit while being sent through the three-dimensional blurred air of the space
itself, the gallery operating normally as a devotional gathering of pilgrims
circling inside a square, held periodically by stations that in this case take the
248 / chapter 23
discomposition. Neither Falla nor Carmichael can get you t here. Both Falla
and Carmichael can’t get you there, either. Doubling opens out, rather, onto
certain questions, perhaps even past Gaines’s own intentions, which are to
reveal and also to insist upon a certain proliferation of relations—as if the
viewer is activated in relation to the relation that he sees, or makes. This
is to align Gaines with what Édouard Glissant calls the poetics of relation,
which uncomfortably is prefigured by Martin Heidegger as a problematic
of techné, whether understood as blooming forth in itself or bringing forth
from another. And the questions that emerge from this alignment have to do
precisely with the politics and aesthetics of the self-in-relation.
In the Garfield High speech, Carmichael says,
250 / chapter 23
tality, is best understood, as in Jean-Paul Sartre’s late work, as bad faith. Let’s
say, moreover, that technically, bad faith is an ongoing commitment to the
continuance of brutality that continually bodies forth—in juridical force, in
ethical power, in the hard operations that are bound to and by the limits of
self, other, and world—a more general and more fundamental disavowal of
waiting which is, seemingly paradoxically, in the interest of constant and ob-
sessively absorptive and expansive self-reflection. Often, the relay between
the production and the reception of art has been understood and arranged as
a theater of such self-reflection, a zone in which what is called consciousness
and what supposedly is felt as bad conscience alchemically produce the tran-
scendence and exaltation that the West imagines as exclusionary common-
wealth. In this regard, the necessarily partial democratization of sovereignty
is, as it were, extracted from art up until the point at which art, no longer
concerned with what it feels like to be me, in relation, in the world, unsettles
and affirms its space in the in the abolition of self-awareness and the radical
disruption of self-reflection.
Gaines folds t hese questions and the imperative they announce into a kind
of showing. In the listening walk, Carmichael’s words in your head are halted by
the musical notation that hides them from your eyes: you have to read, and so
you have to look, so that you can listen, so that you can walk (away), bound to
perform in an extra cagey, extraCagean sense of the term. Duration is given
in the performance. The time’s not set. The relation between depth and sur-
face is reset. T here’s an unworked thickness, a palimpsestic airing that oc-
curs intermittently, as an ensemble of directives. The space between paper
and acrylic is all but traversable. We are barred from it but because of it we
are freed from the bar lines or, more precisely, from what bar lines ordinarily
signify. This designification is part of Gaines’s design. Sign has become mark,
in gridblur, which we sight read and perform in a listening walk.
42.
In his speech, Carmichael could be said to spin out a story of love—not
quite unrequited but certainly betrayed. The desire to be American marks
a failed romance. Does Paco arrive at self-condemnation? Salud achieves
self-determination in death which will have turned out to be the only way
to achieve it at the moment when someone re-traverses that event horizon.
But h ere, on this side of that bourn, self-determination’s terminal condi-
tion is saturation in brutally and violently bad faith. Eric Garner, or Michael
252 / chapter 23
precisely by what they cannot still. Then movement is shadow, iteration and
seriality in entanglement. Gridwork is indiscrete. Color + Number = Blend.
Blur. Breathe. In flight from core expression, things get impressionistic
and fugal. The way math and blackness, or aesthetic topology, works in
Gaines is this: Shadowed number is a bridge from discretion to slur. Slur
rhymes with blur so Libretto, whose indiscretions we perform in walking, is
something I’ve come to think of as Wittgenstein’s seriality blues, his working
out of that haunting that occurs when fascination accompanies expression
and you can’t do anything about it. What if philosophy doesn’t fight against
that blur but, rather, in and with it?
43.
Haunting, which we can also think of as a kind of doubling, as a complex
bearing that might turn out to be disruptive of personhood in general, as a
kind of blur, is taken up in a 2008 collaboration between Gaines and Korean
artist Hoyun Son called Black Ghost Blues Redux, which is part of the first
exhibition I mentioned, In the Shadow of Numbers. There, in and as and
through the work, Son listens, moving and singing in response to bluesman
Lightning Hopkins’s call and, in and after the fact of her singing, underneath
and off screen, Gaines’s response to her response.5 Solvent and solute are
indeterminate in this serialized, surrealized doubling, a fade to black-and-
blue blur in a complex of breathing, of cinematic narration’s fundament as a
kind of layering in aeration, a revelation of charged, changed dimensionality
in the dissolve of a t hing neither into another nor itself but into what sur-
rounds. There’s a social impurity on the move in the relay between internal
spatiotemporal differentiation and interracial, audiovisual mix. Acoustic
mirroring, here, is an internal as well as external operation, where surge and
surgery are interinanimate as a kind of pulse and texture on the screen, an
enlivening of it enacted in what feels like a leaving of it. And that’s the point:
the feeling, not the leaving, so that the leaving is in the feeling—that what’s
onscreen leaves the screen because it feels like something, blur become rub
in an epidermal effect akin to what critic Laura Marks discusses in her The
Skin of the Film as “haptic visuality.”6 Such visuality is especially prominent,
Marks argues, in intercultural cinema’s attention to and embeddedness in
the ongoing disaster of coloniality; certainly the pairing of Son and Light-
ning Hopkins redoubled in the pairing of Son and Gaines, occurs against
the backdrop of a history of Black/Korean tension in the overlapped field of
254 / chapter 23
exaltation’s periodic vestibular negation of field and feel. The solution is the
self ’s dissolution, its lapsed, lax, dispersed concentration which reveals, if we
can figure out how to pay attention, the anatechnological priority of the dis-
solve, where the solute won’t disappear and solvent can’t put itself on solid,
self-possessed footing. At stake is the generality of fundamental, anoriginal
dispossession. Can we be eased with having, or as Richard of Bordeaux says
more urgently and drastically, with being nothing? Can we relinquish the
task of recovering the sovereignty we never had, of repaying the debt we
never promised? Can we refuse to restate that romance? In seeking to affirm
the richly affirmative possibilities that are held in t hese negations, I’ll con-
tinue to turn to Gaines, hopefully not too much against Gaines’s grain, for
what is held in the rich insolvency of his poetics of negative space.
I have in mind a videoepigraph that would betray the fact that I’ve been
trying to get at a certain doubling that occurs between Carmichael and Rich-
ard. The dissolve, as it is manifest in Black Ghost Blues Redux, as it is pro-
duced cinematically in David Giles’s bbc television version of Richard II, as
it is given anacinematically in Libretto, gets me to this matter of absolution
as and in consent to be touched, to be given in hauntedness, which is insepa-
rable from handedness, the maternal flow(n) or fluid or flood, a radical and
general amniosis held, as it were, in the airy thickness of Gaines’s objects.
What if what we call relation is another (both erotic and libidinal as opposed
to self-determinative and self-condemnatory) kind of saturation, so that the
term negative space actually slanders the pailmpsestic reservoir between the
layers of Gaines’s three-dimensional sheet m usic? What if we call it affirma
tive space, a holding in and against the hold, a for(e)given(n)ess: absolution
in amniosis? What if what is given in this renaming, this affirmative unnam-
ing, is to see or hear or read or perform the score in or through absolution? A
blurred, blue immersion of rubbing, of rubbed string, what Lightning plays.
A transoceanic feeling of/in passage, our impassivity, our passing through.
This turbulence, this antagonism, absolution’s absolute dissonance, is given
in and as a critique of relation. That’s what dissonance is: the note that must
be followed by another in itself in and to and as a kind of radical insolvency.
Can insolvency, here, mean both that which is in debt and that which also
resists the solvent, resists that interplay of solvency and sovereignty? (This
is not just what it is not to be indebted but also what it is to resist the power
that dissolves, that imposes assimilation, which is, therefore, that which
solves, that which determines, that which renders and organizes relational-
ity in accord with a normativity that it legislates, that which sets the terms of
44.
Can marginality be depoliticized? This question not only follows from the
ones above but also proceeds from the assumption that politics, insofar as
it is predicated upon the exclusion and regulation of difference, will have
always been the scene of our degradation and never the scene of our redemp-
tion, redress, or repair. To ask the question concerning the depoliticization of
marginality is to consider that marginality’s radically improper place is the
social. How can we see marginality as and for the social? This is a question
concerning the limit. The one who sets the limit—whose self-image is that
of the limit, the standard, the bound figured as the capacity to bind—is said
to be the one who exercises the power to marginalize; and while sharp and
plentiful focus on the usually deadly modes in which that capacity is exer-
cised remains crucial and inescapable, perhaps it is even more important
256 / chapter 23
to pay attention to how and why it is that the marginal marginalizes itself.
What follows from such double vision is a double task—the proposal of an
alternative to marginalization and an alternative mode of marginalization.
Both the vision and the task are undertaken with rigorous and prescient bril-
liance in Gaines’s “The Theater of Refusal” and in Gaines’s The Theater of
Refusal.
What if the theater of refusal w
ere ours, for us, whoever and whatever we
are? How might this manifest itself as a profound and illimitable communi-
cability, as opposed to immunity or prophylaxis? And would it move by way
of a transgression or eradication of limit or as a kind of proliferation of the
limit in and through and in the interest of the surround. Certainly it would
go against the flow of what is called the mainstream and its violent relation-
ality. It would be an antiflow or overflow, an undertow or River Antes, that
troubles every commitment to the self-as-subject and to the belief that the
“the presence of the subject is essential for the implementation of political
power” since we might have to open ourselves to the possibility that political
power is not at all what we need.7 These questions are explicit but—deeper
still and better yet—implicit in Gaines’s essay and in his curacy, in his gather-
ing activity of scholarly and artistic care. In our inhabitation and recitation
of those questions we are constrained to imagine, having already enacted,
a theater of refusal2, a theater of refuse, a theater of refuse, a theater of the
refused, a theater of the refusal of what has been refused, a theater of the left
over, a theater of the left b
ehind, a theater of the left, a theater of the (out
and) gone.
Gaines violently calls for “a new framework that does not condemn mar-
ginality to complicity with power” as gently as if he were calling for nothing at
all.8 He demands and allows us to see the futurial ghost of a marginality in the
absence of a mainstream—an antebinary ubiquity of the margin/al which, in
being everywhere is nowhere reconceived as general, nonlocal, nonsubjective
presence—an immanent aesthetic. When Derrida dreams, in his own gesture
at a/voiding the dialectic, of a structure, or a practice of structuring, without
a center, perhaps what he sees are certain magical trees, grid worked in and
out of itself in a range of anumerical shade, a shading of centric expressivity
that does not reverse the dialectic but evacuates it. At stake is a refusal of
being given in a generalization of refuge. At the same time, givenness, in its
essential difference from itself, in a generative strike against what Wallace
Stevens called “the central mind,” is where disbursal and dispersal converge
on and as a proliferation of verge, edge, tra(ns)versal. T
here is an affirmation
We must also remember dualism’s parent, who is at once both real and
imagined: (in/divi)dualism. In What Kinship Is—and Is Not, Marshall Sah-
lins, echoing Roger Bastide’s echo of Maurice Leenhardt, speaks of the “di-
vidual person,” who is divisble and indistinct, who in refusing the imposition
of the body and its limits refuses the city (polis) and its limits as well.
258 / chapter 23
as are others in oneself.” Emphasizing these transcendent dimensions of
the individual, he noted that “the plurality of the constituent elements of
the person” moved him to “participate in other realities.”10
Perhaps what it is to refuse the limits of the body is to refuse the limit as
regulation in and for possessive individuation and to embrace the prolifera-
tion of limits’ irregular devotion to difference and blur. But this formulation
must bear the fact that even in Bastide the dividual person is given as person,
as an axiomatic subjectivity whose presence animates whatever intersubjec-
tivity or relationality one wants to proffer. What if there are realities other
than that? Facilitation of alterities’ flights from binarism’s origin in the one
requires that an antebinary marginality disrupt any and e very (meta)physics
of separation. And how we might separate from separation is not a problem
for the subject. Indeed, Bastide obscures the insight that Leenhardt elicits.
The blur of spirit admits of no personhood, just as art is a constant viola-
tion of the artist, the viewer and the work that is the mobile location of their
entangled differentiation. At stake is an obliteration of the very idea of the
product, the ergon, as Kant imagines it, which then disturbs any sense of its
relation either to the underlying idea or an external material reality. Don’t
play the background, Ornette Coleman says, play the m usic. The nonrepresen
tational capacities that, John Searle argues, allow representation to take place
turn out not to allow representation to take place after all. Representation
does not take place; there is no place for representation or, representation’s
only possible place is in the general dispersal and openness that we call the
nonrepresentational. In this affirmative space, in the break, in the blur, in the
not-in-between that surrounds the surfaces that surround it, there is an inter-
minable piercing, an unending passing through whose uncountable pleasures
are inseparable from eternal m iddle passage, eternal middle passion.
It’s like that time when art + practice appeared and converged on the
verge of a set of open books Gaines borrowed, giving eccentric structure to
a whole other library.11 Nobody had to enter the space between the back and
the front surfaces of plexiglass b ecause movement in the communicable
recess these antebodies made was general, taking the form of a listening
walk. And we just w eren’t even thinking about what the so-called critics
were saying. The theater of refusal had become our refuge; the margin without
a mainstream is like a river with an active memory. See, part of the trouble
is that when we think the margin we think it in opposition to the main-
stream, to the river, as it were, when really they are both in opposition to the
260 / chapter 23
ing it immune to history and by immunizing history against it.”14 In having
given us a place to start thinking, Gaines also gives us a place where we can
shift and refresh that thinking and its orbit. He shows us that the marginal is
misunderstood to be in opposition to the mainstream rather than to the (in/
divi)dualized limit; that it is in opposition to a degraded practice rather than
to an identity; that it is our task to make an alternative practice, not form an
alternative identity. In this regard, marginality is the activity of marginaliza-
tion which is the river’s remembering, its transgressive flood, its jurisgenera-
tive principle. The theater of refusal2 is where we refuse the limit by way of
its inseparable differentiation. This is what Gaines is getting at in his critique
of the dialectic. Moreover, the work to which he submits himself as artist,
in the interest of an unworking, of a general and generative strike, gets at
that critique more emphatically and viciously even than certain Derridean
or Deleuzo-Guattarian appeals that reify the dialectic of (indivi)duation and
relation. Marginalization is radical nonlocality, a double blade rather than
a double-edged double bind, that incisively renders provisional even black
personhood and the black work of art, insofar as if they are at all, they work
a general undoing not only of themselves and their o thers but also the very
idea of others and selves.
45.
I’m sorry if this is all a blur. I’m so used to my own astigmatism that maybe I
can’t even talk to anybody anymore. To make m atters worse, I’ve never been
able to keep my glasses clean. For the last forty-five years it’s all been a blur
and the dirty lenses Gaines provides in Librettos redouble the wounded,
blessed assurance of my unsure, double vision. I think I’m seeing what I
think I’m seeing, which makes me wonder if I’m seeing what I think. Hope-
fully, it’ll all be all good, in a minute, when I can stop talking to you and
start talking with you. Maybe we can go on a w hole other listening walk. But
let me see if I can finish this one, by way of one last detour to which we might
eternally return. I spoke, earlier, in echo yet again of Samuel R. Delany,
of “libidinal saturation,” which now we might be able to think of as what
happens on the bridge of lost and found desire that stretches between see-
ing things and seeing absolute nothingness, where relation fades in fog and
granite, or paper and plexiglass. Between seeing things and seeing nothing,
sometimes, when I close my eyes, I think that when I open them I’ll see José.
The first time I saw him was in the old, unremodeled sixth floor of the Tisch
It was lit only in blue, the distant bulbs appearing to have red centers.
In the gym-sized room were sixteen rows of beds, four to a rank, or
sixty-four altogether. I couldn’t see any of the beds themselves, though,
ecause there were three times that many people (maybe a hundred
b
twenty-five) in the room. Perhaps a dozen of them were standing. The
rest were an undulating mass of naked male bodies, spread wall to wall.
My first response was a kind of heart-thudding astonishment, very
close to fear.
I have written of a space at a certain libidinal saturation before.
That was not what frightened me. It was rather that the saturation
was not only kinesthetic but visible. You could see what was going on
throughout the dorm.
The only time I’d come close to feeling the fear before was once, one
night, when I had been approaching the trucks, and a sudden group
of policemen, up half a block, had marched across the street blowing
their whistles.
It had been some kind of raid. What frightened was, oddly, not the
raid itself, but rather the sheer number of men who suddenly began to
appear, most of them running, here and there from between the vans.
That night at the docks policeman arrested maybe eight or nine men.
The number, however, who fled across the street to be absorbed into the
city was ninety, a hundred and fifty, perhaps as many as two hundred.
Let me see if I can explain.15
Let me see if I can explain—by deviating, in a way that Delany allows and
makes possible, from Delany’s explanation. It seems that fear is approached
in or as a kind of blur, when the grid, or more generally, the countable is
absorbed en masse, into mass, as kinesthetic visibility is felt in movement
toward the synaesthetic. In Delany’s explanation, h e’ll activate a psychoso-
cial lens so that he can show and tell us what and how he sees on that night
of calculated drifting, when he left his then-wife Marilyn Hacker and their
friend Sue alone to read Henry James aloud to one another while he went
out to see what he could see. The first time I read, and then tried to write
about, this passage it was by way of an early, much-condensed edition of
Delany’s autobiography.16 Now that we have access to a more complete ver-
262 / chapter 23
sion I know that what he sees, and lets us see, can only be seen through
Hacker’s poem “Prism and Lens,” and what it seeks to see and record of an-
other night of blurred vision, of focus shifted and then failed. The relevant
passages from around one hundred fifty pages earlier in The Motion of Light
in Water are separated by section IV and an excerpt from section V of Hack-
er’s extraordinary poem:
7.981 My affair brought my own writing to a halt (for a week) and pro-
duced a sudden creative spurt in Marilyn’s: most of the fragments be-
came her poem “Prism and Lens.”17
264 / chapter 23
where deeds too warped for human sight
were perpetrated in the dark,
The glance we might have taken at Richard II might make you think my
lingering with Delany’s and Hacker’s difficult, wander-struck relationship,
is meant, in part, to amplify the separation of king and queen that Shake-
speare suggests to be a function of Richard’s fascination with, to use Hacker’s
phrase, “boys who are not boys” and to blame that fascination and the failure
of his sovereignty on one another. Most productions play Richard’s homoso-
cial waywardness—which Richard himself describes as a kind of unkept time,
time out of joint or step or off the track—for all they think it’s worth. But in
the case of Delany and Hacker it’s not all about male spatiotemporal errancy,
since Hacker also (a)voids domestic fixity in order to see what she can see.
This, too, is a m
atter of refusal and its inveterate theatricality, the generality
and generativity and xenogenerosity of the not-in-between. In The American
Shore, with regard to Thomas Disch’s “Angouleme,” somewhere in the unex-
cludable middle of a long journey through what is, for and with its remains, as
its remainder, in search and practice of the alternative, Delany attends to the
necessary and all but essentially urban haze of text’s refusal and diffusion,
which is manifest as re-reading, which turns out to be reading’s condition
of possibility: re-reading as refusal, as the text’s generative and anticipatory
discomposition, as the degenerative recomposition of readerly anticipation,
as the speculative, disruptive irruption of what is, as is is anoriginally dis-
placed by as, always as if for the first time in blurred glance, in the erotic,
palimpsestic volume of reflection in the hold, in turning on and away in
turning to, endlessly and without return, adrift.20 This deconstruction and
reconstruction, this dismantling and refashioning, this rereading that in-
sofar as it is as if for the first time staves off the inevitable reproduction
of the first time, of a priority that remains sovereign and irreducible when
refusal remains unrefused is dispersed, like desire in and for the city. Like
Richard of Bordeaux but even more orchestral, Charles of Charleston has
come to tell us that Carmichael’s and Falla’s, Delany’s and Hacker’s, books
are blurred, refused, before we even get there. The question is what can we
make of this wondrous, ruptural, mutually interruptive complementarity,
the miraculous divergence and nonrelation of shared attention in the gal-
lery of New York, or the galleries of Los Angeles, policed but unenclosed?
How do we taste and sound the affirmative space, the air, the breathing of
our blurred books?
266 / chapter 23
46.
This is another question for José Esteban Muñoz. I’ll ask him when I see him.
For now, I can only consult a short unpublished talk he delivered in 2006 enti-
tled “Phenomenological Flights: From Latino Over T here and Cubania’s H ere
and Now.” A fter briefly establishing Miami itself, and more particularly its
complex and unencompassable Cuban lifeworld, as a text just made for eidetic
reduction, where such reduction is, really, and most faithfully, a voluntary sub-
mission of the phenomenologist to Miami’s rhythms—those uncountable syn-
copations that proper, normative, self-delusionally sovereign, metronomically
and scientistically pseudo-philosophical subjectivity overhears as untimely—
Jose begins to describe the intervallic estrangement that structures the native’s
return to his non-native land.
I feel home but not home as I prepare to meet my little brother, who
is much physically bigger than I. He is already late to pick me up. I
prepare to enter the temporality of the Cuban, a belatedness that my
friends in New York and elsewhere associate with me, but I nonethe-
less resent in my kin. I stand in the Cuban diaspora concrete median
and commence my wait. I try him on the cell phone, to no effect. I look
around me and I notice some of my fellow travelers, lost members of
the tribe who have traveled North or West, or just somewhere that is
not here, not the here and now of Miami, the world of Miami. Some
are students, some artists, some wayward queers who w ill divide their
time between South Beach and their parents’ home in suburbs like
Kendall. We recognize each other as we recognize the fact that t hose
of us from not here are now here but never here—never in the natural-
ized time and place of a certain cubanía, an everydayness of cubanía.21
I feel home but not home as I wait for my (big) brother, who is much physi-
cally smaller than I. He’s late and so I prepare to enter the temporality of
the Cuban. In this passage, moving in that line of post-Husserlian phenom-
enological deviance that stretches from Heidegger to Levinas and Sartre, to
Fanon, Derrida and Tran Duc Thao, to Ahmed and Salomon, José teaches us
how to solicit the everyday and, therefore, to prepare.
Some of us once heard José’s mother say that he had some place to get to.
But that transport, he tells us h ere, is aleatory. Having some place to get to
means that the arrivant never r eally arrives. It is, rather, a queer kind of loi-
tering, a kind of cruising, a kind of calculated drifting in and lingering with
perception, the way you get to know a city by its rivers, Hacker says, from
river to river, echoing Langston Hughes’s deferred, montagic dreaming—a
looking walk; a listening walk. That’s what José’s after and he knows, already,
that even normative phenomenology c an’t quite give up its own desire for
punctuality. At stake here is a queer phenomenology of perception, a late phe-
nomenology of the feel, one slow enough to be able clearly to see the misty air,
the mystery, to sense the blur, and not some normative individuation, as the
field from which differences spring.
We consult the blur and breathe books in order more accurately, more rig-
orously to imagine the surreal and differential inseparability of motion, light,
and water. To engage in such study is to effect perception’s perpetual deferral
of apperception, ordering, assimilation, which often takes the form of cata
log or partition. Such study, José says, is “how we engage the world during
our lateness.” That’s what it is to be already late, belatedly early, premature
and postexpectant as Nathaniel Mackey is always just about to say again.
Never quite either here nor now, either I nor thou, disruptive of relation and
its political, metaphysical ground that shifts—in spite of itself, as if a func-
tion of a mechanics which it can hate but can’t control—between condemna-
tion and determination, our imperative is to keep on describing, and thereby
to engage in, the continual unmaking of the world as the earth comes con-
268 / chapter 23
tinually into view. The sovereign turns his cell into the world though the very
condition that is supposed to allow that, solitude, is the undoing of what
that condition is supposed to provide. He c an’t wait, wants time ordered and
absolutely regular, sovereignty trapped in a deictic prison of its own devising.
In describing, in praise, we wait, and serve, knowing also that to describe, as
José says, is also, somehow, even to disrupt the seamless flow of description.
Is that what phenomenology does or is that what performance is? Is that
poetry, or sociology, or physics? The continual fold of unfolding’s refusal to
enfold. José says,