Days of Race | Nicholas Mirzoeff
It is an honor to be invited to speak at this conference centered on the work of Carl Pope, my friend and former colleague. I want to begin by recognizing the insight of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities in organizing this event and making Carl Pope’s work its focus. This decision has been proved prescient and timely by the events of the past month or so. We are living through days of race. The confluence of overseas war, a recession that has finally been named by the media, immigration panics and an African American candidate with a realistic chance of winning a Presidential nomination has produced a state of emergency in the aesthetics of separation that are the foundation of American race and racism. For if race is certainly foundational in the United States, it is in a permanent state of renewal. Often that is simply a repetition of established patters of separation. On occasion, those moments of repetition occur with a difference and it is subject to question whether that difference will be absorbed and accommodated or whether it makes a difference and leads to change. Often we find ourselves surprised at the resilience of aesthetics formed over centuries to resist, return and reshape themselves as if nothing had happened. If there were instead to be a reconstruction it would have to begin with democracy. Here we’re not talking about hanging chads, the dates of primaries, super delegates or the electoral college, although all those questions need answers. The democracy we’re talking about is the question of whether there is a part for the people in the ordering of things.
Here’s where the artists come in. In ancient Greece, Plato considered the artist a threat to the specificity of status in which each person should fulfill their part and nothing else. Ironically, the modern painters have similarly wanted to protect the idea of the artist from being open to everyone. The Mind of Cleveland refuses to know its place. It intervenes in the art gallery, the street and the university alike. It refuses to see a distinction between ‘the’ artist and the citizen. Carl Pope knows very well that the rhetorics of empowerment are actually injunctions to stay in your place. Imagining a different place is a work that requires certain people to specialize in not knowing their place, and imagining another place. That person we might call the artist, as long as we remember that this is just the name for the person who is not where they should be according to the order of estates. In the daze of the exploding art market over the past few years, the artist has become the accessory of the aristocrats of finance capital. The New York Times last week hailed Miucca Prada, the shoe designer, as the great hope for art. That kind of conspicuous consumption commodity art is nothing to do with the work we are discussing here. Sarat Maharaj has called our kind of artist a “knowledge producer.” Pope’s work does not seek to produce a commodity form that is valued for its materials or craft but rather produces knowledge. As this example of his letterpress work suggests, that knowledge is neither simple nor easy to digest, as is the case with all important research. Telling us what we already know is not Pope’s mission.
At the same time, by using the letterpress format, Pope recalls at once the silk-screened posters of Andy Warhol; and the nineteenth century posters that were so often used to advertise so-called runaway slaves. What makes Pope’s work so significant is this interface between the knowing rejection of artfulness by the contemporary post-Warhol avant-garde on the one hand; and the literally and metaphorically critical interface of race and sexuality that Pope’s appropriation of the poster format implies. As Douglas Crimp has put it, we get the Warhol we deserve—in which case we’re really in trouble. At the moment that means an artist whose least production sells for absurd amounts--$23 million for this Liz Taylor in 2007. But it also means a signifier for the frontier of the contemporary. BW or before Warhol was the modern, a now opaque era, dimly understood or addressed. AW, after Warhol is the Now, the eternal present of the digital. Carl Pope tells us that the past is not over. Moreover, he tells us that we don’t know how to find our way around whatever present it is that we now inhabit. It is, after all, becoming clearer that the famous bridge to the twenty-first century has led us into the abyss. We need help.
Consequently, in his recent work, Pope has become what he calls a curator for other people’s creativity. This is the artist as democrat, as someone who accepts that the title of artist implies a form of creative equality not aristocracy. While Pope has done some direct curatorial work, such as his important exhibition at Stony Brook University entitled Queer Visualities, the “Mind of Cleveland” project has taken the endeavor to an entirely different level. Pope is now democracy’s analyst, meaning that he enables a speech that is democratic. By naming his project the Mind of Cleveland, Pope addresses a psycho-geography that has until now been held to be irrelevant, expressible only in the non-choice of ritualized selection between party officials, held with all the solemnity of the Albanian Central Committee elections. If Cleveland has a mind, and these posters show that it certainly does, then it also experiences repression, has desires, has a collective unconscious. The thoughts generated in this first session of analysis should not be judged as if they were a commercial product produced by copywriters. Rather they express a desire for a democracy, an abolition democracy for our time.
In the United States, democracy has been the quintessential problem of everyday life, practical politics and cultural expression since the Civil War. It cannot be distinguished from the cluster of attributes, prejudices and stereotypes that are collectively known as ‘race.’ As the activist-scholar WEB Du Bois pointed out in his magisterial 1935 opus Black Reconstruction: “The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States?” If all workers post-emancipation were to have the right to vote and to be educated, “what control could and should be set to the power and action of these laborers?”i In short, what if abolition was also an abolition to the Constitutional compromise that allowed for the rule of aristocracy (Bush, Clinton, Bush); for the preservation of property, including property in human beings; while also compromising with the desire for democracy. Recall that as late as 1857, the Supreme Court had infamously opined that the African American had no rights that the white person was bound to respect. End slavery and create a new class of rights holders, and a new democracy became possible.
Du Bois depicted the enslaved as having freed themselves by means of a mass general strike against slavery and then engaging thoroughly in the process of redefining democracy by the experiments of Reconstruction. The remarkable democratic accomplishments of Reconstruction are still insufficiently remembered, so that some of their goals seem wildly unrealistic even today. In South Carolina, the new State Constitution of 1868 provided for universal education from the age of six to sixteen, as well as opening schools for the disabled. By 1876, when Reconstruction came to an end, some 123,000 students were enrolled. The 1868 South Carolina convention was notable because “twenty-three of the whites and fifty-nine of the colored paid no taxes whatever.” Imagine that in today’s culture of millionaire representatives and billionaire mayors. Taken together with the homesteads offered to the emancipated, state-mandated wage labor rates and the right to vote, South Carolina enacted an abolition democracy. After the reversal of Reconstruction known in the South as Redemption, a revisionist history portrayed the enslaved as loyal to their owners and Reconstruction as at best a disaster and at worst a crime.i Columbia University professor John W. Burgess set the tone: “It was a great wrong to civilization to put the white race of the South under the domination of the Negro race...A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason; has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.” Think Gone With the Wind Civil War re-enactors and the Confederate flag at the South Carolina legislature. This is the genealogy within and against which Carl Pope is working: an articulation of the often unspoken codes by which a racialized divide creates the cityscape and indeed the landscape.
The aesthetics of separation relied on three strategies highlighted by Du Bois. First were the new Black Laws adopted across the South after the defeat of Reconstruction that criminalize many forms of behavior, ensuring a steady supply of convict labor. For instance, “vagrancy” came to be defined as ranging from theft to drunkenness, handling money carelessly and the catch-call categories of “idle and disorderly persons.” In Alabama, the prison population trebled from 1874 to 1877, nearly all African Americans. The inmates were then leased out to employers at token rates of pay, leading a British writer to comment in 1871 that “This does seem simply a return to another form of slavery.” Second was the rise of share-cropping as the predominant means of agricultural labor, preventing that majority of the emancipated who were agricultural laborers from establishing a stable economic basis on which to live. Third was what Du Bois called the “wage of whiteness.” He described how the poorer whites “were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks and the best schools.” The public sphere, so often lionized as the acme of democracy, was, then not only racialized but held up as the very wages of whiteness. Separation was the essence of the wages of whiteness, creating what Frantz Fanon called “aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo.” Aesthetics was being used in its original sense here, as that which is felt, not the specific sense of the beautiful. This aesthetics defines “what is visible or not in a common space endowed with a common language.” The aesthetic, philosopher Jacques Rancière tells us, is the a priori system of “determining what presents itself to sense experience.” That is to say, what are our senses trained to notice and what do we ignore out of learned habit. Move into a city from a quiet rural location and the noise will at first seem overwhelming until you stop noticing it. At a societal level, the separation of people was felt to be right and hence aesthetically pleasing. Changing this aesthetic requires a change in the division of the sensible, the way in which we order and arrange sense perception. There is a relationship between the visible and what can be said that is at stake here. The question is how and why certain histories become “visible,” and therefore “count” while others do not. By making certain words visible, the Mind of Cleveland project intervenes in the division of the sensible. It asks its audience in the broadest sense to think past the injunction that dominates government mentality: “Move on, there’s nothing to see here,” as said by the police at a traffic accident. Of course this is not the truth because there is certainly something to see, it’s only that we are not authorized to look at it. The Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang has satirized this effect in this work entitled “Move On, Nothing to see Here” placed on the roof of New York’s Metropolitan Museum. The sixteen foot fibre glass crocodile is pierced with 100s of implements confiscated by Chinese airport security—Cai wanted to use American ones but the Dept of Homeland Security refused for “reasons of national security.” Instead of accepting that there is nothing to see, the democratic response is to claim the right to look and to say what is seen.
Remember that democracy was originally a term of abuse, considered the worst form of government by ancient Greek philosophers. For example, Plato argued that the power to govern comes from title, such as that of parents over children, of the old over the young, and. yes, of masters over slaves. In general, says Plato, the superior nature should prevail over the inferior. Finally, there is what Plato called “the choice of god,” meaning the lottery that allocated places in Greek democracies. Democracy is thus the exceptional case because it is the very absence of title that gives title to power. Democracy has no part, it does not count. Whereas all the other titles are modes of domination, democracy is therefore “the institution of politics itself,” meaning both its structure and its beginning. As such it is detested by the oligarchy that rules in place of the people. The people can have anything except what they want. For the people are corrupt, they watch reality TV, play lotteries, drink, refuse personal saviors, use personal credit cards, have sex which they don’t pay for, watch pornography, eat, don’t exercise, don’t take their vitamins. In short, they have limitless desires but power works by creating limits and making divides. In the United States those divides are in considerable part created and made visible by race.
Since the end of slavery, race in the United States has worked as a pragmatic form of the indexical sign. Derived from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, the index is a sign that designates a really existing thing (in common sense terms) in the way that a bullet hole indicates the passing of a bullet. Race thus exists, even if it is not in itself present like the bullet, and visual signs make it visible. Racialized theory itself has been intensely ambivalent about the place of the skin or other physical features in determining race. Numerous accounts argue that these signs may be important but what matters is the internal quality of difference that may be as effectively concealed as revealed by the external appearance. Race has thus tended to be defined in ways that we can call pragmatic, referring at once to the work of American philosopher William James and the sense that race “works” or does work within American society. Pragmatism refused to allow technical or theoretical difficulties, such as an effective means of actually distinguishing humans into distinct races, stand in the way of the practical necessity of doing so. Thus current federal regulations allow for just five categories of racial identity plus “other.” In this sense, the act of racial distinction has created race, just as, in William James’ famous example, the act of crying produces the sensation of grief. The American name for the practice of racial distinction is segregation and the US dominated era of global capital that is now in crisis has absorbed and deployed US segregation as practical politics.
In this view, race is not a specific set of pretended biological characteristics but the result of the practice of a spatialized violence. That is to say, people, goods and ideas are rendered into separate spaces by force and as such become racialized, violently. Violence creates as well as destroys or more exactly creates by destroying. Carl Pope has known this for a long time. His 1993 Police Trophies took the generic awards that Americans give each other and shaped them into prizes for police brutality. The most recent case in New York was the shooting of Sean Bell at his bachelor party, hit with 50 bullets by undercover police, whose trial is ongoing. But today’s violence does not always find people waking up to the burning cross but to the sound of falling envelopes containing foreclosure notices, summonses, medical bills, credit card statements and eviction notices. Reports say that one home in ten in Cleveland is in foreclosure. The result of this economic violence can often be the same as that of physical violence: a form of relative and absolute separation that demarcates the cityscape as a divide in the built environment. By using a global politics of segregation, the current crisis has created a displacement effect in the cultural unconscious that is manifesting itself as images of racialized violence, especially that most American of symbols, the lynching. Here I want to offer a extension to the Mind of Cleveland analyzed by Pope, showing how the collective unconscious of American race generates visual symbols, just as the individual unconscious forces its desires into visualized dream imagery.
Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious was forced into a radical change of direction by the experience of the First World War. Soldiers were suffering from shell shock, a condition in which they were unable to escape a moment of trauma but relived it over and again. Often this moment was some small detail in the panorama of devastation that was trench warfare, one sight too many for the mind to take. Freud had to accept that the unconscious was not solely structured according to its desire to fulfill its wishes, as he had previously thought, otherwise there would be no reason for it to lock onto this moment of suffering. He came to see this condition as being produced by what he called the death drive, manifested in the compulsion to repeat and experience loss. Just as the Great War brought an end to the illusion of endless imperial progress that had seemed at hand in the first decade of the twentieth century, so has the current conflict brought the fallacies of our own moment of globalized imperial ventures glaringly into view. Let’s call it the Eliot Spitzer syndrome: a power whose true erotics is in domination and financial transactions that engenders a sense of mastery. Where there is a master, the old devil Hegel reminds us, there must be a slave.
The war in Iraq and across the Middle East is compelling a reiteration of race that operates in a new form to render the old sense of separation. Because this is literally traumatic, it is experienced as if it were the first time only with a certain sense of déjà vu that causes the symptom to be forgotten until it recurs. We have seen over the past eighteen months that a war that has become increasingly concerned with segregating its combatants has engendered a persistent recurrence of the symbols of lynching in the United States. In November 2006, Michael Richards, who achieved national celebrity as the character Kramer in the comedy Seinfeld was performing at a comedy club is Los Angeles. Encountering heckling from an African American member of the audience, he launched into a tirade in which he suggested that fifty years ago, the heckler would have been lynched. Richards would have been a young child fifty years ago and it seems that under the stress of the moment, he reverted to a childhood experience of overhearing adults discuss a lynching. When the spectator, rather mildly, observed that his remarks were uncalled for, Richards began to shout “look a n------,” as if parodying Frantz Fanon’s experience in France where a child cried out to its mother “look a negro.” Then came Jena, where a noose was strung in a tree as a warning to African American students at a high school who had dared to sit beneath what was known as the “white tree.” Activist organized a march in support of the Jena Six in September 2007. Following this nationally publicized event, there was a noose epidemic around the United States in Oct Nov 2007. Some fifty events were documented, of which at least ten took place in allegedly progressive New York, where the school system is now more segregated than it was before Brown in 1954. PS59 in the Bronx, for instance, has 71% African American students and 27% Hispanics.
It was in this context that, as those of you who are from the city know only too well, that a local white man was mugged by African American young people in Ludlow Cleveland on New Year’s Eve. It was a nasty unprovoked attack, no question. So were the responses. Dick Feagler editorialized to his fellow white people in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “So move. But do it like we all have—like the whole three-county area has—don’t call it racism. Call it reality.”i There were suggestions on the Plain Dealer’s website that a fence should be built around the East side. Numerous issues intermingle here. The first is the divide in Cleveland that in a sense structures the Mind of Cleveland, a divide between East and West that creates the lived experience of “race” as the real, the status quo. The figures generated by the National Priorities Project show how that divide has rendered the city strikingly worse off than the rest of the country in terms of poverty and unemployment. The divide within the city produced a starkly divided electoral pattern in the Democratic primary held on March 4. On February 19, Bill O’Reilly, the syndicated talk-show host, had spoken about creating a “lynching party” for Michelle Obama. Despite media assertions that Clinton represents the working-class, voting broke down almost exclusively on racialized lines in Cuyahoga County. That division produced and expressed by violence comes to be figured as reality in accordance with the long-standing pragmatics of race in America. Here’s Geraldine Ferraro in March 2008, after she decided that Obama is “lucky” to be black: “Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up.” Is that the reality? That people of color and their allies violently police speech? On the Golf Channel, in early January, commentator Kelly Tilghman was asked how other golfers might compete with Tiger Woods. She suggested they “lynch him in a back alley,” a remark that was fully understood by a South Carolina native with a degree from Duke. In the ensuing controversy Golfweek magazine decided to go with this cover on 1/19. One wonders how an editorial board came to a decision that this was a good choice to sell magazines to executives. Then you recall David Letterman’s quip that the Republican debates looked like a group of seniors waiting to tee off at a restricted, i.e. racist, golf course—and you get it. The editor who approved the cover was fired. Kelly Tilghman was not.
The idea of building a fence echoes the ancient practice of building walls to create ghettos, first practiced against the Jews of medieval Italy. It has also been revived to create new and complex racializations in the Middle East since 2001. The Israeli separation wall has created wholly enclosed segments of land on the West Bank, such as Qalqilya, where there is now only one way in and out of the built environment, which is cut off from the farmland that used to support it. Walls have been used to turn Gaza into a no-go zone, in the effort to create two kinds of Palestinians. The formerly detested Fatah has now become a presumed partner for peace and is taken to be spatially equivalent to the West Bank, while Hamas are kept in the zone of the untouchables, now equated to Gaza. Of course, while Hamas does have a dominant position, there are also Fatah and other political groupings in Gaza, just as the West Bank is by no means solely pro-Fatah. The result has been the spectacle of a national government fomenting a jail break. In Iraq, the so-called counterinsurgency has devoted similar efforts to separating civilians into the two categories of Sunni and Shia, forgetting the substantial secular middle class and long histories of cross cultural interaction. Baghdad has less violence than it did because it is now a city divided by walls, creating and separating the new racialized groups.
So too Iraq has become an incarcerated society, dominated by new mass incarcerations that have placed some 51,000 people in detention as of March 2008 from a population of some 20 million, bearing in mind that 4 million people are now either refugees or internally displaced. Ohio also has just over 50,000 people in prison from its population of 12 million people in the 2006 census. This figure exceeds the state department of corrections predictions made in 2006 by 4% that were then described as a “surge.” The state spends 69 cents on corrections for every $ spent on higher education for a total of 7% of the state budget, an amount that has doubled over the past 20 years. Ohio has one of the eight largest corrections systems with a 3.2% growth in the past five years alone, employing 12% of all state employees. Forty-seven per cent of prison inmates are African American, who comprise 12% of the state’s population. In reviewing Du Bois’s categories, it can be seen that the “wages of whiteness” have suffered a significant devaluation recently but still pay a certain dividend. Take Lyndie England, the symbol of Abu Ghraib. Coming to adulthood in West Virginia, England’s only option for employment above minimum wage was a $10 an hour job in a chicken rendering plant. The benefits included management-tolerated abuse of the chickens, ranging from violent methods of killing them to sexualized abuse of the animals. England’s boyfriend Charles Graner took her on holiday where he made videos of them having anal sex that he later screened for her family. No wonder Abu Ghraib seemed more of the same, and England never displayed any understanding of why what she had done was considered wrong. Graner worked as a corrections officer, like many military police in Abu Ghraib. The lend-lease convict schemes have been replaced by mass incarceration as a form of profit generating industry. In the last twenty years, the amount spent on state higher education nationwide has risen by a modest 21%, while corrections budgets have increased by 127%. Angela Y. Davis, activist and scholar, has called the resulting situation “the prison industrial complex,” playing off President Eisenhower’s famous description of the “military industrial complex.” The prison industrial complex is comprised first of the technologies and built environment required to sustain so large a prison population. With state and national governments being unable to keep pace, a substantial global corrections industry has emerged, also used in the detention of asylum seekers and refugees. There are 180,000 so-called contractors in Iraq now. Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia are now visited behind a double barricade patrolled by Wackenhut, a private corrections corporation. Prisoners serve as subjects for medical testing, as call center operators and as minimal cost labor. In Davis’s view, it is necessary to call for the abolition of prison. By this she intends to challenge us to rethink a one size fits all solution to the false dyad of crime and punishment and instead to adopt a networked solution to modern governance: “demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation, rather than retribution and vengeance.” This would be an abolition democracy for our times. Government ceaselessly strives to take decisions, thoughts and actions out of the public and into the private where it can be policed as they wish. Prisons, schools, hospitals, even now the armed forces are run by private corporations or, so we are told, they should be. The Mind of Cleveland is not so sure. It dares to expect better. To hope. To speak. And in so doing to reclaim the vacated space of the public. To the inevitable rejoinder what difference does this make, I would say this: authority relies in the last instance on what Michel de Montaigne called a “mystical foundation,” meaning that all the hereditary titles and lineages are in the end nothing more than mysticism. Democracy needs its foundation as well, a belief that it has a part and should be counted. The electoral turnout that has barely exceeded 50% of even those who have registered to vote shows that this foundation is not there. Rebuilding it takes time and permanent effort, one place at a time. It’s late. But not too late.