Polygraph / ()

Let Historys Records Reect

the Struggles from Below
Inside the Empire
A Roundtable with Dan Berger, Alexis Gumbs, Fred Moten,
Michael Hardt, and the Polygraph Collective
DAN BERGER: What I want to do is try to synthesize some
of the contributions to Te Hidden s, a history of radical-
ism that brings together a mix of professional scholars and
independent scholars writing about some of the many social
movements in the :,os. I want to join some of that work with
some other things that Ive been thinking about and working
on lately.
Part of the impetus for that book and for a lot of my work is
trying to think about both the oos and ,os as what historians
call the Long oos, but also to think about the :,os as a dis-
crete time period in its own right. I think its useful to do that,
as well get into, but also to think about the ways that were not
just learning lessons from the ,os, but the many ways that we
can be said to be living with the :,os. In some ways were still
dealing with these diferent dimensions of politics and culture
and socialities that started in the ,os, but were also having
something of a :,os redux, or reprieve of the :,os. I think
many of the crises that are structuring our world todaycrises
of the economy, of the environment, of the military, and of
the states capacity to governhave their origins in the world
of the :,os. Tey may be more heightened, more extreme,
more postmodern, if you will, today, but a lot of these things
both have their roots in the :,os and really defne the :,os
themselves as an era.
I want to touch briefy on the last piece of that, the states
capacity to govern because I think there are many diferent
aspects of that crisis. Te two most salient are a sense of cyni-
cism, a sense of distance and dismissal of the formal apparatus
of the state, combined with a strong sense of repression. I think
these two things, the cynicism and the repression, go together,
are twin projects of government in the :,os and since the
1y Let Historys Records Refect the Struggles
:,os. I fnd them particularly crucial to mention today, in the era of mass incarcera-
tion, but also perhaps more recently with the round of FBI raids on activist houses,
subpoenas to the grand juries, most recently in the past week against a slew of antiwar
and other activists across the country, including in North Carolina. But in the past
several years weve seen similar FBI raids and subpoenas against activists from an
array of movements. If you look at the :,os, you fnd similar aspects of the start of
mass incarceration and widespread state repression through grand juries and other
means. Despite the prevailing sense of crisis being the dominant framework both of
this time period and of the :,os, the dominant way that people talk about the ,os,
both at the time, and, at least for historians, since, has been in the framework of limits.
I think this is a profoundly mistaken view. Tere are many reasons why people talk
about the ,os as limit; there are lots of diferent observers at the time, politicians at
the time, arguing for limits, the ,os as an age of limits. But I think the framework of
limits misses how radical the time period was, and not just on the lef, perhaps not
even in some ways most signifcantly on the lef.
Te ,os is the gestation and birth years of neoliberalism and various right-wing
reactionary attacks on limits, on the sense of accepted Western liberal democractic
standards of governance, of what the state does, of what peoples individual and col-
lective responsibilities are. Te fact the neoliberalism really emerged triumphant in
:8o and since really shows us the way that the :,os was all about attacking limits,
all about exploding limits.
Tat notion of exploding limits is also true for the lef in this time period as well,
and before I get into that, I just want to say how I got interested in the :,os and how I
came to look at the :,os. My perspective on this owes a great deal to the people who
frst helped me think about this. I did not live through any of the :,os (I was born
in :8:), but began to really think about the :,os, beginning as a teenager and as a
prison activist, in corresponding and building relationships with an array of prison-
ers, especially political prisoners in the US, people incarcerated as a result of their
organizing and activities in the :,os. Tis really opened up my eyes to think about
the diversity, the militancy, the contingency of that period, for which Im grateful.
Particularly tonight I want to talk very briefy about one of those people, a woman
named Marilyn Buck, who, folks may or may not know, was imprisoned in the :,os
for buying some bullets for the Black Panthers, got out of prison, went underground
again, was accused of participating in the liberation of Black Panther Assata Shakur
from prison in :,, and then spent :, years in prison. She was released at the end
of July [:o:o], and passed away from cancer at the beginning of August. In a letter to
me several years ago, Marilyn said, Let historys records refect the struggles from
below inside the Empire. I think that emphasis has driven a lot of my work, and re-
ally driven my desire to be part of recording that history of the many struggles from
below. But also, and Ill come back around to this a little bit later, because Marilyn
was a poet and a translator and a feminist anti-imperialist with a keen sense for
aesthetics, she led me to think about culture and aesthetics and geography and all
of these diferent kinds of things. So Id like to remember Marilyn and dedicate the
event, at least my part of the event, to her and her memory.
Te book itself is dedicated to Alan Berkman, who in the :8os was one of
1y) Dan Berger, Alexis Gumbs, Fred Moten, Michael Hardt, and Polygraph
Marilyns codefendants, but in the :,os was a doctor who treated the wounded at
Attica and the wounded at the Wounded Knee Incident in :,,, and continued afer
his time in prison to be an AIDS activist, ultimately starting HealthGap and continu-
ing a sort of antiracist anti-imperialism. Alan passed away just as I was fnishing the
book. Both Alan and Marilynthe many paths that they took and the many people
whom they worked withboth express a lot of the fervor of the :,os and expose
some of the ways that limits were under attack from the Lef, or the way the Lef was
pushing beyond limits as well.
Lef-wing challenges to limits in the :,os can be mapped along three axes. Te
book is divided this way: Insurgency, Solidarity, and Community. Tose arent hard
and fast distinctions, but rather diferent paths that people took, and combined, at
diferent points throughout the decadebut with the goal of really changing power.
For some of these people, seizing power was the more immediate step, but I think
what cuts across these insurgents, these solidarity activists, these community activists,
is a sense of changing the way that power functions, and really not just trying to apply
the state through established mechanisms for good, although there were many on the
lef who tried to do that, but really fundamentally altering the way that power itself
is practiced. I think scanning just a few of the hot spots (to be corny) of the :,os,
reveals some of the ways that this was in practice. Te :,os was the era, among other
things, of Attica, of Lordstown, of the Cockettes, and of the Clamshell Alliance. Tese
are striking prisoners who launch a multiracial revolt in the racially polarized world
of imprisonment, as the forefront of Black Power. Lordstown, [Ohio] a place where
workers autonomously rebelled in :,: against the boringness of factory work. Te
Cockettes, as a multiracial drag troupe in the early ,os, really emphasizing creativ-
ity and play and drag as part of political strategy. And the Clamshell Alliance, one
of many anti-nuclear direct-action consensus-based organizations in the late :,os.
Seen from any number of social movements, from the womens movement, from
the Puerto Rican independence movement, from the Native American movement,
from the pacifst movement, the :,os was an incredibly vibrant time, and vibrant
especially because it was pushing against the acceptable limits of dissent within
Western bourgeois democracies, for something new, for something diferent. Tis
book as far as I know is the only place that chronicles the revolutionary underground
among pacifsts. In the standard narrative of the :oos, the underground was for the
hardcore ultra-lef militants who wanted to wage armed assault against the state, but
actually there were whole other parallel underground worlds for feminists seeking
safe access to abortion, for a variety of pacifsts who believed that political struggle
always necessitated some form of organizing away from the eyes and ears of the state.
Tese were the people who broke into the FBI omce in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole
the fles that exposed COINTELPRO, the massive state assault against social move-
ments in the era. Committed pacifsts, never apprehended and acting underground.
Highlighting some of these more nuanced or interesting examples of the :,os
is not to minimize or overlook the many people who despite their sincerityor in
some cases, because of their sinceritynonetheless abandoned the revolutionary
project through fetishizing violence, through essentializing monolithic abstract iden-
tities, and through obsession with the primary contradiction as a mode of organizing,
1y8 Let Historys Records Refect the Struggles
through vanguardist aspirations and self-proclamations of vanguard leadership. Tis
is all the sort of Monty Python caricaturesque of the :,os. And its true, there are all
these examples that one could point to for a good time.
Te hidden :,osby which I mean historically, not just the bookwas a time
of implementation, a time when radicals had to sort of walk the talk, from the heady
days of the late oos, when all of these diferent experiments were being invokedthe
,os was a time when all of these things had to be put in practice. I think the most
successful examples of these were those who viewed the revolutionary project not
as an act of mimicry, of repeating something that happened somewhere else at some
other time, but as an act of creating a world that had never existed, and focused on
learning from history, but understanding that the world we wish to create is one that
has not yet existed.
For thinking about the contemporary relevance of that there are three streams
or broad categories that I want to discuss, and then Ill conclude. Tose three rarely
coexisted in one organization but I think can be found throughout the entirety of
the hidden :,os (and here Im saying both historically and the book):
a sense of sovereignty, by which I mean, self-governance, these various projects
which enact self-governance as both preparing for the revolution as some sort of
process but also in their very existence demonstrate revolutionary possibility;
intersectionality, which is obviously in direct opposition to the sense of a primary
contradiction, which emphasizes peoples full selves, the various aspects that contrib-
ute to peoples lives and organizing around all of those points, rather than catching
people at one discrete point in time;
and decolonization, and clearly this was still the era of national liberation strug-
gles working for independence from colonial authorities, but the decolonization
struggles, particularly those within this country, really focused on confronting and
transforming power in a way that was both about fghting the state and about imag-
ining diferent political social and geographic arrangements.
Te domestic national liberation movements, organizations like the Republic
of New Afrika, the American Indian Movement, the Movimiento de Liberacin
Nacional, were all organizations that really pushed beyond the geographic boundar-
ies of the U.S., within the U.S., to imagine diferent ways of arranging society, through
a focus on land and community organization. And these I think were really powerful
and potent examples that continue to inform a variety of workand I think that a
sense of thinking about politics through geography and through aesthetics comes in
many ways from the :,os, or at least is one way in which the ,os remain relevant. By
which I mean continuing to look at unexpected places for political leadership, not in
any formalistic or vertical way, but in the sense of inspiration and excitementfrom
people in prison, from the Great Plains area, the Badlandsthe :,os saw a return
to the South in this way that the oos seemed to be about abandoning afer the Civil
Rights Act and afer the Voting Rights Act. Or the turn to international law and
diaspora, people traveling between diferent parts of the worldcertainly not new,
but something that the :,os lef really devoted a lot of time and organization to.
Similarly, in terms of aesthetics, thinking about play, creativity, joy as fundamental
elements of political struggle.
1yp Dan Berger, Alexis Gumbs, Fred Moten, Michael Hardt, and Polygraph
All of these come together in a range of projects today, among queer people of
color, AIDS activists, immigrant justice, prison abolition, and many, many others.
Te biggest lesson across all of these is a sense of being relevant to your own context
while continuously pushing the envelope to change that context and to create new
more favorable contexts for peoples full potential humanity to be met, sustained,
grown, challenged, developed.
For me personally, all of that leaves me agnostic on questions of political form.
I think those who mechanically applied some political form such as a party or any-
thing else, from another time, as some sort of predetermined almost teleological
good thing, did not meet with much success. I think those most successful move-
ments, including those who used parties, were most successful when they empha-
sized experimentation, trying new things, in a way that built on diverse streams of
radical thought and radical practice, but was about responding to current conditions
while pushing for more favorable conditions. Perhaps the biggest take-away of that
for me is to know that big changes are possible even revolutionary changes are pos-
sible, even in seemingly unlikely times, such as the :,os.
ALEXIS GUMBS: Picking up on Dans invitation, which I really appreciateboth
the invitation to speak next to you and the invitation to think about things in new
ways and to be experimentalI was faced with the challenge of talking about the
:,os and in particular the poems from :, that I have been thinking about over
and over again, and wrote a dissertation about, and have managed not to become
sick of.
Taking the impetus from Dan to be experimental and to try to think about some-
thing in a new way, I have decided to be really brave and do something I dont know
how to do. I tried to teach myself about the relationship between algebra and cal-
culus, through the way that these black feminist poems that I have so internalized,
and now can look at newly, think about relationships to limits. Dan is asking us to
change the way we think about limits, and calculus has to do with relationships to
limits, and measuring the rate of change and the relationships of diferent variables
to each other. Really, reading Dans work has made me think, if were talking about
change and variability and what it takes to shif the way youre relating to something
that is understood to be a limit, within a particular context. Tis is my experiment.
:,, which is the year that Im focusing on, is a multiple variable problem. An
equation is a mathematical statement that asserts the equality of two expressions.
We have identity; x = x is a mathematical way of talking about identity. But some
mathematicians dont think of that as an equation if equality is not actually at stake,
if no matter what you do to that x, both sides are going to be the same. For it to be
an equation, some mathematicians believe that there has to be some controversy
around thatnot everything you plug in is going to produce balance on either side
of the equal sign. So [only this] would be an example of an equation: if the things on
either side of the equal sign are equal [for example] if x is zero or if x is :, and thats it.
Te way that I would ask the question of the equation is: who does this relation-
ship work for? Tis relationship of equality. I feel like this is where Dans work and
my experiment intersect, because Dan is interested in limits, which moves us from
1c Let Historys Records Refect the Struggles
the algebraic to calculus. Like Dan, I am interested in people who are not : or o. Te
equation, the relationship of capitalist citizenship in particular, did not work for
them. And they were saying this in the face of murder, rape, and repeatedly proven il-
legibility to any claim to the law. Teyre not expressing their relationship to equality;
they are expressing their relationship to what were thought of as the limits of survival.
Look, for example, at June Jordans Greensboro :,. Tis poem looks at a
particular problem where limits have a key role. In :, community organizers in
Greensboro, North Carolina, convene a rally for economic justice with specifc de-
mands made by the majority black community in Greensboro. Te American Nazi
Party and the Ku Klux Klan come to rally and open fre on the crowd that is gathered
there, killing several people in the middle of the day. None of the attackers are ar-
rested. Instead, black community leaders like Willena Cannon, who organized the
rally, are arrested. Some are run out of town. Some who choose to stay in Greensboro,
like Willena, are harassed for the rest of their lives. Teir children are targeted and
harassed by Greensboro police omcers to this day.
I would never have thought that the meaning of that set of actions and the ten-
dency it demonstrates would be describable at all, and its not describable in words.
But as the calculus of June Jordans proof argues, it reveals the limits of speech.
So this is one of the poems that we sent out in advance of the event. June Jordan
starts it, we / studying the rule / you cannot say / death to the Klan. So if theres an
equation here, the question of equality that June Jordan asks in response to the situ-
ation, dedicated to a student of hers, is not equality in terms of citizenship, but the
broader question of what will equal survival. you cannot / say a glass of water / you
cannot / say / death to the Klan. You plug in an action on the other side of survival.
Tere are variables, material and political. Jordan gives two choices, two solutions, x
= water, or x = death to the klan. Otherwise you dont get survival. Tats the algebra.
But the equation is inadequate. In fact the demands for economic justice raised
in a peaceful, police-permitted demonstration by these people were not part of a
survival equation. Tey were part of an equation of expendability. And the two equa-
tions are related. So what is the premise? What are the rules of inference where this
can be logical? Te premise that Jordan wants to expose is: the survival of black
people is unspeakable. She wants to show the limit, hand it to her student, represent
it as an asymptote in the graphing calculator and say, there it is. Tats the limit. You
will arrive at this limit every time you participate in this equation.
you cannot / say / death to the Klan / death to the Klan. So Jordan repeats
this: you cannot say death to the Klan, and then repeats death to the Klan. Shes
performing her relationship to a limit that she wants to reveal and, at the same time,
shif her relation to. Shes showing us the relationship between algebra and calculus:
you use algebra to calculate the limit, close up, where the curve looks straight, where
you can see what is not equal. And you use this to develop a theory of change. We
teach this to each other with proofs every time we consider the implication of a set
of premises. What happens if you play them out?
So what calculus does is measure how variables change in relation to each other.
Tis is a question that contemporary activist projects are being trained to ask them-
11 Dan Berger, Alexis Gumbs, Fred Moten, Michael Hardt, and Polygraph
selves collectively and their participants individually, afer the algebraic question,
Who does this relationship work for? Te answer is not us. Te next question
is, What is your theory of change? Calculus arrives at this using functions. Every
function outputs a value. Its important to remind ourselves that calculus is not the
opposite of algebratheyre related, because you use algebra to do calculus, and it
would make sense that this process of clarifying, this is equal to this, this is not equal
to this, this can be made equal to this, this can never be made equal, would be use-
ful in fguring out how variables change in relationship to each other, in presenting
or seeking to prove premises of transformation. Tis is called mathematically, the
transformation rule, or the rule of inference. Tis is what June Jordan sets up when
she begins the poem, we / studying the rule / you can / not say death to the Klan.
So if the problem of :, allows June Jordan, afer her algebra, to arrive at the
premise that black survival is unspeakable, what allows Audre Lorde to arrive in A
Litany for Survival at the premise, it is better to speak? A Litany for Survival is
a poem that I have used to teach undergraduates about a particular form of writing
address. It hails and claims an audience, it describes a formative situation, it explores
the implications of that situation, and it arrives at an approach. And of course this
poem is all about limits. For those of us who stand at the shoreline . . . who love
in doorways . . . who were imprinted with fear / like a faint line in the center of our
foreheads. In other words, for those of us who live here, at the limit, what are we
working with? Something is variable, and something is constant. In this proof, fear
is the constant. Te variable is, this instant, this triumph, and the rule of inference
is, we were never meant to survive.
As a mathematical proof this poem is syntactic and semantic. we were never
meant to survive. Te question of meaning is the haunting that makes the fear con-
stant. Te diference between proof theory and model theory in mathematics is that
proof theory is syntactical. It follows the implications of premise of the language in
the language structure. Te structure that Lorde invents for A Litany of Survival
rifs on the formal structure of the litany. Whenblankwe are afraid / When
blankwe are afraid. So she has all these diferent examplesAnd when the sun
rises we are afraid / it might not remain / when the sun sets we are afraid / it might
not rise in the morning. So this is not an equation by this defnition, its an algebraic
identity. No matter what you plug in, we = afraid. Tis is the premise. Given this
premise, fear is the constant, so it cannot be the determining factor, in what value
we arrive at. Only your action can do that. Te function arrives at a value statement,
for Lorde: it is better to speak.
Model theory is semantic. It lives on the level of meaning, and we were never
meant to survive. Lordes poem serves as proof and model. Here is her injunction
that given the identity of you, and me, and fearmeaning, we=fearspeech is better.
Here is her model for how to do it: claim your audience, your situation, illuminate
the impact of your action, in the function of creating diferent values.
Tis poem, A Litany for Survival, arguably Lordes best-remembered poem,
started out in a letter to her fellow black lesbian socialist feminist participants in the
Combahee River Collectives series of black feminist retreats. She sent it to Cheryl
1z Let Historys Records Refect the Struggles
Clarke, who was combining their responses to the retreat they had just been at, spe-
cifcally in regard to the role of publishing and revolutionary change, and whether or
not it was worth their time to work with white feminist collectives on their racism.
(Lordes opinion was that it was not.)
And placing the poem in the context of the letter Lorde sent, along with sending
some money for the photocopies that Clarke would have to make before recirculating
the responses to the rest of the collective, reveals it as part of an ongoing set of cal-
culations black feminists, like everyone else, were engaged in: how to use their time,
how to use money, where to place their bodies, how to face the limits of all of these.
As Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel suggest in their introduction to Conditions
,, :, was a problem in all these ways: how to organize their lives, their priorities,
and their communication methods such that they could publish the issue, Conditions
,: Te Black Womens Issue, and how to evaluate their lives in the context of the mur-
ders around them. Bethel and Smith, and the rest of the Combahee River Collective,
were trying to fgure out how to respond to the twelve murders in three months of
women in Boston as fast as they were happening, and failing. By the time they orga-
nized a demonstration on March :8, :,, and made signs proclaiming iicu1 vi:cx
womi ui:u, 1ui mUvuivs mUs1 s1ov, the ninth body had already been found.
Te velocity of their responses could not meet the steady exponential algorithm of
the death around theman algorithm dependent on the variables of non-response
from the State and sexist responses, i.e. lock your women up at home, from within
the black community. Teir usually outdated pamphlets which they had to cross out
to update that ten women, now eleven women, now twelve women, were dead, fea-
tured With No Immediate Cause, a poem by Ntozake Shange that similarly inhabits
the paradox of calculating a rate of changean appropriate response to ongoing
violence. Shanges narrator goes through the day and tries to narrate the meaning
of her routine encounters with men in the subway, at the diner, at the newspaper
stand. And with her knowledge of the statistical regularity with which women are
raped, murdered, and brutalized: every three minutes, every fve minutes, every ten
minutes, every day. If this is a double premiseone, violence is ongoing, variable
only in form; and two, one must establish immediate cause, i.e., the validity of the
response is judged in relation to how soon the response happens afer the specifc
act of violenceShange wonders how to walk through the problem set. She sets up
a graphing equation along the axis of her own life: where acts of violence and acts of
self-defense intersect. Shanges word problem asks for calculus: how can we describe
the behavior of the sequenceevery three minutes, every fve minutes, every ten
minutes, every day. Shanges chilling conclusion is that the repetition of this sequence
of violence behaves like what mathematicians call a monotonic sequence. Its behavior
does not change: if its increasing, it continues to increase; if its decreasing, it contin-
ues to decrease. In this case, violence only increases out into infnity. Te response
of violence that this set of facts releases in Shange, her responsive violence, becomes
part of the sequence. Terefore the implication of Shanges poem is that we have im-
mediate cause every three minutes, every fve minutes, every ten minutes, every day.
Tis is the thing that is so interesting to me about the calculus of these poems,
and why it has suddenly become worthwhile for me to learn math afer a lifetime
1 Dan Berger, Alexis Gumbs, Fred Moten, Michael Hardt, and Polygraph
of consciously avoiding it. Because the logic employed in these poems moves past
the humanistic forms of logic, rationality, and the possible; calculus in this black
feminist poetry can move us out of the equality narrative that we keep coming back
to in our discourses and ofer diferent premises of change, like the American Indian
movement thinking about a diferent premise for whats a relationship to land that
is not citizenship and the way that it has been imposed. So radical results that shif
our ability to read the situation at hand are available inside the workings of these
calculations. Shanges With No Immediate Cause uses this calculus to reveal the
fallacy of a legal narrative dependent upon cause and efect along a stable time axis.
If Shange operates on the scale of the minute, Nikky Finney shifs it to the scale
of the millennium. In Atlanta, Georgia, that same fall of :,, Nikky Finney dares to
apply a cosmic ethicist calculus to the economic narrative in which the Atlanta child
murder takes place. It is helpful for me to think about this outside of the apocalysm
of the poem and the ways I thought about it before as a set of calculations and limits
of quantifability; Finneys calculations are designed to put into view a non-existent
social contract when it comes to black children and to appeal to a larger system of
justicelets call it balance in the universebypassing the unearned authority of the
structures of governance. Finney is defying the economic good sense that people
of color living in the :,os in what activists would have called occupied urban
communities in the United States and in developing nations around the world are
considered to always be in debt. Beyond that, they have no credit, they cannot be
believed beyond that they are less than worthless. Finney rejects this premise, start-
ing instead from the rule of transformation or structure of inference that says that
the lives of black children lost through the Atlanta child murders are so priceless that
they overpay any amount of sacrifce that any group of people may be required to
make in the cosmic order of balance. Recalling the blank check concept of an earlier
Atlanta activist, the function of Finneys poem is to produce a value, saying what the
economic language of the United States can never say. Tis calculus says that life
and death are not measurable, but they get measured, so here is how we describe
that relationship. Tis is how we illustrate how each of these factors must change in
relationship to each other. You cannot say that black life is inherently valuable, it is
immediate cause, although we were never meant to survive. You cannot say death
to the klan. Te function of this poetry is the value of black life.
A friend once told me in high school, and I ignored her, that she thought cal-
culus was beautiful because it was a way of describing relationships that cannot be
described in words. Sylvia Windsor says sociopoetics is that act of creating relation-
ships that cannot be described in words, using words, sounds, everything we have. I
am teaching myself math, specifcally the sociopoetics of calculus, how to measure
my relationship to limits, how to describe the ways we change each other, what is
variable, and what remains. As a way of saying, despite everything, we are and
also death to the Klan.
FRED MOTEN: Tats hard to follow these two really exceptional presentations;
its an honor to be asked to do so. I dont know how much of value I actually have
to say. I do have some questions, and I hope you all will accept these questions in
1q Let Historys Records Refect the Struggles
the spirit in which I ask them, which is to join and extend the projects that you put
forward hereand that you demonstrated. I should also say that these are questions
that come from a perspective of actually having lived through and remembering the
:,os. Its very shocking and daunting to have to say such a thing in this context; I
am so used to going to talks and having people talk about the :,os or :os and
being in that kind of cool position of not remembering themand therefore feeling
kind of benevolently sorry for the people who do. I guess I really know that Im get-
ting older. But I do remember the :,os, and there is a danger in even starting out
this way, because my remembrance isI dont mean to suggest that it constitutes
the grounds for a refutation or even a legitimate calling into question of anything
thats been said. However, its impossible for me to speak outside of my own memory.
So thats what Ill do: Ill try to speak from within my memory, and its a memory
that comes out of literally watching Nixon on television and having this visceral
experience of his evil, [Moten laughs] I guess you could sayand at the same time
recognizing that the political circumstance within which Nixon operated makes
him in retrospect, at least from my position, if I were to think about every president
that came afer Nixon, the one furthest to the lef.
Tis contradiction is something that has to be understood. He operated within
diferent political conditions and within diferent political assumptions, and so even
though there was something viscerally, as I said, evil about him in a way that we
might not say of others (or some of you all might not say about others) who have
succeeded him, that visceral evil has to be understood in relation to the fact that
compared to our current president he was a rabid socialist. I think that says some-
thing about the nature of the ,os as a political context, and sometimes the way that
we understand the ,os, the best way, is by the way of terms and the analytic struc-
tures which are produced by folks who though they were within the ,os, one could
say they were not of the ,os. I am thinking about in particular a kind ofI guess I
use the word evil a lotan evilly classic or classically evil text compiled by a group
of scholars who were commissioned to do so by the Trilateral Commission. Te
text, primarily under the authorship of Samuel Huntington, was called Te Crisis of
Democracy, which was published in :,,. And to make a long story short, the thesis
of Te Crisis of Democracy was that the crisis was a function of the fact that there
was too much democracy. Democracy constitutes for those who are in power its
own crisis. Terefore, one way to think about it is that democracy is a pathological
condition. It is interesting to say that democracy is a pathological condition if only
because in that respect, and in relation to the :,os, it joins other social structures
which are also conceived of as necessarily pathologicalthe black community or
black social life being one. Its pathology is a function of the surfeit of what you
would call, for lack of a better term, black maternity. Te condition of pathology is
the same as the condition for continued existence. Democracy seems to operate a
similar way. One way to think about it is at the very moment in which Foucault is
beginning to formulate an articulation of the notion which he talks about in the last
bit of Te History of Sexuality Volume Ithat despite the techniques of regulation
and surveillance, life constantly escapes. Tat formulation is already in play, and is
already understood by precisely the ones that are enacting regulation and surveil-
1y Dan Berger, Alexis Gumbs, Fred Moten, Michael Hardt, and Polygraph
lance. So that the ascription of pathology to life by the ones who are interested in the
regulation of it unto its non-existence is something that shows up and becomes quite
available for us because they are very straightforward and clear when they say it in
the analytic texts of the ones who, in the :,os, were trying desperately to maintain
their hold on the world.
And what I am interested in is the way in which this throws into relief a problem-
atic which I think Alexis gets to, and Dan also gets to it too, but shows up in sharp
relief in Audrey Lords poem. And heres the question I guess I have to askand I
guess its more specifc to Alexis, but not really exclusively so. It has to do with this
question of survival. Because if the crisis of democracy is that there is too much
democracy, if the crisis of black social life is that there is too much life, or too much
life-giving, what is also absolutely clear is that democracy and life as much as they
constitute a crisis, as much as both of them are also conceived as necessarily patho-
logical rather than simply subject to the pathologicalwhats at stake is to recognize
that for those who are in power in the :,os, the very thing that they were afraid of,
the very thing that constituted the object of fear for them, was also always an object
of desire. You can say that there is too much democracy but that does not mean that
you want to do anything to endanger the structure that confers citizenship, since
the very conferral of citizenship is the basic building block of your own power. And
when I say conferral of citizenship what I guess I really mean is the imposition of it.
And similarly, and this is where my question again is a question for Audrey Lord, I
wish she were here to answer it, is that for me Ive always thought that as much as it
might seem absolutely true to say that we were not meant to survive, it also seems
to me absolutely true that we were brutally and viciously meant to survive, which
therefore means that the value of survival is something that shows up not only asI
dont know how to put itit doesnt just show up against the backdrop of whatever
it is that opposes our survival. It also shows up in relation to whatever imposes our
survival. And it raises this question, and I think its a question we can think about
in relation to the incalculable, as much as we would also think about it in relation to
calculus. And the question is simply that we have to consider not only what it means
to have not ever have been meant to survive, but also the question that accompanies
it, which is always, why would you want to survive like this?
Tat question seems to me to be absolutely crucial, and its a question which I
think imposes, or impinges, on some of the things that you were saying, too, Dan,
having to do with the notion of a revolutionary project, but more specifcally within
that notion, the question of what it would mean to try to create a world that has
never existed. So: what if we ask the question, why would you want to survive like
this? What is it about your life as it is lived right now, in all of its insecurity, in every
imposition of violence and brutality that is directed towards you, why would you
still want to livebut not just why would you want to live, but why would you want
to live like this? What is there in your life that is worthy of survival? I think this is
an important question to ask, and its bound up with the question of, if there is a
revolutionary project that is predicated on the notion of creating another world
that has not existed, what is our political allegiance, or what ought our political
commitment be to the world as it already exists? Or another way to ask it would be:
1 Let Historys Records Refect the Struggles
how do we understand the world as it already exists, as the condition of possibility
of the world that has never existed yet? Tese I think are crucial questions in part
because what they both I think intend to challenge is the ascription of pathology,
right, on modes of life and modes of social existence which are generally conceived
of as valueless. Sometimes I wonder whether the notion that we were never meant
to survive carries the uncomfortable trace of another formulation, namely, we dont
want to survive like this. And to say that we dont want to survive like this, in this
way, we dont want to live, in this way, that there is nothing to live for, in this way, it
seems to me ultimately does not constitute the basis or the ground for revolution-
ary political commitments, but actually constitutes something on the order of their
foreclosure. Because why would you have a revolution for people who live this way?
Why would you have a revolution for people who not only live this way but seem to
value living in this way?
Tese are questions which for me persist in part because what still remains for
us as a kind of intellectual project is to try to get to understand at a more minute
level, maybe by way of structures and protocols which we would conceive of as eth-
nographic as much as political theory or literary theory or literary-criticalhow do
we get to understand at a minute level those aspects of black social life or insurgent
social life or Indian social life which constitute a value in and of themselves as they
exist, right now, or right then. Tis seems to me to be, now, what is primarily the un-
speakable or the incalculable within, lets say, a certain kind of professional discourse
in my feld, Black studies, or other felds. Tese seem to me now to be practically
unaskable questions, because everything is predicated on the notion that the way we
live now, or the way some of us live nowbut usually its given in the form the way
they live nowis unlivable. Judith Butler talks about this: the life that is unlivable,
or in her terms, the life that is unmournable. Im interested in what it would mean
for us now to pay some close and minute attention to those lives.
In closing I would just say that if we think about that against the backdrop of
Samuel Huntingtons project, which locates the crisis of democracy in too-much-
democracy, or Daniel Moynihans project, which locates the crisis of black social life
in the very conditions of possibility of black social life, what I think we can discover
by looking against that backdrop is that what they constituted as pathological, in a
discourse which imagines that pathology to be self-directed, rather than directed
toward the very structure of power to which they are committed, they recognize
that theres something there. And I wonder if we have lost the sense that there is in
fact something there. And I think elsewhereobviously, in Audre Lords poem, in
Audre Lords poetry, and certainly in the very fact of the social conditions out of
which that poetry emergedthere is already the implicit acknowledgment that there
is something there: that they had something to lose, and also therefore something to
protect. Tat seems to me to be the fundamental condition of possibility of revolu-
tionary action, which is not about getting something that you dont have but about
saving something you do. Terefore it seems to me that it becomes necessary for us
to study what it is that we have, and what it is that we have, what it is that we share
in common, our mutual indebtedness to one anotherwhich is in a weird way that
1) Dan Berger, Alexis Gumbs, Fred Moten, Michael Hardt, and Polygraph
which overshadows the false, bullshit formulation of our indebtedness to some struc-
ture outside of that commonalityour mutual indebtedness to one another inheres
precisely, or is most evident, it seems to me, in those zones which are conceived of
as the zones of an absolute incapacity to have. Which is how come the police oc-
cupy those zonesnot because theres nothing there but because theres something
there. Not because the people who are there in the very absence of anything that
they could possibly have will come and take your shit, but because Anyway, so
Anyway. Tese are the questions that emerge for me, and I think in this respect these
are questions that are not so specifc to the ,os as a particular period but rather are
to be conceived of as the ,os reconceived as a kind of virus that regularly befalls
whatever period in which you happen to live. Lets call it the virus of disregulation,
or something like that. And our attention to the ,os would be an attention precisely
to those social structures which maintain themselves and persist, right, precisely in
spaces where people are conceived of as having nothing at allprecisely in spaces
where people operate within the kind of tension or the brutal sort of battering ram
that on the one side has, you know, a vicious kind of violent brutality that is meant, as
you said, and as Lord says, to have us not survive, and on the other hand these brutal
forms on inclusion and incorporation that are all about maintaining our survival in
the most minimal and docile ways.
MICHAEL HARDT: One of the things I admire about Dans project and Alexiss
work and in Dans book is in a way a recuperation of the ,os from a common para-
digm that Dans introduction already makes clear: the common paradigm of the
oos as the period of lightness, enthusiasm, in a way the good oos, which are cut
of from us by the ,os, which are not qualifed by enthusiasm, but rather the ,os
are exhaustion, exasperation, and excess. Tat common narrative, which in a way
disqualifes the ,os, and stands as in a way a block to the oos. What I think is much
more interesting, and youre already doing, is to recognize how we belong to the
,os, and how the ,os werent simply a moment of exhaustion, exasperation, and
excess (though they were that in part too). Before that, though, I think its worth at
least bringing upI dont think I can answer these exactly right herefrst, whats
at stake in periodization? What matters for us politically about these dates? And I
think, refecting partly on what Dan and Alexis already said, partly whats at stake
in it is to try to locate what genealogy we belong toand so in a way to understand
the ,os and to understand the aspects of the ,os to which we do or even aspire to
belong. Tat might be true in all of these eforts at periodization.
Te other question that I think is worth bringing up, even though this one too I
dont have a good answer towhich is about thinking about, you might call it, the
uneven development of political periodizations. Of course if you look internationally
they dont map very neatly to one another. Te primarily U.S. periodization were
talking about in some ways maps to a European periodization of the oos and ,os, but
I would see it as very diferent. First, think of how this would correspond in China.
In China I imagine a common one would be from :oo, in a way the long Cultural
Revolution, until Maos death, which of course had some relevance in the U.S. and
18 Let Historys Records Refect the Struggles
in Europe but was a very diferent way of periodizingand of course even within
that long Cultural Revolution had its own narrative imposed on it of enthusiasm and
then excess, falling back.
In Latin Americaand then I was thinking of a diferent correspondence, but Ill
just mention it, it goes too much of topicin some ways I would think of :8 for me
as a more important breaking point, you know, a point of infection. Not so much for
the Berlin Wall in :8, but for Tiananmen in :8, and then also the fnal ofensive
in El Salvador. In a Latin American context, it seems to me, I would say :8 is in a
way the move between the Guevarist guerilla model of the FMLN and the beginning
of the EZLN, and the Zapatista model. Which could have its own relationship to the
political party and its formations. Okay, enough of that.
At least you can see it would at least be useful work to do to take diferent interna-
tional perspectives on this periodization and to see where they do and dont coincide,
and that might tell us something.
One other, preliminary thought I have that I cant quite ft in but I want to men-
tion, is that part of the conventional but also true periodization between the oos and
,os in the US and correspondingly in Europe is between predominantly nonviolent
strugglecivil rights, antiwar demonstrationsto the armed struggle of the ,os. I
think theres some reality to that, and also some projection onto that. Tat too has
consequencesyeah, I guess there are two things involved in that. Te frst is the un-
derstanding of the enemy, and its consequences for political organization. I guess the
thing I wanted to mention, because I fnd it interesting, even though it doesnt exactly
totally correspond, is Foucaults dissent, lets say, about calling the state fascist, and
its consequences. Tis is, at least, my understanding of it. Foucault refused to sign a
petition in :,, that was in support of, really, a lawyer for the Red Army faction in
Germany, the Baader-Meinhof gang, because the petition said among other things
that they were justifed because the German state was fascist. Foucault refused to call
the German state fascist, and the reason he did (and I think this was true for many
of the US and European groups of armed struggle) is that the consequence of calling
the state fascistof analyzing the state as fascist, as a fascist power, of the enemy as
state fascismis that that implies political solutions are not possible, and that the
only possibility is armed struggle, or even clandestine armed struggle. And so what
Foucault was upset about was that implication: if we think of the enemy as that, the
necessary form of organization is this, clandestine armed struggle. And this is what
I think is behindnow Im sorry, Im getting to my own academic preoccupation
when Foucault decides to do this year of courses in :, that was labeled the birth of
biopolitics but was really about the birth of neoliberalism, his argument was: look,
the German state is neoliberal, its not fascist. And the implications are you cant fght
it through clandestine armed struggle, you need to invent a new mode of resistance
that could correspond to neoliberalism. So Ill come back to that in a minute.
I think there are some other ways of analyzing what changed from the oos to
the ,os that might give somewhat diferent views of what the possibilities of orga-
nization are. Dan already brought some of it up, but I wanted to have another. My
lessons in the ,os came throughlike, I lived through the ,os like Fred did, but
1p Dan Berger, Alexis Gumbs, Fred Moten, Michael Hardt, and Polygraph
I was stupid, and I didnt know anything. I only learned about the ,os in the 8os.
And I only learned about the U.S. ,os through what Italians knew about the US in
the 8os, so Im doubly circuitous about these things. But what the Italians were so
concerned about in that shifand it does correspond to the U.S. I thinkis the
shif from a mode of social discipline that was primarily centered in the factory to a
mode of social discipline that was outside of the factory and in some ways dispersed
within society. And if that shif really dominatedif that is the mode of control, the
factory-industrial society, and even of course for all those people surrounding it, in
the oosa diferent form of organization is necessary in the ,os, when the factory
is no longer the center but rather social control as a whole. And its only of course
through the Italians that I learn about the black revolutionary workers in Detroit,
who they were interested in, and who had the same debate about this: should the
factory be the center of our struggles, or is rather Detroit and the metropolitan ter-
rain where we need to struggle? So you see the consequence of that, and sometimes
that periodization maps onto it.
Te other shif that Dan mentioned that I would describe something like this: that
a passage from government to governancerather a oos moment of recognition of
the international nation-state system as the mechanism of control to supernational
forms of governance that defne a new global system. I know a lot of you read things
like Arrighis Long Twentieth Centurythere are a number of these analyses of global
systems that date either :,: or :,, as the shif between these two, which might have
to do with the decoupling of the dollar from the gold standardto a lot of you this
will sound like gibberish. But nonetheless its a diference in regimes of accumulation,
diference in the global systems of control. Fred has interesting things to say about
this too, about the diference between government and governance, and that shif,
and what the implications for opposition are.
So with these two things in mind, I thought: maybe a way of thinking about the
oos and ,os that might ft into this is abouthere of course the periodizations are
always rough and dont quite make senseabout the oos as a topography of revolt
of the outside and the ,os as a topography of revolt of the inside. And what I mean
by this is that much of the imagination of the oos has to do with partly the models of
Tird World liberation struggles and the corresponding imaginary of an outside. So
even in the way Black Nationalism in the U.S. takes up the discourse of sovereignty
and the models of African liberation struggles as that topography of an outside, that
then in the ,os I would say shif towards a topography of struggle from the inside.
When you quoted Marilyn Buck about struggles below from Empire, thats ex-
actly what I mean by that topography of struggles from the inside, that Id say corre-
spond to the other two shifs I was talking about: the economic discipline shif from
factory to society, and the geopolitical analysis shif, from government to governance.
Ive been interested in why these Italians Im interested in were not like most of
the European Communists, not so much interested in national liberation struggles,
but rather in the black radical tradition in the US. Because for them too, they also
have this whole topography of inside: within and against was their slogan. Only
from within Capital, only within forms of power, can one both struggle against and
1)c Let Historys Records Refect the Struggles
propose an alternative. And they saw the black radical tradition in the US as a model
of that, in contrast to the notions of the Tird World liberation outside of Europe and
outside of Capital as a model. So Im wondering if that might be an alternative cat-
egorization of this periodization of the oos and ,os that again might pose how we
belong to it: that struggle from the inside in which social production has expanded
across the social terrain and which the system of control has proceeded to forms of
governance rather than government.
So I want to just try this last bit about Fred. Ive tried thinking this several other
times when you pose it, and its really challenging; its the last part of what youre
saying that Im trying to work through. How much does revolution involve the world
as it is now? How much does it involve surviving as we are now? Its true that, in
contrast to that, I have thought revolution as a monstrous act. Like revolution is
really only for monsters. Revolution is not about, or even utopia itself is not about,
creating the society where we are fnally at home or we fnally ft. Tat seems to
me useless or stupid or... thats not the image of revolution I have. Its not that, you
know, ok, we feel unhappy or alienated or unsatisfed with the society we have today,
and fnally well make something where we fnally feel at home. I think revolution
is really about the construction of a society where we really dont ft as we are now.
Where only monsters ft. And that we would have to become monstersbut I mean
monsters sometimes in a good wayto ft. But see thats exactly contradictory to
what Freds saying. And I was wondering if I really think what I just said. Because
Fred was arguing against it, and I usually agree with Fred.
My friend and co-author Tony Negri always accuses me of being too conciliatory.
But Im trying to fnd a way in which its not so much an opposition between survival
against the modes of attack and the notion of not only revolution, but liberation itself,
as a production of subjectivity that makes us really new, diferent. Im wondering if
those two might be thought together.
BERGER: I do also maybe feel like I want to backtrack a little bit in the sense of
revolution creating a world that doesnt yet exist. I dont mean that in the sort of
total outside sense that you were alluding to at the end, but more as a response
to the sense thats (both within the lef and predictably within some revolutionary
nationalist currents) about a return to the sort of pre-imperial past and the sort of
mythic return being the liberatory project. So my sense of a revolution as creating
this world that we dont yet know is about emphasizing the experimental and the
liberatory in relation to where people are at now, and in relation to drawing in a very
eclectic way, rather than having some sort of predetermined commitment to some
hard and fast ideological discipline.
But I think that your point, Fred, about what does it mean to survive like this
and what people like about this or draw from their current survival or survival in
this current momentis exactly the basis of revolutionary opposition. I started be-
ing interested in studying social movements so that I could be a better participant
within social movements, or a smarter participant within social movements, and
thats still in many ways my interestbut along the way I started to realize that a lot
1)1 Dan Berger, Alexis Gumbs, Fred Moten, Michael Hardt, and Polygraph
of things we do as part of social movements have no ideological loyalty. Organizing
is not owned by the lef. None of the things we dofyering, protest, direct action,
all the way up to clandestinity or armed strugglenone of that is owned by the lef.
So thinking about that sense of appealing to people and their sense of survival in
the current systemwhen you were talking about that Fred made me think of one
of Ronald Reagans big organizing platforms of the :8o election was Are you bet-
ter now than you were four years ago? And this was the hostage situation in Iran,
the economy is in the toilet, all this stufit was a very compelling notion of sort of
organizing people, right, but it also had obviously within it this right-wing patriar-
chal nationalism, imperialism and this sense of return that appealed to a majority of
white Americans that was successful. It made me think about the ways that the Right
uses that sense of survival, as now, in relation to a sort of mythic return that plays
on all these notions of white supremacy, frontier ideology, patriarchal nationalism,
etc. So I think this is a really important and bold challenge for us to think about:
why survive like this? And whats in it for us, in a way thats not about that mythical
return, mythical history.
Im just interested in asking these really simple questions about what makes
libratory social movements possible. What are their sources, where do they come
from? It seems to me that we have to ask these questions, especially if what were
interested in is trying to reactivate them on some larger and persistently efective
scales. And my sense of it is that on some basic level social movements emerge out
of devalued social life. I think its interesting to think about it precisely in relation to
monstrosity, particularly insofar as devalued social life is ofen thought of as being
monstrous, and particularly insofar as devalued social life is also ofen thought of as
being imminently not-at-home. And so to consider the value of devalued social life
has nothing at all to do, for me at least, with a kind of nostalgia or some desire for re-
turn, or some kind of romanticization of homeit is in fact for me a romanticization
of life under a condition of an almost existential homelessness, but that homelessness
is itself not only existential, but also a function of political and economic imposi-
tions, and the question is: how does something continuously occur from that place?
Part of why I want to talk about that subject is learning from history but
not being totally beholden to it, is to counter that sense of nostalgia and disavowal,
and to have some sort of critical relationship to pasts that shaped us in a myriad of
ways. Obviously its not just these social movements that shaped us but all manner
of these processes and developments that were talking about. But at the same time
those social movements are part of that pictureand so I wanted to not recuperate
them, but at least to be able to emphasize them, and hopefully in a way that gets
beyond nostalgia or disavowal to some sense of critical engagement.
GUMBS: NostalgiaI amI think I defnitely beneft from whatever the viral
thing is about the ,os because my work is really on the cusp of the :,os and 8os
and is pretty narrow in terms of year, but then is also within the context of queer
time. So I dont necessarily see it as period work. Next week Im participating in an
event that honors Barbara Smith, who founded Kitchen Table Press, who is one of
1)z Let Historys Records Refect the Struggles
theif yall read the readingsis one of the writers of the conditions of :,; the
whole homecoming project is going to this thing at CUNY about lesbians in the ,os,
so theres a lot, like this is a conversation thats happening, and maybe its because its
viral. I think that because :, is also a very traumatic yearall these black women
are slaughtered in Boston, all these children are murdered in Atlanta, and its more
likely to be seen as melancholia than nostalgia, or thats the way that Im approach-
ing it. Maybe its like a subject position thing, maybe its because I could be read very
easily and probably very correctly as an angry black woman, it might be like just let
it go. But its not over, in a particular sense. I mean I think there is a melancholic
something melancholic to my methodology around it. Its not resolved, its not as
if the pathologizing of the black mother is over, right, and if the applications had
stopped. So I think that, I dont know if, there could be a whole lot of things going
on with afect, but I dont know, having been accused of being nostalgic.
I do think though as a scholar and somebody who wants to talk about these
things and to think critically about what does it really mean, what do the diferent
values that people ascribe to my work, or to these particular texts that maybe are
supposed to be forgotten or maybe have diferent forms of value of people at difer-
ent times, actually perform in a lifetime. What does it mean to other people to see
me doing that work? I think that a lot of it is afective, and I think that sometimes I
inspire a nostalgia in people, who want to work through their trauma or whatever. I
think that its very complicated, whether these scenes of what Freds talking about
means to be responsible to each other and where that responsibility happens, and for
me a lot of it does not happen in the university, where Im really thinking about what
that accountability looks like, where its more complicated, and more generative and
less clear, because I think that within the economy of the university, it seems to be
very clear to me what my role should be. I think thats more the conversation thats
going on in my head about why is it that Im continuing to talk aboutwhy is it that
I talk about this particular period? Te other thing is that I would think I would be
more likely to be accused of being self-centered, to center the years of our birth, you
know? I was born in :8:, and I basically center around :, to :8,, so I mean if
Im trying to look closely at the conditions of my own possibility as an individual
personmaybe that would be a sharper accusation to make of me.
MOTEN: I dont know if Ive ever been accused of being nostalgic, if only because
the stuf that Im interested in, the people who would probably accuse me of being
nostalgic would betray their own desires to say that the thing that Im interested in
ever existed in the frst placeso if they call me nostalgic, theyd have to say that it
was actually there. So maybe they would tend to want to not say that. But the main
reason why I wouldnt think of it as nostalgic myself is just because what Im inter-
ested in is all over the place, right now.