Deathlife

Front matter

00900

ANTHONY B. PINN

AP

Contents

PART I yea eq. o a D 7 N Signifying a e Di Deathlific 1 THE ORPHIC HUSTLER 45 2 THE ANTIHERO 73 PART II

3 BACCHIC INTENT 97 4 ZOMBIC HUNGER 125

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

PARADIGMS OF DEATH (OR LIFE) AND DEATHLIFE

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. —JAMES BALDWIN, The Fire Next Time

In light of ongoing existential circumstances, Black expressive culture naturally has interrogated and wrestled with the constitution of existence—its beginning, its present, and its end. Why would it be otherwise when, as the above epigraph makes clear, denial of the realness of death is futile and unproductive in that it deforms both the nature and the meaning of death and life?

Death and life: while some, as is the American way, seek to sever the connection between the two, social circumstances contain language and practices (e.g., cultural depictions of Black bodies as dangerous, “law and order,’ geographic confinement as something like a grave) that serve to reinforce their relationship despite objections. To avoid this discussion is to misunderstand history and deform aesthetic framing of the social world. They—death and life—are thought together to the extent that being for Black bodies involves the simultaneous potentiality of both, and this generates a geography of speculation both reasonable (drawn from interrogation of sociopolitical, economic, and cultural conditions) and affective. One way to describe this relationship of death and life is through the image of dying. And, so, what Victor Brombert says concerning Franz Kafka’s take on death—one whose poor health kept death always a consideration—is applicable here. “Death for Kafka means not an end; Brombert writes, “nor a passing (or passage) located in a time soon to come, but an everlasting reality of pain in the present; not in fact death, but a permanent dying”1

Pushing forward, Blackness attached to certain bodies has long functioned as a trope, a graphic sign, of this dying—housing at once the terror of death and the longing for life. In a sense, Blackness within the context of the United States has served as a frame for decay, a relationship to social chaos constituted by and monitored in terms of the counterdynamics of whiteness. And in this narration, in this performance against (Black) death and for the sake of (white) life, Black bodies are always and already representative of a perceived dangerous intersection. To think and perform Blackness is, within the context of our social world, to negotiate death and life. In fact, Blackness is constituted by the coherence, the coterminous relationship, of death and life as this is projected onto certain weight-carrying communities. As a consequence, in terms of physical exposure and metaphysical restriction, the history of the United States in relationship to Blackness is a history of demise—an often-denied performance of what I call deathlife. One of the more graphic narrations of this configuration comes from hip hop culture. In certain ways, hip hop culture—and I am particularly concerned with the lyrical content of rap music—offers a language, an alternate grammar and vocabulary, for articulating the nature and meaning of deathlife.

In what follows here, I position deathlife against another paradigm—life distinctive from death—in order to set the stage for its application vis-a-vis rap music.” The examination of these two paradigms isn’t intended to suggest a distinction between death and deathlife. Rather, my aim is to isolate for discussion the intent behind deathlife as a structuring of the Other. Whites, by means of whiteness, don’t “see” deathlife—privilege involves not having to. Instead, they feel its meaning and name its impact using the language of death or life.” The distinction (death or life versus deathlife) is a matter of orientation (whiteness or Blackness), not substance. In making this claim, in the following section, I mean to highlight, from the vantage point of whiteness’s logic, a cartographical presentation of deathlife cast as death or life. The goal is to provide a sense of how embodied Blacks are positioned within US social arrangements related to deathlife (or what whiteness projects as death or life) and the discourse of anxiety marking this positioning of Blackness.* The aim of whiteness in so doing is to position Blacks in relationship to death and life—and in this way ratify the social world. In making this argument, I begin to contextualize and offer pretext for narrations of deathlife that are presented in the remaining chapters.

Paradigm I: Life or/and Death

How does it feel to be a problem?

—wW.E.B. DU BOIS, The Souls of Black Folk

By considering the manner in which Blackness has been constructed as the meaning of death for whites, and publicly performed as the “technology” of deathlife, I want to extend the notion of Blacks as a problem presented by W. E. B. Du Bois early in The Souls of Black Folk? And I do this by recognizing that the “Veil’—his term for what is not only a material source of division and exclusion but also a type of hermeneutical device, or tool of perception—hampers the manner in which Black people are viewed and understood by whites, but affords a clear presentation of whites.° Hence, Blacks as a problem is tied to the production of whiteness (by white people) and its aims. Mindful of this, I want to note the flip side of that formulation (i.e., Blacks as a problem) by briefly considering Du Bois’s later formulation of whiteness as presented in the essay “The Souls of White Folks.” For Du Bois, something about the second sight of Blacks allows them to “see” and to know whites—to view them from a place of familiarity in that he, like all Black people, is “bone of their thought and flesh of their language.” ‘This is a deep familiarity informing Black people, but one that troubles and angers whites, resulting in white denial of Black people’s substance and place within the social world; instead, as Du Bois writes, “They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism?”

Undergirding this is a modern development: the creation of white people as unique and special, the measure of humanity, the standard, ontology’s conclusion, with Blacks as a failed ontology in that they are defined by a radical status as “not like whites” This is a modern logic, which serves to shape the expanse of the social world and all its resources—and which is summed up by the category of whiteness. Or, as Du Bois expresses the predicament, “There must come the necessary despisings and hatreds of these savage halfmen, this unclean canaille of the world—these dogs of men. All through the world this gospel is preaching. It has its literature, it has its priests, it has its secret propaganda and above all—it pays!”®

Whiteness is a justification for total consumption, for unbridled expression of desire; it frames a system of thought combined with diabolical practice that is sanctioned through violence and disregard of any (and all) who pose a threat to this logic of superiority and its grand claims. Or, in Du Bois’s words, “Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” According to the grand narrative, without the presence of whiteness and white people to maintain it, the world would lack substance and meaning—and instead would devolve into chaos. Du Bois sees the trick here, knows the falseness of such claims, and names what whiteness puts in place to manage such exposure. This barbarity isn’t a misrepresentation of white people, not a misnaming of whiteness; rather, it is the very nature of white culture. Maintenance of this falsehood is intense and bloody. It is rabid in its moralizing and championing of a white world through condemnation of Blackness vis-a-vis Black people: “Say to a people: ‘The one virtue is to be white; and the people rush to the inevitable conclusion, ‘Kill the “nigger”!’”!

Here, one begins to see the manner (and means) by which whiteness captures the idea of Blacks through a discourse of anxiety, with Blackness constructed as a corrective narration of deathlife distinct from the experience of whiteness as a relationship of life over against death. In other words, the construction of Blackness carried through Black bodies is meant to isolate death for the white population in something other than themselves. By so doing, Blackness through Black bodies takes on death so that others (ie., white members of the social world) are able to operate through a controlled encounter with death. Put another way, Iam suggesting that whites (through the development and operation of whiteness) work to construct existential arrangements and ontological structures that make death visible and “manageable” by projecting it onto Black bodies.

White bodies do experience death, but whites are able to “attach’—a type of projection—their worst fears about death (as the taking of life), the most grotesque dimensions of their anxiety of death, to Black bodies. This happens with respect to two geographies: (1) physical demise and (2) irrelevance—as an ontological and epistemological rupture in its most graphic form.

PHYSICAL DEMISE

The nature and meaning of death have changed; the locations for death and the framing of death have altered due to various socioeconomic, political, and cultural shifts in collective life over the centuries. Yet something related to the awareness of death remains in place and undergirds reflective awareness of life’s vulnerability. Whites live with an understanding of and fear regarding the end of physical existence. This is such a strong component of individual and collective life that physical death loses its distinctiveness and becomes less easily distinguished from what is called life. In this regard, one might think in terms of material, physical life/death as opposed to a much clearer distinction such as life .. . death." There have been efforts, of course, to control, monitor, and ritualize material death (the end of vital biological functions), or to privatize it so as to make it manageable, to make it fit within a particular sociocultural understanding.

Death experienced in this form gives whites time, resource, and opportunity to work out arrangements in a way consistent with individual need/ want and in light of communal assumptions and priorities. It might involve arrangement of resources, nurturing relationships, and so on. This is an economy of death that is manageable and to some extent “owned” by whites. The opposite of this, the type of death avoided, involves a hard death, entailing death that is untimely (outside the socially assumed chronological frame for human life), death that is violent or in some other way outside the pattern of life or death desired by the person, or death that for any other reason is outside the dominant narrative of life or death. Such death disrupts sociocultural arrangements that mark out life or physical being within a given community. In this way, physical death produces dis-ease within a community and fosters a certain type of anxiety within individuals.

While there may be cultural nuance and difference in the practices of marking off and discussing death, whites and Blacks use similar structuring(s) of physical death; laws, for instance, determine how any body can be disposed of or stored.!* The physical body, the biochemical reality whose biological functions end, can be ritually addressed after death.'? It can be mourned, represented in a variety of ways, and then set apart from living in a clear and “final” manner. It can be presented and available to the living in cemeteries and urns but still at a safe distance from the living, confined, managed, epistemologically docile. Not so with irrelevance premised on a certain epistemology. It, the body, must be apparent, in place, and exposed to life so as to differentiate it from that which isn’t meaninglessness. In this regard, the practices related to the material body are fairly set across cultures and social dynamics. For example, whites and Blacks both use professionals who prepare bodies for presentation and ritualized goodbyes, and so on. Yet there are limits to this connection, in that death as presented here grabs at Blacks in certain ways and casts Blacks in a particular relationship to demise. The challenge is this: contacts, or communities, nurture structures of connection that ease the reality of death, but they also involve the production of circumstances (e.g., diseases and violence) that undercut the offerings of relationship. There is the movement through the world aware that life is framed by death, and death by life.“ This, of course, is true for those who are considered human in ways that have fundamental mattering—who are socioeconomically, politically, religiously, and culturally human—that is, whites.!

The arts have recognized and faced this dilemma over and over again. Particular social developments and challenges have prompted this recognition and the need to aesthetically present it. Karla FC Holloway’s insight is worth noting: there is an intimate link between “color and death” And this connection guides much of what she, and others who hold to this opinion, says about the nature and meaning of the rituals and processes of addressing physical demise within Black communities. In addition, Holloway argues, this connection between color and death shaped cultural production, as the arts became a way to express the nature and meaning of this tragic relationship.'° But regardless of the motivation, the arts have marked out deep awareness of this limitation. On this point I share a question with Sharon Patricia Holland: “What if some subjects never achieve, in the eyes of others, the status of the ‘living’?” Our answers are different. Holland frames the question in light of Toni Morrison's brilliant Beloved and raises the specter of existing with the dead, being “at one with the dead”” For Holland, Blacks are perceived as ghosts.'§ Not so for me—and this is where we begin to move away from the physicality of death. I suggest Blacks do not achieve the status of the “living” not because they are categorized with the dead—the ancestors, for instance—but because they are neither fully objects nor fully subjects. Put another way, they have a particular materiality—an embodiedness that produces discomfort and anxiety in the general non-Black population—but they have limited metaphysical importance, in that their presence is without deep epistemological and ontological significance because they have no will that matters. They, through socioeconomic and political arrangements, for example, are put in place and monitored by the dominant population; in this way, they occupy an in-between space of sorts.

The dead must also be “alive’—present, ever-present—if the meaning of whiteness is to have meaning. But the dead can't be so present as to cause epistemological and ontological discomfort on a fundamental level for those (advocates of white supremacy, among others) depending on this particular arrangement of the dead. Put differently, Blacks must be recognizable— “human” enough to be visible, or regarded—but not able to demand so much attention, or significance in time and space, as to threaten those who advocate modalities of white advantage. One might think of the deaths of Michael Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Trayvon Martin as representing this visceral desire to maintain the placement of Black bodies.” To talk about death—to understand it on some level within and beyond its most superficial dimensions as confrontation of the senses in the form of physical demise—is to talk about life. This, nonetheless, is a reality fought on a variety of fronts. The logic of life, in fact, is death.

ONTOLOGICAL DEATH

There are ways in which the very presence of Blacks in North America entails a certain type of death. Slavery, as the sociologist Orlando Patterson has aptly noted, involves social death: the surrender of will or authority for the sake of physical life.” This arrangement has certainly shaped the context and content of Blacks’ existence in the Americas, but I have in mind a different dimension of this situation, related, but to be wrestled with in its own right. What Patterson describes so vividly entails the existential arrangements of “life,” the experience of living within a context of race-based discrimination. The embodied Black body is confined in time and space in ways felt through the flesh and in relationship to other bodies. Yet there are also ontological considerations of note, meaning ways in which the very being of Blacks is defined by the presence of demise. Indeed, the Black body as social construct is the language of demise, in that it was meant to signify and speak of and tame the end of being as a subject. This ontological death is not the end of vital functions such as heart activity or brain activity. Nor do I mean the end of spiritual vitality in a traditional religious-theological sense. This is not death as a physical or “spiritual” condition, but rather death more fully as an ontological positioning and an epistemological rupture regarding knowledge of being, of life integrity, of dignity, and so on. It is the loss of meaning more generally as opposed to the particular ending of a particular person’s mattering.”!

This ontological and epistemological situation means the “identity” of Blacks isn’t simply marked by stigma. That is to say, Erving Goffman’s keen work on the nature and meaning of the stigma as marking a person who is “reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” doesn't fully capture the construction—epistemologically and ontologically— of Blacks.”* For Blacks aren’t simply human with both “virtual” and “actual” social identity as less than—as somehow and in some way impure. It isn’t a matter of a Black person, a complex human being understood or stereotyped in a way that renders them problematic or deficient in some way.” No, the Black person means something more fundamentally different, and perceived as a necessary danger. Stigma has too limited a range of influence and form, in that any given attribute can render an individual “usual” or “unusual.”*4 Such is not the case for Blacks, for whom the challenge is always and already deeply ontological-epistemological and expressed existentially. Even the idea that some “attributes” are always a problem doesn’t fully capture the situation. Furthermore, the “not quite human” sense, as Goffman outlines it, the sense of race as a stigma, doesn’t recognize sufficiently the nature of the ontological dis-ease (not simply social understandings and arrangements, that is, social identity) assumed to be constituted by Blackness. In some respects, what Goffman points out as stigma involves a type of social and/or physical symmetry lacking in some persons. For the Black person, however, it is more than this lack of symmetry.”°

What Neil Small says concerning the discussion of death within scholarship and as differentiated over time in the West is relevant here: “Death is the apotheosis of this grand dream of control and of the belief in the power of the ordered”? As Blacks have been constructed as death, this means for those needing and wanting this arrangement that death is both sought and feared—having something of a religious quality. It is an odd arrangement: Blacks are projected as death within a context fighting to keep death at bay, and participation in American life in any substantive way requires Blacks to buy into the death they are projected as constituting. With this in mind, it is clear that Russ Castronovo’s intriguing notion of “necro citizenship” fails to fully capture what I mean to represent here. He argues that US democracy enjoys nonresponsive citizens—Blacks—who do not react to political developments, who are passive and still, who are . . . corpses.?’ His sense of a citizenry rendered docile, disengaged, corpselike entails some of the actual consequences associated with the irrelevance or death of African Americans, but I have more in mind, more than the sociopolitical spheres of life. For Castronovo there is something about recognition of morality as political capital that says a word about “democratic existence within the state”?8 The corpse—the body—can be dead, or it can be reanimated through particular shifts in political ideals, practices, and sensibilities. This sense of death, of the final disembodiment, understood within the context of “necro citizenship,’ has something to do with the sense of privatization that so many have understood as the modern turn regarding the dead, while the political is public. This separation isn’t certain and it isn't fixed, when, for instance, one considers the political importance of the social death of enslaved Africans.”? I mean something more fundamental by “irrelevance” over against the “dis/ embodied experience, social position, and political metaphor” intended by Castronovo. The death I describe is the structuring of knowledge about Blacks in spheres of collective interaction (such as their educational ability and criminality) and the very meaning of Black bodies that undergirds these other historical patterns of individual and collective life. Death so conceived is one reason we can talk about bodies mattering.*°

It is not the case, nor need it be, that all agree Blacks are so constructed. The manner of structuring Blacks as such isn’t dependent on consensus. It only needs to become the dominant logic, with white people benefiting directly and indirectly from its normativity, and this doesn’t preclude slippage regarding when and how Blacks are so understood. The presentation of this logic must be compelling or at least presented in light of a shared need, and over time it will become the unspoken reality, the assumed condition. It, this logic, to borrow and apply in a different context a phrase from Albert Camus, entails “solidarity against death”?! Undergirding this configuration of Blacks is an epistemologically grounded and ontological move: Blacks are needed in order for meaning to be and to be lodged in the “life” of whites. Within this narrative of meaning, Blacks are a cautionary tale suggesting the importance of accepting the dominant structuring of individual and collective existence— of safeguarding against contamination. Letting one’s guard down in the presence of Blacks can result only in destruction of social existence as vital, vibrant, and humane. This second form of death, according to whiteness, is a meaninglessness that restricts life force to memory: it subjects one to the caprice of others, to the will of others who determine to what degree one has presence. It is to be without the human will that “matters” Ontology, through death, is warped, and social relationship involves confinement and destruction.

This discussion is not one simply regarding alterity—the Other as a “presence” to be recognized and addressed. Such cannot be the case when Blacks are ontologically and epistemologically dead—that is, irrelevant. This difference in being won't be addressed by simply recognizing the Other or having the Other recognize the dominant mode of humanity. Even the aesthetic reprea sentation of Blacks, from the minstrel shows’ “Zip Coon” moving forward, offers yet another way in which the Black person serves as the marker of death, represented in and by the cultural frameworks and imagination of the general public.” It is in thinking of Blacks in this way, and presenting them in this fashion, that whites over the course of centuries have been able to envision themselves as alive, or invested with meaning, as subjects moving and arranging their world. Over against Blacks, they have relevance within a social world marked by no central and consistent meaning.” Everything about Blacks as being irrelevant has an underlying function of affirming as right this grand narrative of white life over against death. There is a warped assumption that, through Blackness, whites can harness reality and control it through a mode of prescience.**

Blacks are constructed as the embodiment and discourse of danger, destruction, and disorder, whose very efforts to produce meaning result in contamination and chaos that must be controlled by naming them irrelevant.” Yet, oddly enough, this process is not without its weak points. For instance, to the extent Blacks cannot be forgotten within the US narrative of white domination, the Black person is immortal: dead to the extent that they are projected as without meaning, but perpetually alive to the extent that their memory is essential for the safeguarding of the American narrative. Some have recognized such weaknesses and have worked to exploit them, if by no other means than signifying them. From my perspective, that is the case with hip hop culture in general and rap music in particular. Those who carry the bodies of symbolic death (and who pose the threat of physical death) speak in haunting tones of their demise and what it means for the larger structures of existential concern within the US context.” More precisely, hip hop culture is an intervention of sorts, marking a cultural shift—a change in the grammar and vocabulary of living that acknowledges the presence of death. But, through this acknowledgment of death tied to Blackness, rap artists seek to shift its significance and benefit. That is, rather than this association with the workings of death acting as a marker of a less-than status, it is used to project substance. In this situation, meaning is me(an)ing, or a tension between the individual and frameworks of communality played out through/in the fragility of life.

Exposing and Claiming Death

My aim in this section is not to offer a full rehearsal of how rap is related to death in general or murder in particular. Instead, I want to share a few examples to establish a sense of how death functions in much rap music. As artists guided by this paradigm reflect, one has no choice but to consider death and life, to be aware of both. A sense that they are distinguishable entails a point of graphic and explosive conversation.

With respect to physical demise, hip hop has something of an elegiac quality—an irreverent poetic reflection on those who are dead, which includes by its very nature rehearsal of death’s production. Such is the concern with relationship to death, which is to say, how one interacts with it. In certain ways murder is a dominant motif and, in this manner, it is tied to the Western preoccupation with the ending of life through crafted narratives exploring demise. As Michael Collins reflects, “The beautiful murder, the murder lifted into the mind by ‘winged words; is in many ways the heartbeat of American culture—indeed, of all western culture”?” The situation, however, is more focused than that—situated within a particular social geography— and, so, what James Baldwin reflects regarding the nature of socioeconomic and cultural life for Blacks in mid-twentieth-century Harlem holds true for hip hop’s attention to death. The circumstances related to the awareness of loss, or epistemological clarity, make plain that “your losses are coming?’

I want to avoid the quick move to the “why” of killing and instead describe and analyze the “how” and “what” of killing within hip hop culture qua rap. In other words, murder in rap is often viewed from the vantage point of life— what it takes away—yet there are important ways in which murder in hip hop also speaks about the substance of death. Much has already been made of the taking of life, or the presence of active demise, within hip hop culture, particularly as chronicled in gangsta rap.*? And this focus is not without good reason, when one considers the sociocultural impact of the gangsta personae that emerged during the culture wars of the 1980s and in relationship to the age of crack. So, something about the effort to claim time and space, to constitute presence and significance, is connoted through the ability to consume time and space (i.e., murder).

Resembling a thematic arc found in the fiction of Richard Wright, relevance (or what Calvin Warren might call “ontological murder”) for a despised Black figure seeking to be a subject within an anti-Black social environment involves the ability to take life.*? If one cannot determine fully the shape of one’s own social existence, one can produce it through negation—through the ability to end the (social) life of another. There is a “feel” for living produced by the taking of life—a carving out of psychological space and meaning through the void resulting from the manufacturing of demise." For Blacks, as Wright and later rap artists would attest, the possibility of physical or ontological demise is always present, always threatening. Does one take life, or does one have one’s life taken?

Taking life becomes the ontological equivalent of having life. Think, for example, of active demise as a marker of being represented in Dr. Dre and Ice Cube’s 1994 song “Natural Born Killaz.” Life is amplified through the consumptive power of death. While Ice Cube described the song as satire, there’s no concern or remorse regarding the consequences of life taken. Rather there is only an excitement at times erotic in nature: “It feels like I’m bustin’ a nut when I open you up.” Presented from the perspective of the one who controls life by taking it, vitality is determined in light of a signifying of codes meant to safeguard life. Murder is without a larger logic and without grand claims. It takes place because it can, and within this possibility of demise the murderer constructs an arrangement in which one controls life through death. The “right” to life is superseded by the ability to end life. In this sense, production of death serves as a signifier of subjectivity, as a mode of being in contradistinction to social dictates. Or, in the words of DMX,

Look me in my eyes (WHAT!)

Tell me to my fuckin’ face that you ready to die (C’mon).”

Murder, then, is the performance of a twisted personhood. It is not only the taking of life by murder that constitutes a marker of significance; ontological vitality is also constituted through being the target of murderous intent.