- Against Traffic:De/formations of Race and Freedom in the Art of Adrian Piper
Lacking the certitude of a definitive partition between slavery and freedom, and in the absence of a consummate breach through which freedom might ambivalently announce itself, there is at best a transient and fleeting expression of possibility.
—Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection1
Value denotes domination and endurance in a space of multiplicity. Its presence and performance entail the altering, resituating, and refiguring of the Other, or many Others, in margins, in recesses—indeed, paradoxically, outside a self-presence (defined by a fetishized boundary) that nonetheless aspires to be everywhere.
—Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value2
This time I've really made it. I am invisible, disembodied, pure sexual desire, and the night holds no fears for me. Its spirits, indoors and out, are my old friends, and we coil through, around, and alongside people, and one another, exuberantly, shamelessly, knowingly.
—Adrian Piper, "Flying"3 [End Page 114]
I. The Abstraction of Freedom, the Freedom of Abstraction
In her introduction to Scenes of Subjection: Terror and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America, Saidiya Hartman argues that an engagement with postbellum, Black expressive cultures must reconcile the "lack of a definitive partition between slavery and freedom."4 Indeed, as Hartman observes, the transatlantic slave trade not only inaugurated the inextricable, bloodied connection between black subjectivity and subjection but continues to haunt black life in the postbellum era. Freedom is, following Hartman, "fleeting and transient," an abstraction not yet historically realized.5 Yet, it is precisely the "fleeting and transient" qualities of anti-slavery freedom that constitute its persistent possibility.
Profoundly, like freedom, race also operates as a kind of transience as transient and transience indicate both a temporariness as well as an actual person in real and phantasmatic (epistemic, economic, ontological) movement, itinerant without fixed or localizable social position. Inasmuch as race, particularly blackness and black identity, indexes a particular and infinite set of lived social experiences, it simultaneously works to fix and unfix black people's physical and social possibility. More precisely, it is the "elasticity" of blackness—its ability to mean and take on many different ideas, forms, and definitions as well as move and be moved by the empirical perambulations of xenophobic optics that has continued to affect the experience of black life from the antebellum era to the present.6 Reflecting on slavery's vicious economies of captivity, Hartman writes,
Antebellum formations of pleasure, even those of the North, need to be considered in relation to the affective dimensions of chattel slavery since enjoyment is virtually unimaginable without recourse to the black body and the subjection of the captive, the diversions engendered by the dispossession of the enslaved, or the fantasies launched by the myriad uses of the black body. For this reason the formal features of this economy of pleasure and the politics of enjoyment are considered in regard to the literal and figurative occupation and possession of the body.7
Antebellum slavery's figuration of blackness as an elasticized, plastic, simultaneously material and immaterial locale for the cruisings of white empirical and epistemological desire facilitated the mass take-over and theft of blackness from itself. In that way, blackness and black people were objects of abstraction, "fungible" as commodities—nowhere and everywhere at the same time.8 Lindon Barrett is also attuned to the "nowhere and everywhere" [End Page 115] of blackness and black value as it operates in the interstices of materiality and immateriality, presence and absence, form and formlessness, purpose and purposeless and continues to shape an experience of Blackness, of black life and (absent) presence in the United States. Along with Hartman, Barrett argues that the economic, epistemic, ontological, and metaphysical undecidability of blackness is embedded and emerges from a discourse on value. He maintains,
Blackness proves a commodity in a network of international markets. Additionally, however, beyond the legacy of mercenary Western impulses to fashion a "cheap and constant source of labor" with African bodies (Mullin 3), a further transaction concerns itself with efforts to determine African American consciousness. If the material economic transaction produces racial blackness as a phenotypical and commodifiable essence...