Dead Men Printed: Tupac Shakur, Biggie Small, and Hip-Hop Eulogy

The dead body is one thing; the dead black body another. For death is a site obdurately outside all desire and, opposingly, racial blackness a site so fully defined by and within desire it demands regulation, also by definition. In effect, the dead black body may be an ultimate figure of regulation, unruly desire and its risks fully mastered. Yet, as the unfolding history of the United States attests in particular, what is most interesting is that this form of death has a highly useful social valence, and the intrigue of how any form of social productivity might rest on such an inert figure is effectively suggested by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their neo-Marxist usurpation of the interests of psychoanalysis. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari aim to theorize the contingency, coincidence, and continuity of social and phantasmatic productions. They pursue individualizing and collective “flows” of desire passing through what they call “machinic” psychic and social structures that cohere concomitantly as both the subject and the collective of capitalism. These flows, they claim, yield every objective reality as an immediate attestation to psychic desire or, differently put, the phantasmatic appears to know no bounds in its extensiveness, and in its intensity the social appears to know no bounds. Subjectivity, or a subject-effect, falls out these desirous flows only as a residuum of the pyschic and material production fused almost seamlessly together. Deleuze and Guattari write:

The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social and nothing else.

(29; emphasis in original)

The contention here is that to realize a highly consequential social production from dead black bodies proves to be, all at the same time, a substantial feat of phantasm, a profitable social transaction, as well as a thoroughly subjectivizing exercise.

To begin, one might grant that the individual subject is fundamentally a highly prized point of articulation in which one also views an (over)determined foreclosure of other possibilities of desire, phantasm, social production. Because the individual subject is always both desired and desiring, the problem for the interests of collectivity is rendering these two positions fully coincident. The propitious subject speaking through Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, etc., may not advertise that:

[c]ruelty has nothing to do with some ill-defined or natural violence that might be commissioned to explain the history of mankind [or African Americans, or gangsta rap, for that matter]; cruelty is the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them, belaboring them. That is what cruelty means. This culture is not the movement of ideology: on the contrary, it forcibly injects production into desire, and conversely, it forcibly inserts desire into social production and reproduction. For even death, punishment, and torture are desired, and are instances of production.

(145)

One might ask, witnessing the eulogizing of Shakur and Small, what is it that is always being articulated? To what end or use is the “visible” subjective most readily and concertedly put in this crisis? Notions of tragedy and crisis remain crucial to mass mediated responses to the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Small; however—rather than whether or not African Americans (and young black men in particular) are a site of cultural and social crisis—the paramount question involves precisely what kind of social subject is allowed to take public form in collective recognition and negotiation of the crisis. Formulating an answer begins with the recognition that, if the violence of gangsta rap—discursive or physical—is a tragedy, it always attests to (failed) individual fortunes.

Nelson George ends as follows his September 24, 1996, Village Voice commentary on the death of Tupac Shakur: “A gangsta...