Gayatri Charavorty Spivak, in her essay “Harlem,” a piece collected in the superlative volume An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization: “Identitarianism is a denial of the imagination. The imagination is our inbuilt instrument of othering, of thinking things that are not in the here and now, of wanting to become others. I was delighted to see, in a recent issue of the Sunday New York Times devoted to the problem of race, that Erroll McDonald, a Caribbean American editor at Pantheon Books, thinks that 'at the heart of reading is an open engagement with another, often across centuries and cultural moments.' In the academy, the myth of identity goes something like this: the dominant self has an identity, and the subordinate other has an identity. Mirror images, the self othering the other, indefinitely. I call this, in academic vernacular, an abyssal specular alterity.” Spivak first arrived to notoriety and a certain amount of renown on account of her ambitious and altogether remarkable translation of Jacques Derrida’s daunting 1967 door-stopper Of Grammatology, and, like Derrida, she is a theoretician for whom difference is always first and foremost heterogeneous difference, which is to say manifold and hyperactive, a precondition for any kind of discernment or perception whatsoever. A face resembles other faces when we recognize in that face all the various different components that add up to a face—eyes and nostrils and lips and so forth—just as we perform this operation by distinguishing the face from the phenomenal field surrounding it; we differentiate the face from what is not the face, then we differentiate the different elements of the face in mentally processing it as a face. The differences adding up to any given face will also differentiate that face from other faces which we also recognize as faces, but different ones. People are made to look at police line-ups or folders of mug shots: they are expected to differentiate all the faces, and presumably it is hoped that they will remember one in particular. Spivak regularly notes that the persistence of rigid segmentations of difference around racial/ethnic lines and those of binary sexuation are most pervasive and deeply imprinted because these are the first primary differences a child is able to notice with its sensory apparatus before the child comes to attain anything like operational sense from the standpoint of one or another language or sociocultural domain. A huge part of how we come to be socialized involves formal and informal instruction in how to codify these differences within a field of sense. Racism and sexism become routinized campaigns of programming, meant to establish fidelity to the tribe, submission to prescribed roles, and suspicion (or worse) of those classified as Other. These are legitimate issues, they are utterly pervasive, and only the worst kind of sophist would seek to convince you otherwise. Marginalized voices, communities, bodies, and peoples need to and do advocate for themselves. That being said, the identitarian “abyssal specular alterity” that begins by accepting the dominant’s rigid and exclusionary classificatory operations begins by handing to racism and sexism what would on the face of it appear to be both the terms of the debate and a short-circuiting of intersectional opportunities. When awareness of the pure heterogeneity of difference is cut off, it is not only difference itself that is lost in bulk, but along with it the possibility of identifying imaginatively within difference. That racism will tend to have already quite comprehensively poisoned those tasked with resisting it is a fact that was hardly lost on James Baldwin, who shows us some of the forms this can take in his book The Fire Next Time. Baldwin spoke from a place of trauma on behalf of the dormant “humanity” of his countrymen. What he mourns above all else are opportunities never born, a legacy of hatred and violence having arrested a nation in its sundry tribalistic purgatories, the soil rendered inhospitable to any kind of genuine communication across enemy lines and thus of any opportunity for collective growth. In “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” the second, lengthier essay of the two incorporated into The Fire Next Time, its title already suggesting a focus on the imagination as an exemplary political tool complimentary to Spivak’s above-quoted formulation, Baldwin writes of growing up in Harlem, a neglected and yet aggressively scrutinized community that came to progressively take on a great deal of what the oppressor projected upon it (at it, into it). Baldwin writes of having rapidly fallen out of love with the church and its hypocrisy. Instead of the tenets of “Faith, Hope, and Charity,” Christendom came to seem grounded in “Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others.” Terror, fear: those pervasive spiritual and intellectual cripplers, whatever a person’s skin colour. “And the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted and, in the end, hated almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves.” A person could not hope to find a more apt encapsulation of abyssal specular alterity. Baldwin suspects he apprehends in the racial intolerance of whites a kernel of self-hatred and self-ignorance, already the emergence of a suppressed self-identification within difference that throws supposed binaries—“the self othering the other”— into confusion: “whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” There is an absence of authentic conscience, but it is preceded by a failure of imagination. In Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, Baldwin sees a force of black supremacy rising up against white supremacy, and in its so doing becoming mirror image of the dominant, ineffectually Africanizing the tropes of a long extant white supremacy. From the standpoint of Christian white supremacy, black people are the sons and daughters of Ham, cursed as such, unequal, consigned to slavery. From the standpoint of the Nation of Islam, black people are Allah’s chosen, they will rise again, white people are literal devils of whom Allah disapproves. Baldwin: “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.” Hatred and violence are loss, hurt, neglect, and need, before they erupt in the form of explosive animus. But they are above all based in a fear or a terror that produces spiritual atrophy and paralysis of the imagination. “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, which is the only fact we have.” The tribalistic segmentation of difference is a lie that seeks to suppress the dynamism and polyvalence of difference itself, the sole tool we have at our disposal to recognize elements of ourselves (or possible elements of ourselves) in others and identify with them outside of or peripheral to the mandates of the normative. Most of us surely know this, even if we don’t know that we know it. Think of the home in which you grew up. Parents, siblings, any number of intense gulfs between disparate parties, volatile disputes, unexpected changes in trajectory, weird intimacies and alliances, each member of this “nuclear” cell impossible to mistake in their uniqueness for any other, even should there happen to be one or more sets of twins on hand (who can only be confused momentarily). A family of origin is one kind of institution that cannot be summed up meaningfully—if we take my family as an example—as four Caucasian people who happen to not be from the Caucasus and are also quite a bit taller than average. An exemplary film here is, to my mind, anthropologist-ethnologist and peripatetic cinematic-situation-enabler Jean Rouch’s 1961 La pyramide humaine. Rouch thought of himself as a maker not of documentaries but rather of collaborative ethnofictions in which participants from a given milieu contribute to the telling of stories extrapolated from their lives and from the myth-systems of their heritage. Of the collaborative films Rouch made in Africa, he is doubtlessly most famous for those such as Mammy Waters (1953), The Mad Masters (1957), The Lion Hunters (1966) and Jaguar (1967) that focus on myth and ritual within the context of (often remote) tribal microcosms. La pyramide humaine is a purely contemporary urban feature, perfectly easy for the unschooled viewer to take for pure documentary employing more than usually aggressive self-reflexive/self-interrogative techniques, set within (and within the context of) an interracial lycée on the Ivory Coast. The film was made during a period of multiple active movements for national independence in French-speaking African territories, and there is, as one would imagine, a considerable amount of racial tension in play. The film incorporates the students it depicts as agents of critique and disputants in the negotiation of alliances and splits, the film telling us outright that it intends to get to the bottom of why white and black students almost completely avoid fraternizing outside of school. The white student body consists of reactionaries, radicals, and moderates, as does the black student body. Very quickly, it becomes very obvious that the film is not and cannot be a dialectical one about two cleanly divided camps, each Other to the other. This is first and most lastingly evident because all of the black students and all of the white students are dynamic, curious, idiosyncratic individuals, not properly anything resembling a stationary stereotype, though some will, naturally, from time to time embody general tendencies germane to their respective castes, some of the more reactionary students, either black or white (though generally male), remaining more than a little resolute in their avowed support for some sort of general segregation, though the practical logistics of the situation mean that the enforced separation or barrier only really exists in their limited imaginations. This is an institution in which intersectionality hardly needs advocates because it is so obviously an inevitable byproduct of the situation. Black and white students will not only meet outside of class—and have long been doing so—they will meet for far more than merely chitchat, not that this is without its capacity to make trouble for them. What intersectionality needs is a schooling as pertains to its ongoing negotiation, which is to say a pedagogy, which is what Rouch’s film ultimately attempts to instigate, in so doing aligning it with Spivak’s work on the necessary impossibilities of effective aesthetic education (institutional practices devoted to the use of the imagination in producing new alliances and/or lines of fortuitous development). Let us now consider how two recent longform television/streaming series situate the problem of the inauthentic or excessively narrow segmentation/compartmentalization of difference within institutional or extrainstitutional spaces. First consider the second season of the Netflix series Mindhunter, in which behavioural scientists, forensics specialists, and F.B.I. field agents working out of Quantico in the early 1980s, having already begun to compile an exhaustive database concerning patterns within the case histories of serial murderers, consistently find their data ineffectual at best, the condition in which they investigate ongoing cases the same fundamental one of presiding opacity it has always been, the data and the various tenuous assurances it affords, if anything, only muddying the waters all the more. This is the early 80s we are addressing, as mentioned, and in case there should be any doubt, season two has consistent cutaway sequences featuring active serial killer Dennis Rader (The BTK killer), who will not be apprehended until 2005 (by way of old-fashioned police work, facilitated by slip-ups from Mr. Rader). The motto of the series in toto could well be a quip offered by gruff agent Bill Tench (nicknamed “Colonel Patton” by a local lesbian bartender), who responds to free-associate spitball postulations respective what is “known” about certain kinds of criminals from his zealous younger colleague by ruefully observing that he once knew an Irishman who only drank milk. Consider secondarily the remarkable BBC ONE/HBO series I May Destroy You, created by, co-written by, and starring the absolutely astonishing Michaela Coel, the whole all-too-timely premise of which, aside from possibly having something to do with the Hindu concept of māyā, rests on the core precept that as necessary (or at least unavoidable) as it is to have learned preconceptions and strongly held principles, in going out into the world each day one can expect the messy lived affairs mobilized within unavoidably intersectional social environments to throw those preconceptions and principles into an utter shambles, and one will have to adjust, which may even mean ultimately coming to recognize oneself in the worst and most seemingly remote enemy one had heretofore ever imagined was out there somewhere, this specular enemy also having for some time taken up destabilizing residency in one's head.
