Introduction: To Describe a Life

English, Darby

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Introduction: To Describe a Life

Darby English

To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror

Police killings of black people express a foundational truth about American life. Such crimes are not occasional examples of conflict in a generally civil society between the police and the black...

Author

Darby English

PublisherYale University Press

PublisherHutchins Center for African & African American Research

Related print edition pages: pp.1-21

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00170.003

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18029

Chapter subject tags:Race relationsAfrican Americans in artBaldwin, James, 1924-1987Racism--United StatesBlack lives matter movementRacial profiling in law enforcementLeonard, ZoeAfrican American artistsArtists, Black

Introduction: To Describe a Life

Police killings of black people express a foundational truth about American life. Such crimes are not occasional examples of conflict in a generally civil society between the police and the black subjects they’re charged with protecting; they express a steadfast antiblack impulse whose violence became foundational by being for so long omnipresent, unremitting, and unprevented. Recognizing this, Christina Sharpe, one of our most perceptive thinkers, points to what she calls “the entirety of the apparatus aimed at corralling black life.” Sharpe avers that the “violence everywhere and everyday enacted by the state on black people is the grammar that articulates ‘the carceral continuum of black life.’ All black life, on the street and on the page.”1 See Christina Sharpe, “Black Life, Annotated,” New Inquiry, August 8, 2014. Available online at https://thenewinquiry.com/black-life-annotated/ (accessed October 26, 2017). Sharpe attributes the formulation “the carceral continuum of black life” to Frank B. Wilderson III, but the phrase originates with Loïc Waquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment and Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 97. See also Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 75. Indeed, when due dignity and respect come to the likes of Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Ayana Stanley-Jones, and Alton Sterling, it’s one Facebook post too late. The image archive of each person is a composite portrayal of unfinished business. What gives these name-images their flickering incandescence if not an oscillation between the living flow that each was and the figure of senseless death she or he became. Each now assumes the hypostatized form of the case, where the extensiveness of ordinary life collapses into the living that might have been, if only . . . As a case, an individual exists too distinctly.

During her or his time, each of these people was the agent of a life, at once the framer and the witness of a process of living, of being and doing. Now that the living is done, each becomes an emblem of life’s telltale flicker. Worse, a particular lack of empathy is accorded to them as victims: “it’s just the thing that keeps happening to black people.” That means, “Not a thing that’s happening to us as a community, to us as a society, not a thing that’s being done in their name. It’s just the thing that keeps happening to black people.” Speaking less than forty-eight hours after the killing of Castile by Minneapolis police, and early fallout from its videotaped aftermath, the author of the above words, writer Mychal Denzel Smith, problematized his own distance from this kind of violence: “My first reaction . . . was: I can’t watch another lynching.”2 Mychal Denzel Smith, in “Marc Lamont Hill and Mychal Denzel Smith: We Must End State Violence Against Black Bodies,” Democracy Now, July 7, 2016. Available online at www.democracynow.org/2016/7/7/marc_lamont_hill_mychal_denzel_smith (accessed October 27, 2016). As the dedicatee of a vigil or protest, a Philando Castile or an Alton Sterling supplies the totem for reflections on the nature of life, its pointless loss and its valuation on a sliding scale. Here, to describe a life is to paraphrase it; and to paraphrase is to set the original aside. Removed from immediate consciousness, a described life is not merely past, not merely an article of memory. It becomes the occasion of a narrative that closes on a heinous injustice, or several; it sacrifices on the altar of abstraction those moments of the living person that were singular and unrepeatable, irreducibly human. During roiling crisis, the life described by birth, good living, and premature violent death becomes an abstraction — an integer, a figure of crisis as such, an entry in a growing table of cases. Even at its most well meaning, media epistemology proudly projects body counts in a spirit of data ex machina, portraying these sacred losses in series. As of this writing, The Guardian boasts the most vigilant mainstream oversight of the U.S. policing crisis, albeit in a Web feature called “The Counted.” Each new entry becomes the more garish by the teeming background of precedents. Notably, the feature borrows its luridly colored, vociferating typography from road-hazard signage.

How far this system of representation delivers us from what persons are and do. Marc Lamont Hill, Smith’s interlocutor in the conversation cited above, observed that the victims of police shootings “are literally invisible to us . . . before they are shot and killed.” Hill continues:

And then we either have video or . . . wall-to-wall news coverage in which they become visible to us. We have the entire world watching and dissecting their lives. And what happens is [that] the nuances and interior of their lives get dismissed. . . . They are avatars for a cause and, in a way, the justification of the denigration of [black] people’s humanity. And I think that that’s the thing that we have to get to, is that we have to understand that their humanity has never been in question. . . . How do we shift the [mass-cultural] conversation to that?3 Ibid.

Smith and Hill rightly decry a conversation wherein the operative conception of life imagines something that can be described, not a process that is lived before it is violently ended. Attuned to representations that etherealize life, they decry the supplementary violence that diminishes persons to what Sharpe has called “the currents behind a body in flight.”4 Sharpe, in Selamawit Terrefe, “What Exceeds the Hold?: An Interview with Christina Sharpe,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 29 (2016). Available online at https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e06 (accessed October 27, 2017).

In an email notifying friends and colleagues about the lecture series in which this book originated, I invoked the recently emergent hypervisibility of black life obliterated.

Collectively titled “The Right to Reflect: Lectures at the Intersection of Art and Race Terror,” the lectures comprise new work occasioned by the ongoing event of the hypervisible destruction of black life. Motivating this work was a desire to think about the swelling unpleasantness of black experience in the United States — a widely registered sense of backsliding — with art as my chosen tool. Among my presuppositions was this: in emergency conditions, as demands for art to be pertinent increase with the want for strong analyses of “real” conditions, the peculiar realness of art risks fading from view. Some recent art permits deep insight into definitive elements of the present situation while concurrently challenging popular sentiment and established taste. Each lecture engages a single object or project — a bonded nickel replica of the Lorraine Motel (November 1), Pope.L’s Skin Set Drawings (November 2), and a 2015 portrait of a black policeman by Kerry James Marshall (November 3) — to contextualize art’s faculty to question our most prestigious historical forms and significations by instituting new ones.

I spoke then, as I write now, with a certain uneasiness: is this any time for questioning? A lot of people exhibit a certainty that I do not share about how best to describe the prevailing state of affairs. It can be a great thing to inject doubt into the air surrounding a plight, but it’s also terribly, horribly difficult. Today’s seems a particular kind of violence, an ultrarich new formulation — as though it weren’t just happening but also howling “You have no chance!” What could a conscious black male city-dweller possibly have to wonder about at a time like this?

If the rat-a-tat says to you slow down, precisely in order to ask what it is that is going on, then its reminder is that, while thinking in parallel with crisis is unavoidable, synchronizing thought with crisis or obliteration is not. Urgency neither necessitates nor justifies elision. When it comes to a problem calling for analysis or interpretation, patience with the sources usually makes for better solutions. In this connection, it feels important to acknowledge the indispensable role that myth often plays in crisis: a few stories are repeated as if they said it all. As concerning as the substance of a crisis myth is its power to define reality. The return to prominence of myth today scares me. In all of the killing, a certain myth sees the racist power structure doing its thing again — but, or rather so, it begs an enormous question: to whom is this life-ending injustice being done, again and again, with impunity? When an outlook sees the return of some old form in each iteration of a patterned phenomenon, does it not concede something to the very repetitions it would claim to theorize anew? What about life outside what Sharpe creatively calls the hold? In fact, the hold offers just one way of fitting things together.5 See Sharpe, “The Hold,” in Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 68–101. True enough: making while black means a constant negotiation of the urge to invent amid the demotivating knowledge that, to a certain pitch of mind, anything you might create has already been invented. So rare are interlocutors who do not seem certain that you long ago exhausted your full capacity. So how do you work this through? This is a problem for all artists, not just for those who make while black. But the latter face a special version of the problem, one with particular qualities that I attempted to describe in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007) and 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

To negotiate instances of creativity that trouble (and sometimes embarrass) instituted meanings of subjectivity and crisis representation calls for a quantum of descriptive work. For this reason, the chapters that follow this introduction hew closely to a small number of objects. In each, I ally with my subjects, more or less, in pitting description against the temptation of readymade perspectives. An observation by Eve Sedgwick captures the sense of description that I intend:

Then it’s a question of what do you need/can you do to yield the richest possible analysis, the most novel narrative that also does truthful justice to its subjects. This renews or restates the necessity of close reading in certain critical situations, especially those where what one demands of the analysis, where what one needs the analysis to yield, is an antidote to rampant generalization, to a set of bifurcated/bifurcating questions that evacuate complexity in the name of quelling emergency with answers that actually precede any questioning. Or, to put it more generously, questions whose form engenders impoverished analyses. The commitment to description that is not in a predetermined relationship to theoretical questions, even though it would ideally be open to them at every point, is a really important practice.6 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in conversation with Gavin Butt, “Art, Writing, Performativity,” in Frieze Projects and Frieze Talks, 2006–2008 (London: Frieze, 2009), 129.

Indeed failures of representation abound, their plenitude inviting a question demanding time that the current high-velocity discourse seems to stingily withhold. The question is — or, rather, remains: how do you do representation in a crisis? A crisis in culture means a crisis in thought. Confusion is par for the course; admitting this, less so. A vastly expanded view of culture in relation to crisis (the formulation is Douglas Crimp’s) would include articulations that mirror the instability of the predicaments giving rise to speech.7 See Douglas Crimp, “A Day without Gertrude,” in Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 166. But today, it seems, first and foremost crisis must be legible, accompanied by easy-to-use narratives that explain and direct — typically by reference to neat oppositionalities. But the vernacular, organic epistemologies that crisis actually precipitates muddle those oppositions, and, at the very least, invite us to consider what may be good for crisis thinking about less-than-perfect legibility.

The preceding is to say that the lectures responded to a rather congealed situation: the prevailing appetite for blanket solutions made it difficult to reflect freely, even in the Obama era. I responded by doing it anyway, through extended consideration of two objects and one ongoing artistic project. Each chapter centers on a ruminative object or project that stages an ingression of creative imagination into some instituted form — the black male subject, color, people, the historical present, love — yielding a new symbolization. Each work entails an exercise of agency, which has as its basis and its framework the picking of options from what the future holds.8 This formulation adapts Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), xiii. First published as Unsere breite Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010).

Every sheet of Pope.L’s Skin Set Drawings, for instance, attempts to portray the (continual) action of a person thinking about people as a new problem, a thorn in the temple of anyone who attempts to lift an easy meaning from it. Persons who see people are the dumbest people in the world, Pope.L’s series appears to sing-speak. (To this cause Emily Dickinson lends considerable help in the form of her conviction that “eyes were not meant to know.”)9 Emily Dickinson F449 (1862), J45. The Skin Set Drawings imply seeing but record, or index, knowing. A full picture of their representational activity accounts for its meandering epistemology and for the thrilling graphic and textual activities it comprises — that is, the drawings know that they lack synthetic ambition, harbor no synthetic vision of the organization of knowledge about people, place no faith in the ability of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Can we look at them and know the same?

As I write in chapter 2, Pope.L’s project’s manifest subject is the problem of being present to difference, and trying to stay that way. The ecstasy permeating the project, an ecstasy of differing, counts among its most engaging aspects. As though unable to respect or police the appropriate boundaries, Pope.L embraces, hurls himself into, everything visual thought can generate. The novelty of each of the many drawings renders every such embrace as a moment of becoming — each a form of slippage, as when the mind suddenly loosens, gives itself over.10 This formulation is inspired by Jacqueline Rose, “Specimen Days,” in Rose, The Last Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), 183. “Becoming what” may be precisely the wrong question: the subject at issue, adapted to plenitude, does not teach us much when considered as a case, except that maybe there is no such thing as a single motive.

Boym Partners’ replica of the Lorraine Motel operates in a related fashion. An artless object that adopts as its prime inhabitation the moment and site of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis in 1968, the Boym Replica requires of whoever may engage it that she have a faculty for thinking about the meanings, plural, of working through a past that comprises that event. The object advances a problem of distance we didn’t know we had: “as mankind moves along in time, it thinks it has left the past behind; the distance afforded by the present moment depreciates the value of past experiences as points of orientation.”11 Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present, p. xii. A kind of visual thud, the Boym Replica denies the pastness of King’s vision of racial reconciliation, mitigating what E. P. Thompson called the condescension of posterity, which blinds us to past articulations that speak directly to present phenomena and needs. To compel fixation on the time and place of King’s fleshly end is also to militate against the vaporization of personhood entailed by any dismissal of his morality — that is, the meaning of his work and the way he pursued it. The work, then, invites a sustained reflection on cultural mobility or transference: the transference of forms both live and lifeless from one sphere to another (e.g., there and then to here and now). Kerry James Marshall’s untitled 2015 portrait of an imaginary black male police officer wholly preserves the strangeness of the other. Suspended between his occupation and his existence as such causes this “portrait” to disrupt the perpetrator/victim dyad that is so often the linchpin of oppositional politics. As to whether Marshall’s subject is one of us or one of them, we can only be unsure.

As I saw it, among the many other things they do, these artworks confronted one of the hardest consequences of existing in the present: having to negotiate the unfolding of a massively demoralizing tragedy without the comfort of consoling narratives or satisfying conceptualizations. Given so much pain, so many cases, so many perspectives, and the many ways in which different truth claims get complicated when they pass to a larger public, who am I to adjudicate them? I could only muster basic questions like, How do we deal with this? Even this question is hard to put in certain company: if you’re angry, then act angry. Like everyone else, I’m constantly wondering what I can do and worrying about the sufficiency of a given action. So I did what I do: I turned to some momentous works of art created in and for this time, artworks situated within and against our culture of happy summary. When I really needed help, some art had actually helped me. Availing myself of it, I’d found that I harvested more questions than answers.

This felt deeply right, because it meant keeping a finger in the thick contingency of the situation. A goal I set for the lectures was to narrate this procedure, hoping my articulations would show that when an artist approaches an urgent affair obliquely — that is, to an end that feels a little hermetic, as in, necessary to interpret — the results can prove indispensable. In the process, I have done everything I can to avoid underestimating the difficulty of this exercise.

Ever since the feeling of moment set in — when we were, all of us, catapulted into a mediated hyperawareness that black people must now demand publicly not to be killed on spec — I have wanted to explore this mood and the dilemmas it presents, and have argued, never delightedly, in favor of staying with the harder inquiries.12 How to theorize the gap between dialogue and headway? Can one use the senses of fear and futility to gain insight? What’s forestalling a conversation about the issues that preserves, rather than eschews, their intricacy? What does it mean at a time like this to side with presence and the senses against the summarizing, explanatory array? How to shape one’s complaint if an interlocutor argues rightly — by insisting, for instance, on the concreteness, corporeality, and presence of human life — only in terms one cannot countenance? In a historical moment when “the everyday occurs as a fusion of consciousness and software” (Gumbrecht), how to commit deliberative attention to social and intellectual practices that thin concrete corporeality as a substrate of human life? For instance, I spent much of the time it took me to metabolize the details of Michael Brown’s killing by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014 at my desk at The Museum of Modern Art — a circumstance that compelled me to ask what I could do from that position by way of response. What was my purpose in venturing to respond from such a seemingly inapposite location? Precisely to ensure museum-goers’ consciousness of this fatal shooting of an unarmed and innocent black citizen. Precisely to recognize, outwardly, that a museum should offer no “escape” from the predicaments that such events rouse. Precisely to insist, as I could, that the very definition of response, especially on such a stirring occasion, ought to be as expansive as possible.

What I could manage promptly, while the public’s wound was still gaping, was to install a topical work of art. In an institution rarely touted for its agility, some excellent colleagues and I positioned Benny Andrews’s masterful No More Games — purchased directly from the artist just after its completion in 1970 — in a greatly trafficked space (fig. 1).13 Available online at www.moma.org/collection/works/78585 (accessed November 12, 2017). We did so desperately and a little bit blindly, because we had to do something. That something was a placeholder for what this book is trying to do.

~

Description: No More Games by Andrews, Benny

Fig. 1 / Benny Andrews (1930–2006), No More Games, 1970. Oil on canvas with collage of cloth and canvas; diptych: 100.9 × 50.2 in. (256.2 × 126.7 cm) and 100.9 × 50.9 in. (256.2 × 129.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund

A painted collage eight feet square, No More Games presents a field of bare canvas hued faintly like desert sand, and filling at least as much of the work’s surface as the paint that gives it a meaning. The scene comprises two figures, a black boy seated on an upturned crate in a pensive posture, and a fleshy white subject just to his left, prone against the earth and draped in a felicitous interpretation of the American flag. The diptych structure divides them — she’s in one half, he in the other — but the image laid upon it muddles this putative separateness. Equal parts stars and stripes and inconstant reds and blues, the flag, like the figures, is part painting and part collage. While the vaguely Edenic setting of No More Games nods to countless painted allegories, the work tells only one straightforward historical truth: these two are representational unequals. Whereas it constructs her as a lusciously painted, modeled form, it pieces him together from raw, rough-cut, smudged fabrics. Except for this one thing, the painting is a tremendous “accomplishment in ambiguity.”14 The phrase originates with Jasper Johns, who used it to describe what he saw when looking retroactively at the number paintings he created between 1955 and 1959. See David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 163. A bevy of scripts about sex, race, and the life of symbols in the United States anxiously awaits summoning to service here. But Andrews’s picture ratifies none of them — we don’t know where we are, or what the subjects are doing there. We want to. Probably we feel that we need to. But we don’t get to. Whatever has transpired under the sulfur sun of No More Games Andrews consigned to this moment’s past. It is unavailable.

What counts is the material situation at hand. Andrews’s uneven distribution of actual blankness, in the expanse of vacant canvas, allowed him to build his primary figure up and out. This figure is layered forth until he becomes, in effect, inevitably a party to a proper witnessing. And what we witness is not an unpunctuated social fact but an alert, cogitating subject in an uncertain relation to a (deflated) allegory of his homeland, indeed to action itself. What are his hands doing? What do they enfold? In this way, No More Games advances the adolescent black male subject as a significance, a presence to be registered rather than a succession of perceptions framed by a specific system of representation. Viewer frustration counts directly toward the materiality I have in mind. On this scene, contending means considering: looking deeply at a stationary thinking figure (reminiscent of Rodin’s), scanning the oddities of its construction (a painted mask of canvas and cardboard make up the head, fragments of a T-shirt and trousers the bulk of the body; the use of paint alone was reserved for the neck, hands, and shoes). Andrews leaves us to explore the particularity of the sitter and his circumstances without benefit of a narration that would make the consideration educative. Indeed, the upfront perverseness with which it takes up themes bounteously addressed, though hardly exhausted, by received opinions and practices is a cue to the work’s importance. An expressively abundant statement about race relations, especially as sex and class transect them, No More Games honors the instability of its topics rather than elides it in the name of easy summary. Its fierce ambiguity makes description an unavoidably ethical matter.

When No More Games went up at MoMA in September 2014, the operative definition of crisis response was hardly expansive enough to include making or sincerely considering difficult art. But in fact everybody invested in the crisis that Brown’s assassination engendered — that is, anyone with a feeling for the unarmed and innocent dead, their survivors, their legacies — was responding in her own way. On her own time, in her own terms, and sometimes by recourse to means that did not conform to the going notion of appropriate response. Using the object/viewer dyad to illustrate response appealed to me precisely because of the object’s ruminative structure: as much as anything else art is “for,” it is for thinking with. And No More Games occupies that crucial cultural space energetically and devotedly. That made it feel urgent to show and to study. We did not know it then, but the months and years following the destruction of Michael Brown would see the unofficial reinstatement of a longstanding custom: periodic instances in which shockingly disproportionate and brazenly compensatory police brutality targets black citizens. Multifarious new information streams, issuing instantaneous bulletins and amplifying every articulation to the max, mean that representations themselves — of event and aftermath, outcry and backlash — have been equally definitive. Holding a space for oneself or one’s own means gets harder by the day.

Advance to November 2015. I’m well into the research and writing of two of the lectures but fully undecided about the third when some university business necessitates a visit to Marshall’s studio. Following a meeting in the loft that Marshall primarily uses to draw and read, I descend a stair into the snug, tidy area where he paints. Nearby sits an unfinished painting, a three-quarters view of a single figure bent roughly at the middle. At this point Marshall has only spread a ground layer of Venetian red and, atop it, begun to break the sixty-by-sixty-inch field into two primary units, one each for figure and ground. From the hues and the massing in the picture just under way, though, it seems clear that he is painting a cop on a scene awash in Chicago’s telltale gray-blues. I ask to return when the work is complete and Marshall obliges.

Indeed, Untitled (policeman) turns out to be a picture of a cop and nothing but a cop. Marshall has rendered his subject utterly without judgment — an evident choice that I found at first disappointing, then vexing, and then poignant. He hasn’t painted a takedown; that isn’t how he has played it. Rather, from his interest in the complexity of the issues in play, he has portrayed not the dumb application of power but its gyroscopic activity, an interplay of perpetration and suffering. As a black man, Marshall’s cop is the agent both of the erasure of black being and of the insistent refusal of that erasure. This instability, concentrated materially as well as ontologically in the image, gives topical new form to Marshall’s aesthetic of unswerving love for everything in black life, from the vernacular to the metaphysical. This is what doing something meant for Marshall. And in looking to me a lot like the work of a social actor whose thinking left room for doubt, it felt bracingly honest.

A few days later, the City of Chicago released an October 2014 video captured by dashboard cameras. The footage shows Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke ending Laquan McDonald’s life because he was carrying a knife. Van Dyke fires one bullet to immobilize the fleeing youth before closing in on him and emptying his magazine of fifteen more rounds, fourteen of which drill into McDonald’s body in nine places. Between its completion and its debut one week later at a Miami art fair, Marshall’s uncannily Chicago-esque depiction of an imaginary police officer had collapsed into yet another matrix of cultural resonance — with its ambiguity intact.

During the summer of 2016, as I finalized the lecture typescripts, I was worried as hell about delivering them in the present climate. Like a lot of people, I was thinking about what meaningful action is. Modest in tone and scope, the lectures would report out — nothing more — from a particular juncture in a process of worrying about my country, my life, and my competence, as an art historian, to act in the gap between the two (pace Robert Rauschenberg). I wasn’t trying to worry productively, but the occasion for which I was preparing was sufficiently august to make the temptation too difficult to resist. (In fact I titled the series “The Right to Reflect,” in full cognizance of the mirandizing rarely afforded to police-shooting victims, to insist in a small way on the right to reflect instead of produce.)

One day that summer I saw Tipping Point (fig. 2), a stack of used, first-edition hardcovers of James Baldwin’s justly notorious book The Fire Next Time. Leonard gathered fifty-three volumes into a stack, each unit representing one year in the life, up to 2016, of Baldwin’s text, which has remained continuously in print since its publication in 1963. The time had come for Leonard to respond, as she could, to the ongoing hypervisible destruction of black life by unchecked police power. From the humble clarity of Leonard’s response I took a needed sense of permission to stick to the plan.15 Had I time in Cambridge to deliver an extended preface to the lecture trilogy, I would have used it to talk about how directly Tipping Point had, on the one hand, mirrored and thereby assuaged my frustration precisely about what could be done, and on the other, proved Sedgwick’s intuition that the “most novel narratives” do “truthful justice to their subjects” and affirm “the necessity of close reading in certain critical situations.”

~

Description: Tipping Point by Leonard, Zoe

Fig. 2 / Zoe Leonard, Tipping Point, 2016. Fifty-three copies of the first edition of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, 39.5 × 5.75 × 8 in. (100.3 × 14.6 × 20.3 cm). Published by Dial Press, New York, 1963

My encounter with Tipping Point brought a welcome mixture of compression and relief. The compression builds with the stacking in the stack, in the unit-by-unit establishment of its overall weight and presence. The same compression radiates outward, when the body registers the work’s weighted scale (Tipping Point hits me at the belt) and the mind its slight but determined will to uncompress and fall. Instead of remaining constant, the body pressure varies. I knew from the start that mine was a strong reading of Tipping Point; after all, I adore Baldwin, minor differences, and thinking about both. But I also know that not everyone cares or will be attentive in the same way to the possibility of seeing those books fall. So one can speak about the particularity of the compression: like a lover’s address, it’s just for me. With that feeling of belonging came relief: Tipping Point is a sculpture “about” books that could help me to introduce the project of a book about to originate in my own efforts at meaningful action through embodied performances of criticality. My book about — what? Wondering what to do when everything is so fucked up, and being reminded, for the umpteenth time, that you don’t know where the solace is until you get there. That you do all kinds of things, like make a stack of a certain book you’ve been collecting . . .

Leonard thinks that what caused Tipping Point finally to come to form was the congealing impact of the most recent series of murders of young black men by the police.16 Zoe Leonard, personal correspondence with the author, March 3, 2017. The correspondence is also the source of the quotes following. These killings, though, had not occasioned her first registration of the resonance of Baldwin’s text; she was just twenty-two when Michael Stewart — a guy around her age, familiar to her from the club scene — was killed by New York transit police, late in September 1983. To lose a friend at such a life stage to a systematic slaughter is to know a shaping kind of pain. The books were there already for the most part: when Leonard declared Tipping Point a committed sculpture, in 2016, she had spent roughly half a decade collecting first editions of The Fire Next Time. Both activities were part of what she described as “a long process of thinking about that book, that title, and the book stack as a form.” If we find Tipping Point hard to square with the kind of statement we want or feel we deserve, then it may produce a worthy occasion to reassess that desire or sense of entitlement. Tipping Point issued from the kind of doing — closer in spirit, perhaps, to mulling than to acting — that immersive, ruminative thought actuates. Leonard was creating not so as to “act” in a facile political sense — the mode that a priori either proscribes art from political action or stipulates explicitness in art’s politics — but rather to register a desire to act. That sort of desire, or need, emerges during a process of thinking that accords due respect to potential action by means of the deepest possible consideration of what effective action would entail. And such consideration is to be distinguished, sharply, from a judgmental attitude that would, say, resolve in advance all questions about the form politics can and cannot assume.

In fact, the police’s use of brutality and murder to control the black American population is a main theme of Baldwin’s text, but not its principal one. That, rather, would be the necessity of patience in dealing with the sources of our pain. Baldwin’s hardest book, The Fire Next Time is equal parts a merciless disclosure of the American attachment to violently discriminatory life-ways and a tenderhearted defense of love’s power to erode such attachments. Among the book’s richest passages are its accounts of Baldwin’s many direct exposures to this stifling process as a youth in interwar Harlem. He counts himself among the black boys “lost” to the countless everyday hurts that “wear one down to a cutting edge.” By the age of fourteen, he had realized that his fears were a part of him and “controlled [his] vision of the world.” For something like liberation he then turned to the black church, only to find in it an institutionalized version of those same fears, exemplified for him in its prohibition against the love of white people. Baldwin refused this prohibition, which he saw as totally of a piece with foundational American notions about the fate of its black citizens. “To be born black in a white country, . . . you give up hope of communion.” In the name of love, Baldwin refused this sacrifice of hope. That meant declining with equal force both the police’s insistences on the low value of his life and his own community’s articulations about permeating, systematic racism. Both parties, Baldwin writes, supply a perspective from which “there is no way to get through a life . . . to be loved. The universe has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can.”17 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1962, 1963 (reprint ed. New York: Vintage, 1993), 19, 27, 30, 30.

Baldwin’s book comprises two love letters. The one that appears first Baldwin wrote in 1963, on the hundredth anniversary of emancipation, and addressed to his nephew James, then fifteen. (Baldwin was thirty-nine.) The second, written the previous year as an essay for The New Yorker, is a love letter to America, or a part of it anyway: the “handful that we are” positioned “to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country” by a not-incremental adjustment of consciousness.18 Ibid., 105. The project Baldwin sets for himself centers on his dispute with the notion of fate: it “had nothing to do with anything I was, or contained, or could become; my fate had been sealed forever from the beginning of time.”19 Ibid., 36. Pleading with young James to resist proclamations about his fate, the letter is also Baldwin’s attempt to stop fate from consuming his nephew’s mind before he can achieve the concept of love. It’s been a hundred years (now 154), and still we wait, but love is the only road to where we want to go, and love is the hardest thing. You can know all about love and still keenly fear, as did Baldwin, the coming of “a day when the United States decide[s] to murder its [black citizens] systematically instead of little by little and catch-as-catch-can.”20 Ibid., 53.

Indeed, the police and other “horrors of the American Negro’s life” feature prominently in Baldwin’s text. So, too, do what Baldwin calls the “merciless formulations” of black extremists. In Baldwin’s morality, both parties figure the temptation to hypostatize a condition that he is at pains to render with maximum complexity.21 Baldwin himself finds the temptation difficult to resist. “I cannot risk assuming,” he writes, “that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms.” Ibid., 68. Whether assessing Bull Connor or Elijah Muhammad, Baldwin finds that “such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes . . . historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person.”22 Ibid., 43–44. “Love,” Baldwin writes, “takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough . . . sense of quest and daring and growth.”23 Ibid., 95.

Baldwin’s adoption of the love-letter form already speaks to his desire to rein in the abstractions that have always made the national conversation on race (seem) impossible. The epistolary form at once contracts that conversation to an utterly interpersonal scale and allocates room to the other. In Baldwin’s conception, LOVE is the magma where static representations of culture, as sources of both “attitudes” and possibility, dissolve. With LOVE, Baldwin is talking about nothing less than the relinquishment of difference. LOVE, here, is a social form where difference, in its customary guises, ceases to be trackable.24 This is neither utopia nor formal collectivity. The zone that “relatively conscious whites and relatively conscious blacks” populate is willfully nebulous. Indeed his operative “we” is an interracial coalition; he describes it as “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — [If we] do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare.”25 Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 105. The warning that commentators repeatedly insist Baldwin issues by paraphrasing biblical prophecy in his title, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”? It doesn’t exist. Warning is not a decisive feature of the text but a projection onto it.26 Readers bent on preserving the air of biblical truth may be forgetting that the most immediate contemporary referent for Baldwin’s title was not the bible but a slave song, “Mary Don’t You Weep,” that had been revived as a popular hit by two different acts in 1958 and 1959 and became a stalwart anthem during the Civil Rights Movement. Before these words, in which Baldwin’s message is so often and wrongly understood to condense, the writer places a crucial conditional clause: “If we do not now dare everything.”27 Ibid. Baldwin places no faith in prophesy, that twin of fate. Like artists, lovers make their world.

Tipping Point’s physical volume is so completely involved with Baldwin’s literary one as functionally to cancel the difference between them. But when I first saw the work, I saw bodies: the stacked bodies of shooting victims. (Leonard has stacked things before, but those things have felt less like bodies than like the units that Tipping Point comprises.) One effect of Tipping Point having happened to me when it did, in the middle of another summer of police shootings, was that I would not only make connections between the work and the world, I would force them. After all, the serial aspect of the sculpture is only legible through another repetition — the repetition defining a crisis engendered by police killings of innocent and unarmed black citizens. By this assessment, the uprightness of the sculpture was perfectly memorial in cast, the pile being thirty-eight inches high (it hits me at the waist), just high enough to confirm, to me, the impeccable trueness of an inexorably rising body count, of the haunting fear that matters will worsen before they mend. Add one more book and the stack will fall — an evident fact that might only heighten the oblique realism of Tipping Point, a cenotaph to precarious lives lost to pervasive, unanalyzed fear. One could say something about fate here.

The longer I sat with this idea of memorial, the uneasier I felt. It seemed too easy to make the stack over into an image, as the notion of a memorial so readily does. Tipping Point must have some other representational and affective work, some project distinct from arty reportage.28 And yet, could it be more obvious that Leonard — by her choice of a widely cited “classic” of a book — places no faith in the illusion of an artwork somehow existing on its own terms? This is no inert stack of books: it’s less a body-object with integrity and stability than a chain made up of withering bonds, a disaster waiting to happen. Its definitive repetition extends beyond bodies and killings to losses per se. Meanwhile, looking at writing about killing, and listening to talk about it, abstracts these processes from the matters of the flesh that reside at their core. The body of the victim is an organizing structure that maintains order by appropriating and incorporating whatever threatens to disrupt it. The political and symbolic value of destroying black bodies in public lies here: so pitched is those bodies’ fleshly threat to lives that matter unquestionably, and to America’s forms and ideals of integrity (e.g., police), that we become the ideal of worthy sacrifice. By abstracting loss through the “production” of yet another dead body, fleshly black existence designates the more vividly the wild aspects of contemporary life, the aspects that resist mastery, domestication, and control. As imminent disaster, Tipping Point engenders a more authentic response to a related but not comparable experience of loss, one that does not prise apart the perceiving subject from the perceived object.

Tipping Point is a complete work whose basic dimensions will not change but whose posture and condition will. Leonard secured the form by placing the flatter specimens first. But as she increased the load, the whole assembly began to lean spineward (the work has a spine; fig. 3). One glance is enough to remind us, or teach us, that a book is not a squared and even thing but a wiggly, organic one. A trade hardcover may never have laid flat. It’s a stack of paper, sewn through with cotton thread and fixed to covers with natural glue. The tension needed to bind all of this pinches at the spine, causing what conservators call “wedge,” sometimes from birth.29 It’s the variability of this tension that determines whether a given binding, once it starts to loosen, will cradle a book’s pages in a concave space or propel them outward from a convex one. Wedge reminds us, again, that the word “book” derives from words meaning “tree trunk” or “block of wood.” In fact it’s the stacking of wedge upon wedge, their deformations either concave or convex, that produces the familiar lean that will bend, by a few perceptible degrees, a pile of books stacked neatly but just a smidge too high. This is what brings the body immediately to bear in any viewing of Tipping Point. We all have a physical memory of the kind of mess this pile will make when it crashes; we carry that memory in our gut. Tipping Point is a pile of raging love arranged to be perceived with the body. There’s nothing inert about it, or about one’s experience of it.

~

Description: Tipping Point, alternate view by Leonard, Zoe

Fig. 3 / Zoe Leonard, Tipping Point, 2016. Fifty-three copies of the first edition of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, 39.5 × 5.75 × 8 in. (100.3 × 14.6 × 20.3 cm). Published by Dial Press, New York, 1963

The constitutive units of the stack had undergone considerable transformation well before it came together. Of the fifty-three books that Tipping Point comprises, each shows quite differently because, up to now, each has led its own life. The varying spine colors suggest something of the textures of those lives (fig. 4). The visibly dynamic chemistry of the fugitive, noncolorfast dyes that Dial Press used to try to mark out The Fire Next Time as a distinctive and irresistible object now induce a local registration of all this situated living. Among them, black is the constant; red and several variations on orange, the variables. Equally impossible to reconstruct are the conditions that went into producing the chromatic and other physical irregularities that at once hold the viewer and pull her along a course around Tipping Point and along its length. During a book’s life, everything about its paper core (or text block) will change in proportion to changes in its environment. Being hygroscopic, paper grows both up and down from the water it consumes and expels. So some of Leonard’s copies still have their original flat cover boards; others’ boards are bent from time spent under gentle, constant pressure; others cock from standing a long time beside a shorter neighboring thing and stretching into its unclaimed airspace. The weight of a book alone (considerably greater than that of its binding) will cause its text block to sag, forward and down if stored vertically, or out, into a more pronounced wedge, if stored flat. The merging itself of fifty-three specimens — come together along an untraceable cartography of shops, boxes, desks, shelves, bedside tables, wet and cold or hot and dry rooms — relates change as a fact, albeit one that cannot be thought apart from the same. Here, a formal story about the mutable conditions of light and heat, and about paper’s gift for describing their impact, also entails a story about reception. Differences give the form its interest: the wavering same describes the assortment of welcomes and emplacements Baldwin’s text has met with during its time. It reminds us again that the volume is, in large part, its spatiotemporal dispersal — the line across space and time from writer to reader that every bought book describes.

~

Description: Tipping Point, detail by Leonard, Zoe

Fig. 4 / Zoe Leonard, Tipping Point, 2016. Fifty-three copies of the first edition of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, 39.5 × 5.75 × 8 in. (100.3 × 14.6 × 20.3 cm). Published by Dial Press, New York, 1963

A quantity of copies of a book written by James Baldwin is presented by Zoe Leonard for public consideration as a sculpture. Tipping Point can be described as a design that Leonard realized by recourse to a composition that works in the following way: demarcate a space to create a volume, then fill it entirely with the work of another producer.30 A good number of other producers, in fact, when you account for all those who had a hand in making this thing right here what it is. Alongside Leonard and James Baldwin, that ensemble includes the printer, the bookbinder, the collector, the Alibris inventory manager, et al. Where, then, does Leonard’s work stop and Baldwin’s begin? We might justly describe the resulting artistic compound as the work of a gay black male Christian infidel queer European-American woman born between 1924 and 1961. Leonard sets in motion the question of authorial primacy — usually determinate when works of sculpture or literature are in play — and leaves its terms to oscillate unfettered. We know this artistic move by heart, but that doesn’t stop certain instances having unique effects.

I like that Leonard strides onto the scene only to cede Baldwin the floor. Here, the move toward the other is so complete as to constitute unimpeachable evidence that “we only exist through the others who make up the storehouse of the mind.”31 Rose, “Mass Psychology,” in Rose, The Last Resistance, 62. Indeed Baldwin’s and Leonard’s identities are not precisely respective here, but rather subsumed by a complex within which the only identities on offer are unstable ones. Relatedly, I like how Tipping Point constitutes the “we” who might be its viewers as both an audience to art and an indivisible mass of Baldwinian love agents. I like how the rudeness of the book stack — perhaps a hard format to love — succinctly restates Baldwin’s theses about what’s hard about love. I like that the book remains shut. In this way, Tipping Point refrains from recasting or even amplifying Baldwin’s words and just reminds us they’re there. These books exist in a moment-to-moment specificity. They wait to be read privately by individuals, not performed aloud or collectively. They have questions about our “we.”

In Tipping Point’s presence, one is privy not to The Fire Next Time’s messages about difference but only to the book’s form as a multiple that makes a spectacle of differing, the main elements of that spectacle being the organicism or almost-aliveness of the book itself, the changes seeable in each volume, and the nonidentical physical sameness that causes the stack to lean.32 In this way, it bears no generic affinity with a serial artwork. As we have seen, Baldwin’s book itself lacks a message about difference in the empirical, informational sense. It disputes the historical and public attitudes that would make difference a fact describing a life before a feeling for a living can even develop. In place of such a message, we find Baldwin as we find Leonard: working, in the very midst of race terror, to envision configurations that push the question of difference into a realm where — as in love — its form becomes exceptionally difficult to track.

The column’s weary chroma, ragged outline, and leaning posture make clear Leonard’s equal interest in the persistence of Baldwin’s text and its long dormancy in our cultural life. Make no mistake, these are copies not to read. She figures the book waiting for a reading, longing, perhaps, for a suitably wide and sympathetic reception. (In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes appositely that “the crumbling of my faith” dates to “when I began to read again.”)33 Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 34. Fifty-two of the units are shut with the weight of closure itself. The stack, then, doesn’t exhume Baldwin’s text so much as symptomatize a longstanding resistance first to open and then to enter into the heart of that text, so full of challenges. Tipping Point produces a viewer who is actively, publicly not reading Baldwin, making of us figures of waiting, even of forgetting to risk love. In this way, it seems to ask, Are you ready? are you accessible to this analysis now? For sure, Tipping Point waits, too — only in the sense of holding back. It knows better than to tell us how to think or read. An understanding that feels vital just now inheres in this: there’s still time. How much is another question altogether.

These pages treat the contrapuntal facts and works they explore as very different from one another and yet equally of interest, because they give good glimpses of a present historical situation. I construe that situation as a set of questions about humanity, power, and representation demanding close attention, rather than a field of circumstances ripe for a mapping. Giving rise to these questions were confrontations with art, and particularly the irritated proximity generated in many sustained encounters with it. I need it clear that when I say “encounters” in this context I mean repeated and sustained direct experiences with this art, in its presence as it were, that occurred in the midst of a haunting. That is, I assimilated this art, and not always neatly, during my everyday life as a black American man living and working, reading and watching the news, walking and driving in Chicago and New York. While at times this art provoked anger, in what proved the pivotal instances it permitted me to synthesize floating concepts and give shape to questions; in others, it just held me.

Nothing in this art offers an easy answer, a platitude, or a tidy fact: there is real difficulty in this art. Like all art, it brings us up against entities different from us. But this art’s messages, whatever they be, are delivered with grace and charm, and the difficulty that emerges is precisely the kind we need. You may encounter much that is not pleasurable in what follows; it is often troublesome, itchy, full of coarse edges and resistance. For all their differences, the works in play here share a refusal to take the simplification of difference — via color, class, role, political position, or whatever — as anything but a scandal, an intransigent difficulty. This is so not only because such a perspective vaporizes personhood; it is also so because many contemporary proposals offered up to us as figures for, or images of, our condition may unwittingly flatten our dimensionality.

Such proposals come to feel like a way, or reason, not to maintain contact with the distinctive textures of now — a feel for our continual spread, variegation, and other effects of what elsewhere I have called discomposure, in a gesture toward what flows and overflows between and beyond the stuff that our race words name.34 See “How It Looks to Be a Problem,” in my 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Such proposals would fit an increasingly rangy and discontinuous cluster of black experiences into a tiny poetical carapace. Sustained contact with discomposure, on the other hand, dictates attention to the actual cultural and political effectiveness of, for instance, the dwindling social authority of the color line amid multiracialization, strategic and non-strategic misappropriations of racial blackness all over the culture, and the pervasive decoupling of black practitioners from so-called conventionally black practices. Discomposure requires an interracial aesthetics, one agile enough to follow the dictates of desire and play, and willing to track the erosion of established cultural forms and logics. To think with discomposure is to know the untidiness of racial reconciliation, especially when things get hot. Thinking with discomposure attempts not to yammer on further about various problems of meaning (a shameful concession), but rather to sit hard with and listen to what fights meaning, and how.

It appears to me that, as viewers, we must look as we live: in our skin, as discomfiting and even excruciating as that can get sometimes. Before some art, one cannot be indifferent toward the true, indeed the urgent problems of life. These can appear to be amplified by the art that we will track in these pages. It and its creators declare their independence by adopting a clear theme and citing a heteronomous element, a certain something else, that simultaneously makes and subverts its point. In considering such work, the point is not to yield a dialectical analysis that neatly reconciles such oppositions; rather, it’s to bring attention to the coincidence of contrasting phenomena, events that at once elucidate and obscure the contrasts one is exploring. We cannot think such events without a robust concept of mutual accommodation, one that recognizes its limits in a spirit of hope rather than takes them as an excuse to haul out shopworn boundaries. It issues a solemn challenge: imagine there’s no difference. It’s very hard to do. Sometimes you need a thing to impel you to that place. It can take anywhere from a minute to a lifetime to learn what it has to teach. Such a strategy seeks to explain how certain objects directly engaging questions about the representational politics of the present do so in a way that actually keeps those questions open. It imagines not a formless politics, but a politics informal enough to engage with equal seriousness the letter and the spirit of a question.

1 See Christina Sharpe, “Black Life, Annotated,” New Inquiry, August 8, 2014. Available online at https://thenewinquiry.com/black-life-annotated/ (accessed October 26, 2017). Sharpe attributes the formulation “the carceral continuum of black life” to Frank B. Wilderson III, but the phrase originates with Loïc Waquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment and Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 97. See also Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 75. »

2 Mychal Denzel Smith, in “Marc Lamont Hill and Mychal Denzel Smith: We Must End State Violence Against Black Bodies,” Democracy Now, July 7, 2016. Available online at www.democracynow.org/2016/7/7/marc_lamont_hill_mychal_denzel_smith (accessed October 27, 2016). »

3 Ibid. »

4 Sharpe, in Selamawit Terrefe, “What Exceeds the Hold?: An Interview with Christina Sharpe,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 29 (2016). Available online at https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e06 (accessed October 27, 2017). »

5 See Sharpe, “The Hold,” in Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 68–101. True enough: making while black means a constant negotiation of the urge to invent amid the demotivating knowledge that, to a certain pitch of mind, anything you might create has already been invented. So rare are interlocutors who do not seem certain that you long ago exhausted your full capacity. So how do you work this through? This is a problem for all artists, not just for those who make while black. But the latter face a special version of the problem, one with particular qualities that I attempted to describe in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007) and 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). »

6 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in conversation with Gavin Butt, “Art, Writing, Performativity,” in Frieze Projects and Frieze Talks, 2006–2008 (London: Frieze, 2009), 129. »

7 See Douglas Crimp, “A Day without Gertrude,” in Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 166. »

8 This formulation adapts Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), xiii. First published as Unsere breite Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010). »

9 Emily Dickinson F449 (1862), J45. »

10 This formulation is inspired by Jacqueline Rose, “Specimen Days,” in Rose, The Last Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), 183. »

11 Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present, p. xii. »

12 How to theorize the gap between dialogue and headway? Can one use the senses of fear and futility to gain insight? What’s forestalling a conversation about the issues that preserves, rather than eschews, their intricacy? What does it mean at a time like this to side with presence and the senses against the summarizing, explanatory array? How to shape one’s complaint if an interlocutor argues rightly — by insisting, for instance, on the concreteness, corporeality, and presence of human life — only in terms one cannot countenance? In a historical moment when “the everyday occurs as a fusion of consciousness and software” (Gumbrecht), how to commit deliberative attention to social and intellectual practices that thin concrete corporeality as a substrate of human life? »

13 Available online at www.moma.org/collection/works/78585 (accessed November 12, 2017). »

14 The phrase originates with Jasper Johns, who used it to describe what he saw when looking retroactively at the number paintings he created between 1955 and 1959. See David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 163. »

15 Had I time in Cambridge to deliver an extended preface to the lecture trilogy, I would have used it to talk about how directly Tipping Point had, on the one hand, mirrored and thereby assuaged my frustration precisely about what could be done, and on the other, proved Sedgwick’s intuition that the “most novel narratives” do “truthful justice to their subjects” and affirm “the necessity of close reading in certain critical situations.” »

16 Zoe Leonard, personal correspondence with the author, March 3, 2017. The correspondence is also the source of the quotes following. »

17 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1962, 1963 (reprint ed. New York: Vintage, 1993), 19, 27, 30, 30. »

18 Ibid., 105. »

19 Ibid., 36. »

20 Ibid., 53. »

21 Baldwin himself finds the temptation difficult to resist. “I cannot risk assuming,” he writes, “that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms.” Ibid., 68. »

22 Ibid., 43–44. »

23 Ibid., 95. »

24 This is neither utopia nor formal collectivity. The zone that “relatively conscious whites and relatively conscious blacks” populate is willfully nebulous. »

25 Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 105. »

26 Readers bent on preserving the air of biblical truth may be forgetting that the most immediate contemporary referent for Baldwin’s title was not the bible but a slave song, “Mary Don’t You Weep,” that had been revived as a popular hit by two different acts in 1958 and 1959 and became a stalwart anthem during the Civil Rights Movement. »

27 Ibid. »

28 And yet, could it be more obvious that Leonard — by her choice of a widely cited “classic” of a book — places no faith in the illusion of an artwork somehow existing on its own terms? »

29 It’s the variability of this tension that determines whether a given binding, once it starts to loosen, will cradle a book’s pages in a concave space or propel them outward from a convex one. »

30 A good number of other producers, in fact, when you account for all those who had a hand in making this thing right here what it is. Alongside Leonard and James Baldwin, that ensemble includes the printer, the bookbinder, the collector, the Alibris inventory manager, et al. »

31 Rose, “Mass Psychology,” in Rose, The Last Resistance, 62. »

32 In this way, it bears no generic affinity with a serial artwork. »

33 Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 34. »

34 See “How It Looks to Be a Problem,” in my 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). »

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