Evident truths

In summer 2020, as protests multiplied and institutions navigated between the momentum of history and the inertia of tradition, debates about free speech ricocheted within conservative and liberal echo chambers. At Princeton University, hundreds of faculty members signed a letter demanding action to address racism in the academy, sending it to the university administration on July 4th. [5] The letter began, “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” observing, without equivocation, the causal relation between the nation’s formation and its history of coerced labor, death, and dispossession. Days later, professor of classics Joshua Katz published a response in which he contrasted his own family’s tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence aloud on July 4th with the “blunt sentence” that opens the faculty letter. [6] Katz seemed to opine that the letter’s demands for accountability for racist behavior and research presented a more ominous threat to free speech than racism itself.

But to assume a tradition of free speech in the United States demands abstracting the bodies from which speech issues. When Washington spoke as the first president of the United States, he did so literally through extractive means. White speech was enlivened by Black labor. The opening sentence of the July 4th Princeton faculty letter is true in a social and political sense, but also in a forensic sense – one that compels a shift in the symbolic coordinates of institution and nation, indeed, of the universitas that gives the university its name.

The oldest trees on Princeton’s campus are two sycamores planted by University President Samuel Finley in 1766 in homage to the Liberty Tree of Boston, where revolutionaries protested against the British Stamp Act of 1765. A few months after the planting, Finley’s slaves were sold at auction, meters away from where the new trees took root. [7] When we look at engravings of the Liberty Tree, we cannot help but also see the trees from which Black people were hung, their flesh tortured and mutilated. [8] Those who orchestrated and attended lynchings also acted in defense of liberty – the liberty for white citizens to ravage the Black body at will.

In which contexts are tongues allowed or disallowed to be unruly? Under what conditions is disruptive speech heard?

Louis Cameron, „Last Words: George Floyd #1“, 2020

FIGURES OF SPEECH

An enraged public removes statues from public space. The State removes people from social and biological life. Bots spew ceaseless “speech.” Corporations claim personhood. In the afterlives of slavery that are our present, subjugated life matters less than the endurance of frozen figures and animated algorithms.

In the months leading up to the 2020 election, Donald J. Trump explicitly linked the defense of free speech to what Paul B. Preciado has called “the sculptural biopolitics” of nation, that is, the governance of public space by means of “statuefied” bodies, and the contestation of that space by means of their removal. [9] In a speech at a September 2020 White House Conference on American History, Trump banned federal trainings using critical race theory and announced the creation of a 1776 Commission to “promote patriotic education” in the face of “the mob in the street” and the “cancel culture in the boardroom.” [10] He also pledged the addition of Caesar Rodney, a lesser-known signatory of the Declaration of Independence, to his proposed National Garden of American Heroes, a sculpture garden to be populated solely with “realistic” statuary. [11] As protestors toppled statues and called for abolition – an end to prisons that purposely evokes the end of slavery – Trump decreed that those guilty of demolishing federal statues would be sentenced to ten years in prison.

Eidolopoeia is the ventriloquism of the dead: to speak in the name of a phantom or idol. The executive order funding the National Garden of American Heroes declared that “statues are silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal” that belong to prior generations as well as those “yet unborn.” The phrasing is cued to pro-life conservatives, but it contains an extraordinary irony. [12] Rodney, like other signatories of the Declaration who were also slave owners, laid legal claim to the lives of the unborn children of enslaved women through the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem – literally, the offspring follows the womb. The enslaved body was thus not only partitioned and multiplied in space; it was dispossessed in time, along with its progeny. [13] In Trump’s imagined National Garden, the “yet unborn” are summoned as proprietors rather than property: the rightful heirs to Rodney’s unliving, speechless form.

To figure a person or thing is to represent that entity through expressive means. A figure of speech is an expression that uses language figurally: Money talks. Keep a stiff upper lip. Bite your tongue. My lips are sealed. In its rhetorical marshaling in the fight against “the mob in the street,” the statue of Rodney figures the abstract notion of free speech. Paradoxically, any solid form that Rodney’s persona takes remains necessarily phantasmatic: Rodney never sat for a true portrait during his lifetime, owing to a facial cancer which his doctor excised, along with a significant chunk of his face. [14] Statues of Rodney may be realist in style, as Trump desired, but they can hardly be said to be realistic.

On January 6th, 2021, abstract and literal coordinates of figuration converged, willy-nilly, as right-wing insurgents stormed the US Capitol. Rioters wrapped in flags and allegorized as the Statue of Liberty appeared alongside a man making off with the lectern of the Speaker of the House. The marauders claimed to embody symbolic ideals by the fact of their protest but simultaneously suggested that the congressional symbol of speech must be literally captured and held hostage. In the immediate aftermath, the Chief of the Capitol Police indicated that the riot was a “First Amendment activity” gone horribly wrong. [15]

Seen through the lens of a bodily economy of speech, though, it is less surprising that this particular First Amendment event would transform into a seething mob. For, faced with the prospect that US representational democracy no longer represented white speech at the expense of other speech, it became imperative for protestors to assert their literal bodies within the symbolic space of the Capitol. The proliferation of images of rioters staging selfies with statues, glitchy video capturing screaming hordes, and testaments to insurrection proudly posted to social media proclaims the white body itself as justification. If there was any doubt as to the racialized economy of this body, however, we need look no further than the so-called QAnon Shaman, whose persona as “digital soldier” includes the appropriation of Native American ceremonial garb.

The confusion of bodies, symbols, language, and action on January 6th is symptomatic, for freedom of speech has always been a figure of speech in the double sense of the term. Technically, it has belonged to a specific and limited group of bodies. Theoretically, it is a notoriously mutable proposition comprising variable and often conflicting stances. In ancient Greece, rhetoricians distinguished between isegoria (equal speech in public) and parrhesia (frank, even offensive speech), a distinction often confused in current debates. [16] Moreover, parrhesia inheres in a social relation: it is directed to the powers that be, with risk to the speakers themselves. [17] Parrhesia comes from below. To invoke free speech from the position of white supremacy – as Trump and his allies have done – is the utter perversion of “speaking truth to power.”

The legal defense of free speech is likewise riddled with historical lacunae. In 1937, for example, the Supreme Court renewed its defense of the First Amendment, “the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.” [18] But the Constitution and the First Amendment were coeval with the whip, the hold, and the iron muzzle. The appeal to “every other form of freedom” thus contains within it the historical condition of unfreedom. In other words, in the United States, free speech – that indispensable condition – began by bracketing and denying Black freedom.

A woman protesting COVID-19 mask mandates in May of last year neatly diagrams the persistence of this relation in our contemporary, pandemic times. In the sign she holds, an image of Anastacia, an enslaved Afro-Brazilian woman muzzled by a metal contraption bound to her head and neck, figures the inverse of the “free human being” to which the protestor lays claim.

Sozialkundeaufgabe für die Mittelstufe / Middle school social studies assignment, Kannapolis, North Carolina, 2019

MULTIPLICATION AND DIVISION

What does it mean to possess one’s body and its emanations? In his work on the shifting nature of intellectual property in the 19th-century United States, Stephen Best notes that the drift toward “the commodification of personhood,” such that the very notion of the person was “fragmented into its various attributes, capacities, and ‘properties,’” found its internal analogy in the legal code’s reckoning with the ontological problem of the slave. [19] Did owners own the totality of the person or simply their labor? With the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the fugitive became two bodies in one – “pilfered property and indebted person,” as Best puts it – inaugurating a drive toward the alienation and abstraction of persons from intangible features such as their own image, voice, or thought. [20]

Soon, new instruments of mechanical reproduction, such as the gramophone, rendered the voice acousmatic, severed from its source. In the wake of these new media, property rights for such intangible emanations became a form of fugitive capture enacted through contract law. But such a conception springs from the prior notion of fugitive slaves as active participants in contracts of labor services, services of which they were in default when they attempted to escape. [21]

Of course, unlike the recorded voice, enslaved peoples’ labor could not be separated from their bodies, or at least not usually. For the purposes of capture, form and content, vessel and substance, were one. This is why the implanted teeth of Washington’s dentures form a paradigmatic exception. In severing but simultaneously multiplying the labor of the enslaved body, the dentures perform the sheer violence of slavery’s ontological equivocation. By grafting shards of that enslaved body (bodies) into the mouth of the master, the dentures anticipate – in forensic form – the mechanism by which the law manufactures a fantasy of consent. And in creating a material assemblage dependent on the extraction, commodification, and fragmentation of life, the dentures belie the notion that speech is self-identified, free, and sovereign for the slave but also for the master.

The partitioning of the enslaved body haunts the logic of political representation and speech in the United States. The three-fifths compromise allowed slaveholders to count enough of an enslaved body to gain access to state coffers and electors, but not enough to force recognition of citizenship or personhood. The deformation of representational democracy that began in that compromise continues in the Electoral College today. [22] And the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, made formerly enslaved people citizens, granting them equal protection and due process under the law. Since 1886, however, the same amendment has been used to secure the personhood and later the “speech” of corporations. Slavery, as Best writes, left behind “its unique scandal of value.” [23]

Deana Lawson, „Nation“, 2018

FORENSICS OF NATION

George Floyd: I’m through, I’m through. I’m claustrophobic. My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts. I need some water or something, please. Please? I can’t breathe, officer.

Derek Chauvin: Then stop talking, stop yelling.

George Floyd: You’re going to kill me, man.

Derek Chauvin: Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk.

George Floyd: Come on, man. Oh, oh. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. Ah! They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Oh! [24]

In psychoanalysis, projection is the process by which the unconscious attribute of one person is imagined to be the purview of another. It is therefore not surprising that anti-Black rhetoric – in the guise of the defense of free speech – calls out against “cancel culture.” But in the United States and the Atlantic world more broadly, true cancellation – if by cancel we mean limiting someone’s ability to speak, to participate in the public sphere, or indeed to speak at all – describes the longue durée for people of color. It was illegal for enslaved people to read and write in many slave societies. The communicative language of drumming was banned throughout the slaveholding Atlantic world.

Lynching is the spectacle of snuffing out breath, the vitality of life and the medium of utterance, exclamation, speech. As Vanessa Stovall observed in relation to certain sanctimonious claims, it is the ur-cancellation. [25] In the continuing epidemic of death-by-asphyxiation, words are silenced along the way to choking off breath. The refrain of protesting voices, “I can’t breathe,” is the amplification of “Black disbelief, a desire for otherwise air,” as Ashon T. Crawley puts it, in the face of this litany of racialized violence. [26] As a refrain, it demands that a truth experienced and expressed by the Black body be recognized as such; that this body be attended to, heard.

But “I can’t breathe” also signals a precise calculus of political possibility iteratively performed by the police response: “If you’re talking, you’re breathing. I don’t want to hear it,” declared Deputy Mechelle Denton to Willie Ray Banks, who died shortly thereafter. [27] This is the paradox of Black citizenship in a state armored by white supremacy: you are permitted to breathe if you stop talking, but you cannot do both at once.

When we watched George Floyd’s murder last summer, we witnessed the call and response of this perverse equation. Floyd’s murder was citational: it mobilized an instrument of terrorism inextricable from the iconography of moral appeal and protest that punctuates the history of abolition and civil rights in the United States. Police choking speech from Black bodies; bended knees imploring for freedom; kneeling as silent denouncement, mourning, rageful dissent. The mongrel mouth, the congruency of these knees: these embody the terrifying experiment that is the United States.

Dave Chappelle: This is my impression of the “Founding Fathers of America” when the Constitution was being written. You ready? Here it goes: “Hurry up and finish that Constitution, n****, I’m trying to get some sleep!”* [28]

The current moment demands a forensics of nation, not an idealization. But this is not to suggest that that the evidence speaks for itself. As Eyal Weizman and Thomas Keenan have argued, forensics refers to the forum where orators practiced, prosopopoeia, thus giving voice to inanimate things. [29] Forensics is rhetorical and aesthetic as much as scientific, and it binds together object and speaker through the act of interpretation. Likewise, the forum in which such interpretation unfolds is not given “but is produced through a series of entangled performances,” as Keenan and Weizman write. “Forums are gathered precisely around disputed things.” [30] A forensics of nation therefore entails assembling around that which idealization refuses: the thingification of persons; the partitioning of persons for the purposes of speech.

Deana Lawson’s 2018 Nation is one such gathering: an assortment of bodies, props, performances, and spectral presences that prick the viewer’s flesh. In the work, Washington’s dentures grimace from an inset in the upper right corner, hovering over the ostensible diegesis of the scene. Here, in a room, we see three Black male protagonists: two face the viewer head-on from the couch; a third, who wears a scarf decorated with grinning skulls, is functionally decapitated by the image of the teeth. One of the seated men wears a ghastly orthodontic device, the image of which came to Lawson in a dream. For the shoot, Lawson spray-painted the device gold and positioned it alongside an assortment of gold jewelry she invited the participants – hip-hop artists in their own right – to wear. The resulting photograph is a parafiction born of this encounter, riddled with what fellow artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa calls the “disjunctions” of representational surface and sociality alike. [31] The image of the teeth – tucked into the golden frame like a grisly family photo – locks together this chain of incommensurabilities. The dentures lie in a physically distinct plane, yet the viewer cannot help but join them to the mouth of the man with the dental apparatus, unleashing a chain of temporally impossible causalities. Are the brittle teeth a prologue or a haunting? Are we the target of the gun, conjured by the other man’s outstretched hand? Or is it we who perform the violence of the shot from the other side of the frame?

Jafa has described Lawson’s photographs as X-rays that pierce the surface of images and subjects. They look past “surface scars,” he observes, to “the things that typically fall outside of the seen,” even though the visible, paradoxically, is what photography captures. [32] Nation: three Black men surveilled by a macabre relic. How does this staging of the body politic square with the horror of what politics does to Black bodies? What bile and beauty does the image spew? What does it compel us to see?

Theaster Gates, „Bitch I Made This Pot“, 2013

THE MATTER OF FUGITIVE SPEECH

Lawson’s Nation is a surplus of forensics: an X-ray that accumulates entanglement rather than strips it away. Its attention to gaping mouths and dental devices recalls and remixes prosopopoeia as the embodied short-circuit of master and slave.

But how to limn speech that speaks from the other side of legal and bodily partition? A 19th-century African American potter named Dave from Edgefield, South Carolina, offers one indication. Flouting an 1834 state law that outlawed literacy for slaves and free Blacks, Dave inscribed multiple pots with verses of his own creation. Scholars believe Dave was born around 1801, the same year in which Thomas Jefferson gave his inaugural address as the third US president. [33] In that speech, Jefferson outlined “the essential principles of our Government, [. . .] stating the general principle, but not all its limitations.” [34] The opening principles deserve special mention: “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” [35] In 1857, a decade after it appears that his wife and six children were sold away, Dave wrote:

I wonder where is all my relations

Friendship to all – and, every nation [36]

The first line invokes the wrenching apart of Dave’s own family, embedding within his devastating query the plight of all enslaved families and millions of uprooted Africans shipped across the Atlantic. The formulaic goodwill of the next line attempts to seal over this gash. Yet in speaking as precisely that limitation to Jefferson’s body politic, Dave transforms the president’s isolationist vision of national sovereignty into an articulation of diasporic relations as expansive, entangled, and interior as the alliances Jefferson disavowed.

But who, or what, constitutes the speech of this political rejoinder?

On July 31, 1840, Dave inscribed a verse on the wet surface of a clay vessel, together with the date:

Dave belongs to Mr. Miles

Wher the oven bakes and the pot biles [37]

Here, speech is coincident with its support and, like any writing, separates the words from their author. But Dave’s verse marks a further displacement, for he, the author, “belongs to Mr. Miles,” much like the pot that he makes. The life-size dimensions of several of his vessels, often signed “Dave” and “L. M.” (for Lewis Miles), conjoin corporeality and objectification at the site of enunciation. As literary scholar Michael A. Chaney writes, “The thing ‘Dave’ hereby replicates more things named ‘Dave’ through a process of reproductive nomination,” one that both “call[s] forth and call[s] away the subject [his] signature endeavors to name.” [38]

From this perverse oscillation between subject and thing, Dave renders matter agential: it is the oven that bakes and the pot that boils. Or does it bile? The rhyme is compelled by the leading line of Mr. Miles. Nearby Gullah Geechee pronunciations of “boil” likewise suggest its intentionality. [39] Yet the rhyme also spectacularly exceeds its phonic necessity. For bile is the bitter substance secreted by the liver, its palette ranging from brown to yellow to green, not unlike the earthen alkaline glazes Dave applied to his wares. Bile is a medieval humor – black for melancholy, yellow for anger and ill temper – a temperamental effect of choler and phlegm. A record, a warning, a chain of inflection that runs from bodily fluid to disposition, subject to object, slave to master and back again.

The bile boils as the oven bakes.

In certain etymologies, bile means boil, but also lip, brim, edge, rim: the projecting boundary that marks the opening of a vessel or body; the border beneath which Dave wrote verses on his pots. Lips with no teeth, Dave’s pots speak, unfreely, in a material language of radical refusal. His speech, which is his and not his, recalibrates the rhythm of subjection, delivering truth as a punch to the gut.

Rub your tongue against your gums; are they boiling?

Notes