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Not in between: Lyric Painting, Visual History, and the Postcolonial FutureAuthor(s): Fred MotenSource: TDR (1988-), Vol. 47, No. 1 (Spring, 2003), pp. 127-148Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1147035 .Accessed: 20/11/2013 20:33

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o t n e t w e e n

Lyric Painting, Visual History,and the Postcolonial Future

Fred Moten

1. Painting 34: Tshi-bumba's example of his

strength s a historical

painter. Courtesy f ohan-nes Fabian)

I

Remembering he Present 1996), the ethno-historio-graphic, yrical, painterly n-counter between Tshibumba Kanda Matulu and Johannes Fabian, retrieves Pa-trice Lumumba and the postcolonial future he desired and symbolizes.' Thenarrative yricism that is given by way of technological mediation in the radio ad-dresses of Lumumba, a lyricism whose supplemental orce cuts and augments theauthoritarian danger of the radiophonic voice and the neocolonial recapitulationsof historical recitation, s part of what Tshibumba attempts o reproduce n his art.Moreover, this lyricism is embedded in their visual registers by way of the medi-ation of their own voices and the voice, if you will, of a general-painterly, eth-

nological, historical, cinematic-phonography. In this sense Tshibumba-by way

The Drama Review 47, i (Ti77), Spring 2003. Copyright C 2003New York University and the Massachusetts nstitute of Technology

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I28 Fred Moten

of and, to an extent, against Fabian-reinstantiates the lyric singularity hat is thematerial pirit f the postcolonial future. This singularity moves through the opposi-tion of African or Afro-diasporic particularities nd the universality hat the Westhas mistakenly called its own. In order to understand his spirit of the postcolonialfuture as a revolutionary, ntellectual orce we must make a detour through the workof C.L.R. James and Cedric Robinson.

2

The writing f history becomes vermore dfficult. The power of God or theweakness f man, Christianity r the divine right of kings ogovern wrong,can easily be made responsiblefor he downfall f states and the birth of newsocieties. uch elementary onceptions end themselveswillingly o narrativetreatment andfrom Tacitus oMacaulay, rom Thuycidides o Green, hetraditionallyfamous istorians ave been more rtist han cientist: heywrote o well because hey saw so little. To-day by a natural eaction etend o a personification f the socialforces, reat men being merely r nearlyinstruments n the hand of economic estiny.As so often the truth doesnot lie in between. Great men make history, ut only such history s it ispossiblefor hem o make. Theirfreedom fachievement s limited by thenecessitiesof their nvironment. oportray he limits of those necessities ndthe realisation, omplete rpartial, of all possibilities, hat s the truebusiness f the historian.

-C.L.R. James (I989:x; emphasis added)

C.L.R. James desires the old-new thing: cut dialectic and not in between. In

The BlackJacobins, he Caribbean, the not in between, emerges narratively, n re-sistant aural performances, as the function of a materialist aesthetics and an aes-theticized political economy of appositional ollision. nd so James speaks of a brokendialectic, not in between, ditch jumping, the missing logic of a spare seriality. Buthow does the appeal he amplifies through concepts of Africa, of the African, workin this emergent self-consciousness of the Caribbean, in particular, and the post-collisive performances, the cut dialectic and not in between submergences of newworld blackness in general? What does the African bring to the "rendezvous ofvictory"?2

The theory and practice of revolution s bound to the way the individual emergesas a theoretical possibility and phenomenological actuality n and out of the rev-

olutionary ensemble. James s interested n this relation. He is interested n the waythat the truth of this relation lies not in between its elements. Therefore, Jamesreopens the Afro-diasporic traditions' long, meditative, and, above all, practicalconcern with spacing, incommensurability, and rupture. He works in relation to,at some distance from, and in the not in between of, that concern and a Euro-philosophical theorization of aporia. ames ndicates that the question of comport-ment toward such issues, toward the form and content of the cut, is tied to anotheropposition-that between lyric and narrative-that in turn shapes yet anotherfundamental disjunction between the science and the art of history. The question,whose answer is in the not in between that both marks and is James's phrasing,concerns the irruptive placement-marked in the practice of his writing and ac-

tivism, his historical movement and research-of the outside in James's work; itconcerns the way the literary achievement of exteriority embodies a theoreticalachievement that is nothing less than a complex recasting of the dialectic.

The recasting of the dialectic thatJames's phrasing embodies and is directed to-ward disrupts he convergence of literary meaning and bourgeois production that



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Not In Between I29

comes into its own with that reification of the sentence that animates and is ani-

mated by the rise of novelistic techniques of narration. Such disruption is noisy;and such unruly and ongoing reemergence of sound in literature s crucial because

the lyrical interruption of narrative marks a different mode, within the same

mode, ofliterary production.

It is a mode that might be said to stem from some-

thing like what James would have called a socialism already n place in the factory,something like what Althusser, after Marx, would call a communism in the inter-

stices of the market, in the cut outside of market relations. This different mode is

shaped by resistances. Transferences tructure that mode of organization out of

which comes another (mode of) aesthetic content. So a phrasal disruption of the

sentence is crucial; so poetry remains to be seen and heard so to speak, and in

excess of the sentence, because it breaks up meaning's conditions of production.But how do we address hat privileging of narrative hat might rightly be seen to

emerge from a certain politics, a certain theory of history, a certain desire? Not by

opposition; by augmentation. This means an attention to the lyric, to the lyric's

auto-explosion, to the auto-explosion the lyric gives to narrative. This means

paying attention to the object (to the commodity, to its fetish character, o thewhole of its secret) that notes the presence of that desire, that takes into accountthe lyric's infusement with narrative, hat sees the historicity and political desire

of the lyric precisely as the resistant hat animates and is one possibility of the fetishcharacter. This is the possibility of free association and total representation hat

emerges from a transference hat is only possible in the form of the fetish characterof the object/commodity/lyric, by thinking the rhythm of world and object.

New grammar can emerge from conventional writing as another writing, a

writing infused with another sensuality, where the visual might expand toward hi-

eroglyphic from purely phonetic meaning and where aurality urther serves to dis-

rupt and trouble meaning toward content. In Of Grammatology [1967] I976),

Jacques Derrida initiates a critique of the valorization of speech over writing thatis always, at its most rigorous, driven not only to infuse speech with writing butto infuse writing with speech and, therefore, with the music of speech. The com-

plex interplay between speech and writing (rather han the simple reversal of thevalorization of speech over writing to which that interplay is often reduced) thatanimates Of Grammatology ouches on issues fundamental or the black radical ra-dition thatJames explores and embodies. I want to address he constructed, non-

oppositional, material nterplay between writing and speech, narrative and lyric,the European and the African-or, to invoke James's phrasing, Enlightenmentand Darkness. It provides the framework for new revolutionary theory, practice,and identity, which is marked n the form and content ofJamesian phrasing as the

location and time of the not in between, where phonography rewrites the relationbetween writing and the unfinished work of man. This is to say that I want toaddress he nature of the address.

Toussaint's ailure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness. James

1989:288)

If he was convinced that San Domingo would decay without the benefits ofthe French connection, [Toussaint] was equally certain that slavery couldnever be restored. Between these two certainties he, in whom penetratingvision and prompt decision had become second nature, became the em-

bodiment of oscillation. His allegiance to the French Revolution and all itopened out for mankind in general and the people of San Domingo in par-ticular, this had made him what he was. But this in the end ruined him.

Perhaps or him to have expected more than the bare freedom was toomuch for the time. With that alone Dessalines was satisfied, and perhaps the



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proof that freedom alone was possible lies in the fact that to ensure it Dessa-lines, that faithful adjutant, had to see that Toussaint was removed from thescene. Toussaint was attempting the impossible-the impossible that wasfor him the only reality that mattered. The realities o which the historian iscondemned will at times simplify the tragic alternatives with which he was

faced. But these factual statements and the judgments they demand mustnot be allowed to obscure or minimize the truly tragic character of his di-lemma, one of the most remarkable of which there is an authentic historicalrecord.

But in a deeper sense the life and death are not truly tragic. Prometheus,Hamlet, Lear, Phedre, Ahab, assert what may be the permanent impulses ofthe human condition against he claims of organised society. They do this inthe face of imminent or even certain destruction, and their defiance propelsthem to heights which make of their defeat a sacrifice which adds to ourconception of human grandeur.

Toussaint s in a lesser category. His splendid powers do not rise but de-

cline. Where formerly he was distinguished above all for his prompt andfearless estimate of whatever faced him, we shall see him, we have alreadyseen him, misjudging events and people, vacillating n principle, and losingboth the fear of his enemies and the confidence of his own supporters.

The hamartia, he tragic flaw, which we have constructed from Aristotle,was in Toussaint not a moral weakness. It was a specific error, a total miscal-culation of the constituent events. Yet what is lost by the imaginative free-dom and creative logic of great dramatists s to some degree atoned for bythe historical actuality of his dilemma. It would therefore be a mistake tosee him merely as a political figure in a remote West Indian island. If hisstory does not approach he greater dramatic creations, n its social signifi-

cance and human appeal t far exceeds the last days at St. Helena and thatapotheosis of accumulation and degradation, the suicide in the Wilhelm-strasse. The Greek tragedians ould always go to their gods for a dramaticembodiment of fate, the dike which rules over a world neither they nor weever made. But not Shakespeare himself could have found such a dramaticembodiment of fate as Toussaint struggled against, Bonaparte himself; norcould the furthest imagination have envisaged the entry of the chorus, ofthe ex-slaves themselves, as the arbiters of their own fate. Toussaint's er-tainty of this as the ultimate and irresistible esolution of the problem towhich he refused to limit himself, that explains his mistakes and atones forthem. (290-92)

Dessalines undertook the defence. He threw up a redoubt at some dis-tance from Crete-a-Pierrot, left detachments to man them both, and wentto meet Debelle who was coming south towards Verettes o make contactwith Boudet. Dessalines would not give battle but retired toward Crete-a-Pierrot, keeping his forces ust ahead of the hotly pursuing Debelle. As hereached he ditch which urrounded thefortress essalinesjumped nto t and all hismenfollowed, eaving he French xposed emphasis added]. A withering firefrom the fortress mowed them down. Four hundred fell and two generalswere wounded. Hastily retreating, hey took up position outside the fortressand sent to Leclerc for reinforcements. Dessalines entered the fortress and

completedthe

preparationsor the

defence. But already his untutored mindhad leapt forward to the only solution, and, unlike Toussaint, he was takinghis men into his confidence. As they prepared he defence he talked tothem.

"Take courage, I tell you, take courage. The French will not be able to



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Not In Between 131

remain long in San Domingo. They will do well at first, but soon they willfall ill and die like flies. Listen IfDessalines surrenders o them a hundredtimes he will deceive them a hundred times. I repeat, take courage, and youwill see that when the French are few we shall harass hem, we shall beatthem, we shall burn the harvests and retire to the mountains. They will not

be able to guard the country and they will have to leave. Then I shall makeyou independent. here will be no more whites among us." Independence.It was the first time that a leader had put it before his men. Here was notonly a programme, but tactics. The lying and treacherous Bonaparte andLeclerc had met their match. (3I4-15)

These are some passages n The BlackJacobins hat allow us to ground the not inbetween and also to disclose, by way ofJames's characteristic style, the impact ofphrasing on the interinanimation of theory and history. And here we want explic-itly to think about The Black acobins n two ways: (I) as the narrative description,on the one hand, of Toussaint's expansive vision and practical ailure and, on the

other hand, of his Lieutenant Dessalines's imited vision and practical uccess; and(2) as the irruption into that narrative of a radical energy, an exterior lyricism,whose implied victory has not been achieved or met (but which we are slowlyworking our way to in the name and spirit of Lumumba). I'm interested in themoments in James's texts in which he points to that energy, in which his phrasingrecords, is infused with, or engraved by that energy's phonographic weight. Thisis to say that I'm interested in those moments in James's historiography whenmeaning is cut and augmented by the very independent syntaxes and outernoises-conveying new and revolutionary content, mysterious and black magicalpolitico-economic spells and spellings-that James would record. Those mo-ments help to structure a collisive interplay n the work that is not in between but

outside of the broad-edged narrative/historical rajectory of a familiar dialecticallineage now cut and augmented by the serrated yricism of what Robinson callsthe "black radical tradition" (1983). I intend to pay some brief attention to themechanics ofJames's lyrical history in order to think what might appear only as acontradiction indicative of a failure. It would have been a failure on the part of theauthor that replicates the military/political failure of Toussaint, a failure that op-erates perhaps in spite of, perhaps because of, the author's mastery. I think it is,however, something more than failure, more than contradiction that it indicatessomething that remains to be discovered n black radicalism.

What I'm interested n at this juncture is the question of what Robinson reads nJames as a problematic enchantment of/with Hegel, one, to use Nathaniel Mackey's

terms (I986), both premature and post-expectant. Here James s working in directconfrontation, working through the opposition of subjective and objective reedom,undermining Hegel's attachment to the figure of Bonaparte, n excess of that his-torical trajectory/dialectic or which Bonaparte s telic. And Toussaint, all hookedup and bound to the French, rapped n the no-man's-land between liberty (abstract-subjective-telic-white) and independence (national-objective-present-black: heposition Dessalines seemingly naturally lips into) hips us, by way ofJames, to theneed for something not in between these formulations. ForJames the desire is forsomething not in between darkness and enlightenment, something not in be-tween Dessalines and Toussaint. And we've got to think what it means not just forDessalines to take the men into his confidence but to talk to them. We've got tothink the form of that talk as well as its

content,in untutored and broken

dialect,unretouched, addressed o his followers and not to the French, sounded and notwritten and rewritten, seemingly unmediated by the graphic, and, finally, con-cerned not with liberty but with independence. The opposition between Tous-saint and Dessalines, between (the desire for what is called) enlightenment and



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(the adherence to what is called) darkness, between direction to the French anddirection to the slaves, s also the opposition between speech and writing. Dessa-lines leaps forward; he jumps into the ditch, sounding, descending. That jumpingdescent is coded as a jumping forward. Another dialectic. It's whatJames's phras-ing does to the sentence. Oscillation, bridging over to leaping forward, umpinginto. This is a question of music.

In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition,3 obinson speaks ofJames's reaction to the Italian nvasion of Abyssinia, the complicity of the nonfas-cist bourgeois states and the silence of the antifascist eft. Robinson speaks of thatreaction as the moment when the tutelage of European radical thought in Jamesis broken. That emergence from a tutelage at once self-imposed and imposed byexternal forces is marked by The Black acobins nd by its phrasing. What is therelationship between James's breaking of this tutelage and (his representations f)Dessalines's untutoredness, on the one hand, and Toussaint's nability to break hattutelage on the other? James's phrasing occupies the place not in between these.Robinson says: "The force of the Black radical radition merged with the exigen-cies of the Black masses n movement to form a new theory and ideology inJames'writings" (1983:382). Yes, but how does this actually work? Is "merge" the rightword? Is this new delineation, this Dessalineation, in James's writing only at thelevel of a convergence of black radical thought and black mass movement? Doesthe end of his tutorship under Euro-radical thought constitute an erasure of thatthought? Should it? What language does he offer to describe this movement? If, asJames says in the appendix to The BlackJacobins, ntitled "From Toussaint L'Ou-verture o Fidel Castro" (1989:391-418), the road to West Indian national identity(and liberation) led through Africa, then how can we think the relation betweenAfrica and the not in between? The return to Africa is coded as a kind of futureexteriority that is already here, the externalizing force of something already here,

the revolution that is somehow brought with us, there when we got here, and leftbehind in a sound, a loud hurrah enacting a certain interference of and with com-mon sense and reason.

Robinson writes ofJames's fascination, played out in Notes on Dialectics 1980),with Hegel's mode of argument as an obvious problem, a limitation ofJames'swork. He objects to the Hegelian "distillation of history into rich concentratesused solely for the grounding of abstract discourse" and to the Marxian combat-iveness of the style, shaped by a "dismissive tongue used to humiliate opposition"(1983:395). I want to think about The BlackJacobins, y way of Robinson's analysisand the concept of the "not in between," as a kind of anacrusis, a prefatory anddialectal bent note on/of dialectics. I want to look more closely at that style in

order to look more closely at what Robinson calls James's "lyrical and sometimesmischievous iterary voice'" (I983:394), to think about how the far-reaching rob-lems that are embedded in the oxymoronic notion of literary voice play themselvesout in the form and content ofJames's work as well as in the revolutionary heoryand practice he would there both know and mimetically reproduce. This is to askhow literary voice and political theory and practice are disrupted by the external andexternalizing force of a sound not in between notes and words, not in betweenlanguages, n the not in between of accent; a sound that bends the regulatory mu-sicological frame of notes, the hermeneutic insistence of the meaning of words,the national imperatives of European idioms, the dialect that reconstitutes dialec-tic as reason, historical motive, liberatory polyrhythm. There is, in the work, a

lyric disruption of a certain Europeanized notion of public/national history andhistorical trajectory as well as an exterior/African disruption of the interiority ofEuropean lyric. The property sang, the commodities shrieked. Jumping in theditch, revolutionary actic and dance, lingering in the space between the notes, de-scending into the depths of the music. Toussaint might have acted had he jumped,



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"freedom's basis [is] in the indeterminate" (Dirlik 1994). The not in between ofthis opposition would be some kind of syncopated but nonhesitational phrasing, hekind of phrasingJames ets at when he puts this notion forward. It would be not inbetween enlightenment and darkness, narrative nd lyric, all of that. In the letter hewrites to the French Directory on 5 November 1789-a letterJames dentifies as amilestone in his career, a letter whose phrasingJames ituates not in between truthand bombast, a letter whose aural origins in broken dialect are obsessively eworkedin order to make possible their entry into historical dialectic (but always carryingthe revolutionary force of that dialect; how much energy will it have? can it besustained?)-Toussaint says/writes: "I shall never hesitate between the safety ofSan Domingo and my personal happiness; but I have nothing to fear" (1989:196).It's the rhythm of the phrasing here that's so profound. James s always rying bothto channel this rhythm and raise t to the level of theoretical principle and histori-cal motive. This disruptive but nonhesitational rhythm is the form and content ofa dialectic of the not in between, of an identity and revolutionary political stanceand movement not in between enlightenment and darkness (blackness), of a his-toriographical practice not in between narrative and lyric, disruptive of the rup-ture (between science and art, knowledge and mimesis) in historiography. Thisrhythm is illustrative of his belief that:

The violent conflicts of our age enable our practised vision to see into thevery bones of previous revolutions more easily than heretofore. Yetfor hatvery reason t is impossible o recollect istorical motions n that tranquility hich agreat English writer, oonarrowly, ssociated ith poetry alone. I989:xi; emphasisadded)

The recollection of historical emotions requires that which exceeds tranquilityand, here, poetry is understood not only to have no monopoly on such tranquilitybut is also perhaps given as that which is in excess of tranquility tself. We don'tappeal to prose, then, for that excess of tranquility required to recollect historicalemotion; rather we see how poetry is marked by an excess of tranquility, a lyricand dialectical drive that brings the noise of such emotion. Not in between poetryand prose, tranquility and turbulence.

The inevitability of that relation as Derrida would understand t; the nature ofthe dialectic or of the possibility of another dialectic asJames would understand t;the place of the dialectic with regard to freedom; the relation between dialecticand dialect; the sonic irruption of the outside, of the not in between of the dialec-tic or of another dialectic; the refusal of an oscillation that seems, ultimately, o be

part and parcel of the dialectic; the failure of its own internal resources o achievethe Auflebung toward which it is directed and how that failure manifests itselfin the colonial encounter: all this points toward something beyond a breakdownof the sententious along some oscillative and caesuric lines. The dialect carriesbreaking sound as well as broken grammar. And if the dialectic is the pulse of free-dom, what's the nature of that pulse, its time? What bombs are dropped there?Must the pulse, the rhythm, be free in order to keep the time of freedom, to breakunfree time, usher in new times? This is what the infusement of lyric into histo-riographic narrative would do. The free pulse of a new dialect/ic is what animatesJames's phrasing, even if only intermittently, even, perhaps, f only in such a wayas to replicate with differences something of the form of Toussaint's ailure, a fail-

ure not of enlightenment but bound up in whatever oscillation occurs betweenenlightenment and darkness. Toussaint and Dessalines, anticolonial leadership andan anticolonial "proletariat," narrative and lyric, the idealization and materializa-tion of freedom, of its trajectory and its presence.

Finally, for James the essence of a thing is its animation, its internal difference



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and temporal-historical constituency, as much what it shall be as what it is andhas been. This animation is a universalizing force, the generalizable, avantgarde,politico-aesthetic (we might say musical) energy of proletarianization. This re-

quires rethinking the proletariat, at its transcendent moment, as more than a par-adox. The proletariat realizes, actualizes, and universalizes man through, on the

other side of, struggle and differentiation, through production, through the on-going production and consumption of performances. The avantgarde s in the au-dience. The new universal is listening. What Robinson sees as a paradox, theunaccountable derivation of the proletariat rom the bourgeoisie, ames understandsas one of those punctuated equilibria of the dialectic, an effect of syncopation in

phrasing, the not in between.4 Leaps Leaps Leaps A mystery of aufheben. his iswhy Hegel is so important forJames, why the nature of the dialectic is so crucial.Because it is all bound up in the relation of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat, nhow to get from one to the other, in how one fulfills the etiolated universalism fthe other. This is the future in the present, the invasion from the inside, socialismin the factory. It is the manifold content of the being of the worker, the trace of

what the worker shall be that is the worker's essence. This is why, forJames, theessence of Lenin is what he "surely" would have said if he'd lived, determined bywhat he did say right before he died. This mode of reading or improvisation, hisanticipatory critique or future anterior maneuver, is the dialectic, orJames. He putsforward for us a notion of an internal incursion that can be seen in relation to aninterior force of exteriorization, moving towards a possibility coded as outside, anactuality nside. Inside and outside are, then, not only positions but forces; and thenot in between marks an insistence in the black radical radition that is embodiedin ancient and unprecedented phrasing. To insist, along with James, on this kindof fullness, on this Caribbeanness hat exists only as a function of a return not toauthenticity but to Africa, s to recognize that black radicalism s done necessarily n

relation o or under water, something occurring in the deep, in sound, as sounding.This implies that the black radical radition s not, though it is nothing other than,grounded in African foundations; that it is sounded in the impossible return toAfrica that is not antifoundationalist but improvisatory of foundations; that it is aturn toward a specific exteriority; that it is not only an insistent previousness nevasion of each and every natal occasion but the trace and forecast of a future inthe present and in the past here and there, old-new, the revolutionary noise leftand brought and met, not in between.5

3

All that was in preparation or an engagement with the record of an appositionalcollision between an ethnographer and an informant. In this case, however, therichness that cuts and augments every such encounter, making it always so muchmore than most ethnographers ever realize n their recording and analysis, s givenin a more or less explicit and conscious way by the ethnographer. In this encoun-ter between ethnographer and informant, Johannes Fabian s conscious of himselfas mediator and sponsor and Tshibumba Kanda Matulu is conscious of himself aspainter and historian. I want to read the political reason they amplify n their dia-logue though I begin with some remarks of Fabian whose placement of Tshi-bumba is useful not only for the information it gives regarding Tshibumba'srelation to Lumumba but for the example of an increasingly broken critico-administrative odification that it sets:

When an exceptional artist such as Tshibumba Kanda Matulu broke awayfrom genre painting and defined himself as a historian, he went to great



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lengths to stress national unity, if only because he needed the nation as the

subject of a history whose narrative he could oppose to colonial and aca-demic accounts. In this respect Tshibumba emulated his hero Patrice Lu-mumba, who pursued his resolutely unitarian course because he knew thiswas the only way to establish his country as a political power vis-a-vis theformer colonizer and on the international scene. (I998:76)

T: I am good, for instance, at the kinds of pictures you have in your house,the historical ones.

F: Mm-hmm.

T: I'm strong in history. Of the flogging there [points to Colonie Belge,painting 34] I can do three a day. Pictures ofLumumba I can do two a day,if I work hard.

F: Mm-hmm.

T: Because you must seek to work with care on detail. (1996:6)

[...]A few days later (on December I6, 1973), we met again and picked up

where we had left off. Most of the paintings turned out to be about histori-cal events, especially the life of Lumumba. Could you do more of those, Iasked (and this may have been the moment our project was born, in anycase it was the moment I realized that Tshibumba had ambitions beyondpainting the few historical subjects that had become an accepted genre).

[...]

T: I'll come with a lot.

F: Pictures showing Lumumba's history?

T: History and nothing but history.

F: But, as you said, you are an historian.

T: Fine.

F: And an artist.

T: I am an artist, yes, I am a historian. (1996:9)

Tshibumba moves, here, in a kind of contrapuntal urplus and disruption of theproject Fabian rightly and problematically ees as collaborative. This is not only inrecorded pauses and interjections, sounds usually unassimilable o writing, but inthe syntax of the response as well, a break of ethnographic grammar marked by nospecial spelling, by neither ellipsis nor emphasis. It's ust the old rhythmic break ofthe non/response, cutting the flow of the interview, the continuity of an encoun-ter still too laden with power. "Fine."

"I am anartist, yes,

I am a historian."

Thisbroken phrasing marks something on the order of a fantasy, bears whatever poly-phonic disturbance even the accompaniment of the utterance leaves behind in itspercussive recapitulation of what Fabian might otherwise think of as the naturalseparation of the aesthetic and historical projects and impulses. Of course, it's not



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138 Fred Moten

I973, dangers Fabian amply points out, but by the necessity of an historico-aesthetic project whose adequacy depends, precisely, upon the transcendence ofmere return. Tshibumba's project is necessarily a reconstructive, resurrective one,an image of totality seeking to capture he complex and multidirectional imes andthe manifold social layers of another understanding of development. The rhythmof the paintings and the interviews with Fabian mark all of this all of the time.Lumumba's death is constitutive here in its lack, as is his spirit in its supplemen-tarity. This is part but not all of what Tshibumba is after when he characterizesLumumba as the "Lord Jesus of Zaire." Here we can look at three modes of Fa-bian's transcription, hinking their difference among other things. This is, for Fa-bian, a crucial moment where "[t]here is no attempt [...] to escape into allegory.Speaking in the first person, and actually giving his name and profession, [Tshi-bumba] asserts his authorship of the story and assumes responsibility or its emplot-ment" (1996:267). What happens via this mediation? What does Fabian assert/insert? s it ever not aesthetic?

You see that I made three crosses back there. [About] the meaning of thispicture, I am saying that Lumumba [died; he interrupts imself nd makes anew start] , in my opinion, I, the artist Tshibumba, I see that Lumumba waslike the LordJesus of Zaire. (1996:267)[...I

So he died, but we don't know where his body lies. There are suspicions.Some say they threw it into sulfuric acid, or what do you call it? If you puta human body or whatever in it, this acid leaves only a liquid and somesolid residue, and that's t. That is what some people said. In any event, yousee that I painted three crosses back there. I am saying-I, speaking for my-self, as the artist Tshibumba-that in my view, Lumumba was the Lord Je-sus of Zaire. Above I painted six stars, because he died for unity. And Ithink you see the blood that is flowing from his side, how it spreads andwrites something on the ground: Unity. What this means is that Lumumbadied for the unity of Zaire. (122)[...]

F: Where is this scene? I don't recognize it; is it out in the bush?

T: The actual place? In my thoughts it was inside a house. But then I did itin this way in order make the death more visible. Were I to present thescene inside the colors would not come out and it would not be as impres-sive [...]. And the three crosses you see there, that is my idea. Because whenI followed his history, I saw that Lumumba was like the Lord Jesus. He diedthe same way Jesus did: between two others. And he was tied up the wayJesus was. It was just the same. (122)

Fabian outlines early in the text a certain apparatus, his curatorial choices. Theyare, first and foremost, typographic, visual, but their visuality marks always he in-flection of the aural:

Each painting [...] is introduced by portions of Tshibumba's narrative,

which appear n sans serif type below the painting itself. They are followedby excerpts from our conversations about the picture, with the speakersmarked T for Tshibumba and F for Fabian. [...] I must emphasize that noteverything that was recorded was displayed. [...] In the narrative passages,traces of conversation-brief interjections, repetitions, hesitations, and



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much of the redundancy that characterize oral performance-have been si-

lently omitted. (x-xi)

Nevertheless, one notes with gratitude that Fabian, n his ethnographic/method-ological essays, takes pains to recover the exigency and surplus of oral perfor-mance. One wants to say that: (I) this surplus of aurality s Tshibumba's aestheticsand politics; (2) it infuses the paintings as well as the utterance/performancearound the paintings-accompaniment as essence in politics and aesthetics.

Tshibumba's transcendence of genre and its "predictable creativity" s seen byFabian as a transcendence or disregard of the aesthetic as well. More precisely,for Fabian, "What [Tshibumba] says about art and aesthetics-or for that matter,about painting-remains of secondary importance compared to his ambitions asa historian. What he does as a painter is absolutely essential to his work as a histo-rian" (I89). However, Tshibumba's reprise of Fabian's pause at a juncture that inthe political reason of Tshibumba gives no pause, opens us to the question ofwhether the aesthetic-as something he enacts and, in so doing, theorizes-is

elemental not only to Tshibumba's historiographic ambition but to his politicaldesire as well. This is to say that the lyrico-narrative ingularity hat bears the con-tent of Lumumba's political utterance/accompaniment, that is the essence and ve-hicle of African political reason in its universality, s an aesthetic concern, situatedat the asymptotic nonconvergence of the autonomous aesthetic and the autono-mous political. Moreover, the ethnographic object ruptures ethnography genera-tively, breaks ethnography's aws; but this is only possible because of ethnography.This is history and nothing but history.

T: That means we are all historians.

F: That is true.T: They are writers, I am a painter.

F: Mm-hmm.

T: But we are the same; we join [forces].

F: Mm-hmm.

T: Because a man cannot have a complete life without a woman, only if heis with a woman.

F: Mm-hmm.

T: It's like a marriage.

F: Mm-hmm. (I4)

The dramatics/erotics of the ethnographic encounter sounds differently hereand now. Here Fabian indicates his method for forging an attunement to thatsound in the discourses on the paintings:

The texts that make up the Prelude, unlike the ones that accompany thepaintings, are attempts at literal translation. Repetition, monosyllabic inter-

jection, repair, and other elements of live conversation are preserved n thisversion, and only a few brief passages are omitted (marked by three dots).Just as shapes and shades are worked out in a painting, sometimes withmuch brushwork, sometimes by merely a few strokes, so are ideas devel-oped in oral communication, which is characterized by both redundancy



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140 Fred Moten

and ellipsis-too much and too little for the reader who was not present inthe flow of speech and cannot benefit from clues that get filtered out whenspeech is transposed nto writing. (3)

Fabian opts for a faithful transcription of these discursive performances rather hana faithful transcription of the utterance. This is to say, n Austinian terms, that Fa-bian transcribes he accompaniment of the utterance as well as the utterance. Inthis sense he violates Austinian principles to which the transcribers fAustin's lec-tures faithfully and faithlessly adhere. Implicit in Fabian's decision is that the con-tent of Tshibumba's work depends upon his faithless, aithful transcription. Fromthis we extrapolate that the content of Lumumba's ife and speeches-which is tosay the essence of Lumumba's politics, the essence of African political rational-ity-depends upon the lyrico-narrative ingularity of what cuts, augments, accom-panies his utterance. This is to say that the rhythmic or temporal disruption anddislocation of Tshibumba, which occurs not only in his aural responses to Fabianbut in the paintings as well, is accompanied by a tonal supplement that is, again,both in the paintings and the aural responses to Fabian. (Note, as Fabian does, themassive and content-filled compression of space, time, and history in painting 5:I th-century explorer Diego Cao in 19th-century pith helmet, marking the con-centration of a transnational history of colonialism into an enframed moment; andthis is not some reduction, some "essential section" of African development, themark of some out-of-time African "contemporaneity" somehow both in and outof Hegelian totality and temporality; t is rather a framed but internally differen-tiated "moment" in which the movement and stasis of colonialism is given in allof its punctuated duration.)

I would call, here, echoing Lumumba, for a political radiophonics, a politicalphonography beyond mere transposition, improvising through the oppositionand-carrying forward the content-of faithful and faithless transcription. Thisrequires thinking what it means to speak of the paintings and what accompaniesthem. Not just text but sound. Sound and content. The sound and content ofTshibumba and Lumumba is recorded in the paintings, reconstituting them notonly against (what Derrida might call the law of) genre but as phonographic his-tory as well. So that what occurs in the paintings s not prior to or outside of writ-ing, but part of an ongoing reconstitution of writing and the political reasonwriting (and reading) allows. The edgy lyricism of the painting that shows up asan irreducible trace of its production-brushwork and out, off color-is Lu-mumba's spirit, the spirit of a postcolonial future, the breath of the utterance thatis also the breath of its accompaniment. So that the internal, theatrical difference

of the utterance and the irreducibly differential phonic substance that is the utter-ance's material and mystical shell mark the point where the essence and, for lackof a better term, (aural) appearance of the speech converge.

Is this accompaniment like that of the pauses, repetitions, noises, silences, thataccompany the utterances of the prelude? What justifies the absence of these ac-companiments? Are they really absent? How can we begin to speak of and hearthe aural accompaniments of the painting that are not only underneath, but in it?Deleuze and Guattari give us a clue that might be expanded:

The refrain s sonorous par excellence, but it can as easily develop its forceinto a sickly sweet ditty as into the purest motif, or Vinteuil's little phrase.

And sometimes the two combine: Beethoven used a "signature une." Thepotential fascism of music. Overall, we may say that music is plugged into amachinic phylum infinitely more powerful than that of painting: a line ofselective pressure. That is why the musician has a different relation to thepeople, machines, and the established powers than does the painter. In par-



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Not In Between 141

ticular, he established powers feel a keen need tocontrol the distribution of black holes and lines of i-deterritorialization in this phylum of sounds, in

order to ward off or appropriate he effects ofmusical machinism. Painters, at least as com- i

monly portrayed, may be much more open so-cially, much more political, and less controlledfrom without and within. That is because eachtime they paint, they must create or recreate a i iphylum, and they must do so on the basis of bod-ies of light and color they themselves produce, '::whereas musicians have at their disposal a kind of

germinal continuity, even if it is latent or indirect,on the basis of which they produce sound bodies. ):-Two different movements of creation: one goes

;

from soma o germen, nd the other from germen o

soma. The painter's refrain s like the flip side ofthe musicians, negative of music. (1987:348)

It is precisely n the too much and too little ofredun-

incy and ellipsis-cut and augmentation that a sur-us lyricism in form and sometimes in content mirrorse structure of the political totality, the particular and

vaginative universality, hat Lumumba was after n thest place, that provides for us, now, the aesthetic analogan anarchy n excess of democratization, an anarchy

ven not as the absence of ground but as ground's im-ovisation in the absence of

origin,something

alonge lines of what Fabian, here, anticipates: :-'i- :

Combining what I gleaned from Power nd Performance ith what I learnedfrom the study of charismatic authority and popular historiology, I come toa conclusion that will probably be perceived as scandalous: Political narchymust be seriously onsidered s a realistic ption or, and outcome f, "democratiza-tion, " if the term is to mean political thought and action from the bottom

up rather han ust the importing or imposing of institutions whose history,after all, has been inseparable rom capitalist and imperialist expansion. [...]

Anarchy as a rational option is emphatically not to be confused with pseudo-realistic analyses of a factual breakdown and descent into Hobbesian chaosdemanding brutal outside response n the form of outright intervention and

ultimately political recolonization. Nor could anarchy be a rational optionif it were conceived in mere negative terms as the absence of effective

government. It should be thought of as a discursive errain of contestation,and it will be up to Africans-the people as well as those certified intellec-tuals who think from and for the people to invent or reinvent models andinstitutions of political life that make possible survival with dignity. [...]

Finally, t should be obvious that I am not assigning anarchic democrati-zation to Africans. Ernest Wamba dia Wamba- who has for many yearsbeen working on the palaver, ommunal litigation, as a viable form of deal-

ing with power-points out [...] that "democracy must be conceptualizedat the level of the whole planet Earth." If anarchy s a realistic option of de-

mocratization, t may have to be considered globally. I think that, in a timewhere once comfortable compartmentalizations nd distinctions between

3. Painting : Tshibumba'scompression f time, space,and history: 15th-centuryexplorer Diego Cao in clas-sic colonial arb. (CourtesyofJohannes Fabian)



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I42 Fred Moten

democratic and nondemocratic societies are getting blurred, few need to beconvinced that this is so. Therefore serious thoughts about Africa, and thestudy of democratization here, is anything but a matter of bringing readysolutions to that continent. Democratization as a solution is the problem.(1998:127-29)

What is the relation between Lumumba's surplus yricism-its lyrical disrup-tion of the politics of meaning, of democracy as the politics of meaning-and an-archization? Everything. And what have these to do with a certain eclipse or cutof genre, a generic or sexual cut? Perhaps his: that Lumumba's ranscendence ofgenre corresponds with Tshibumba's. Tshibumba achieves the memorializationor historicization, the recording and amplification, of Lumumba's lyricism inpainting, a mode of painting that cuts genre precisely by way of its reproductionand incorporation of that lyricism, its reproduction of Lumumba's sound.

What are we to make of this? How does this signify? How do we think thisbeyond signification, on the other side of a certain set of restrictions of language,out from the outside of the discourse on value? By way of the fact that the objectmoves. Animating the paintings, fluxing their objectivity, s the spirit/value (if notsome purely representational or significational meaning) of a postcolonial future.This spirit of the future works in conjunction with the ways in which the paint-ings are meant, as part of their commodification, to bring certain things to mind,to induce certain memories, even memories of the present. Political, migrational,choreatic. The music is the vehicle, drives and is the car. These are phenomenathat we might fruitfully think in Eisensteinian terms. The paintings constitutewhat Sergei Eisenstein recognized in Leonardo's The Deluge-notes for a paintingnever done, description figured by Eisenstein as a "shooting script"-as an earlyexperiment in audio-visual relationships 1942:25):

[Such] forms included "overtonal" montage. This kind of synchronizationhas been touched upon [...] in connection with Old and New. By this per-haps not altogether exact term, we are to understand an intricate polyph-ony, and a perception of the pieces (of both music and picture) as a whole.This totality becomes the factor of perception which synthesizes the origi-nal image towards he final revelation of which all of our activity has beendirected. (86)

Eisenstein moves toward an analysis of color in film as the decisive element for"the question of pictorial nd aural correspondence, hether bsolute r relative-as an

indication of specific human motions" 86-87). And in this movement he will in-troduce a term that seems peculiarly well-designed to encompass what it is thatTshibumba accomplishes: "chromophonic or color-sound montage" where mon-tage, at its most basic, is "Piece A, derived from the elements of the theme beingdeveloped, and Piece B, derived from the same source, in juxtaposition giv[ing]birth to the image in which the thematic matter is most clearly embodied" (69).The thematic matter, n this case, is the material spirit of the postcolonial future.

Tshibumba derives something from colonialism (by way of Fabian, by way ofthe ethnographic encounter which they both perform in a kind of animating con-tamination; this something is what we might call the opportunity of the book, thesequencing the book allows and the dissemination of that montagic form): a cer-tain

modernityin

techniquesof form and

subjectivity. But these are means. Thework remembers ts originary animation, its unachieved natal occasion, its before:the postcolonial future. And this memory drives it and instantiates what the workwould enact. If Fabian's ethnographic performance s meant to produce and con-vey knowledge about Tshibumba's culture, this must be understood as a media-tional condition of possibility for a certain movement of Tshibumba's work and



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Not In Between 143

as the echo or contemporary manifestation of those social and politico-economicconditions which make Fabian's work possible and the work of Fabian and Tshi-bumba necessary. But Fabian's ethnographic performance is, at the same time,made possible by and contained within the trajectory of Tshibumba's work. Fa-bian's aim is within Tshibumba's circle or frame. But Tshibumba's aim and workabounds and exceeds Fabian's. Tshibumba's work is (animated by the spirit/value)a representation, which is to say a memory of a postcolonial future prefigurativelycutting any return or recourse to authenticity.

Fabian speaks of the irruption of the outside into the performance/productionof the project, the sound of the plane during a moment in which Tshibumba n-serts commentary into his painted narration where aerial bombing is central; heinsertion of commentary into narration n general. These irruptions ead Fabianto speak of the reproduction rather than the representation of knowledge. Theseirruptions, however, don't stop Fabian's privileging of the historical over the aes-thetic. It's as if his notion of the aesthetic is too narrow to admit modes of repre-sentation that are not immediately opposed to production. Such reconstructive

modes are precisely what Tshibumba is about as painter/historian and politicalthinker in the Lumumba tradition. So that if Fabian understands Tshibumba'sproject as a window onto culture, a logic with history, a way of fulfilling his an-thropological responsibility "to represent Tshibumba and his work in such a waythat they add to or deepen our knowledge of the culture n which they emerged,"he understands t only partially. This is to say that the aesthetico-political (histori-cal) encounter in Tshibumba's work operates n a way that calls the idea of cultureinto question rather than merely illuminating that idea in some particular mani-festation. This is to say that each of the paintings, the relations between the paint-ings and the performance that emerges from them and out of which they emerge,constitute an articulated combination that is, itself, always cut and augmented by

a rhythmic and tonal surplus that is the difference between them and is commonto them. Culture is a false, allegorical totality, an object given in a methodologythat works in and toward the eclipse of the aesthetic and the (political/economic)historical, an object that means to stand n for the complexity of the social totality,that moves in relation to the articulated combination, the interinanimative auton-omy, of the aesthetic and the politico-economic. The deepening of "our" knowl-edge of a culture has intense connections to the return to authenticity. Here iswhere the ethnographic and the neocolonial projects converge. Here, also, iswhere the postcolonial project is reconstructed. Fabian s constitutive of every as-pect of this complex. He is a necessary condition of the resurrection of a(geo)political aesthetic. And it's all about the irruption of the outside, not just as a

paradoxically essential accident of performance but as a fundamental element ofthe African political aesthetic, of African political reason. What Fabian sees as "aninstance of[...] the intrusion of materiality nto the immaterial world of represen-tation," where "[noise] establishes physical presence," is, more precisely, a mo-ment that reveals that fundamental im/materiality of representation of whichTshibumba is aware and upon which he depends as aesthetic and political theoristand practitioner. And if noise establishes presence, it establishes t at a distance-of space in the case of the plane (which is there and not there, above and before,our hearing of it marking proximity and its other all the time), of time in the caseof Lumumba (whether memorialized in song or in Mobutu's totalitarian radio),of both. All this is to say that our interest in the performance of the painting mustbe

alloyed byan interest in

performance in the painting-as sound and rhythm,as musical or radiophonic transfer. And here we get to painting 97, by way of oneof Fabian's ess aggressively edited transcriptions:

T: [...] I went inside my house and thought every which way I was capableof. I failed. Just as I was about to go to sleep I put the radio down at the



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144 Fred Moten

head of the bed. Then sleep took me. After sleep had taken hold of me Idreamed this and that, always with the idea that I should receive the futureand what it would be like. But I failed completely. I just listened to the mu-sic. It began to play and it was already midnight.

F: Mm-hmm.T: As the music was playing, it brought me a dream. I dreamed this build-ing, the way you see it. I didn't really see that it was a building; it was in adream, and the colors I put-all this was in the dream-but it did not sitstill. You [= I] would look, and it was just different. Now, the music theybegan to sing-it was the night program about the Revolution-they be-gan to sing a song, "Let us pray for a hundred years for Mobutu." All right.Now, the vision I had [mawazo le naliona, it. "the thought I saw"] was this:There were those skeletons that were coming out of this building, here andthere, on both sides.

F: Mm-hmm.

T: Then this one [here] comes. Then mournful singing started n femalevoices; that was there on the side of the building. So sleep had carried me[away], and I dreamed those skeletons [...]. (257)

Following an interruption in which Tshibumba speaks of another painting, apainting too dangerous to circulate or carry around, Fabian breaks here-and sogives us a chance to do the same. In the break we notice the aspect-dawning ofTshibumba's vision. Internally differentiated, he painting would not sit still-itwas animated. And we notice Fabian's footnotes where the term "animation" s

said to refer to "the dancing and singing of praise songs for the party that accom-panied all public occasions at the time" (I996:257, n. 7). Tshibumba by way ofFabian points us to the truly revolutionary force of such accompaniment, itschange in aspect out of the control of Mobutu, infused by another spirit. After thebreak Tshibumba resumes: "You see the skeleton standing up. Then they playedanother song that really woke me up, a song that Tabu Ley used to sing long ago:[in Lingala] soki okutani na Lumumba okoloba nini' [...] (258).

And here follows another interruption repeated by Fabian. This interruption san aside on the importance of dreams n traditional African culture. Fabian doesnot include it. "Then he resumed his account exactly at the point where he hadinserted his reflection" (258).

[T:] Now the tall skeleton just stood upright at the time. Then I woke upand began to tell my wife about it. Also, I was full of fear. When I thoughtabout things [other paintings] to do, I failed [to come up with any]. Then Ithought: No, I'll do that painting exactly the way my dream was. Becausewhat Mr. Fabian asked me was whether I could do the future. All right.While such thoughts went by me, I set out to dream what was asked for.Actually, I did not consciously think anything, the ideas I had came as a sur-prise, [for instance] when those skeletons appeared here. In my sleep I ranas fast as I could, and I was startled o hear that they were singing this song,"Kashama Nkoy." That was the song they began to sing.

F: "Kashama Nkoy"?

T: "Kashama Nkoy"; it's a record by Tabu Ley.

F: Mm-hmm.



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Not In Between 145

I i ?00: >/" : t:i -:iy ::;:f ; -- IIK e 4. Painting 97: The1 0 | 0 ' f | ^t i;;^ Nt0, 4X thought Tshibumba aw: a

tIf - - : ::::-nightmare vision of "a hun-dred yearsfor Mobutu."(Courtesy fJohannes Fa-

.. i e'^ i...'i^. bian)

T: Now, he was speaking n Lingala; n Swahili he [would have] said: [firstrepeats he Lingala hrase] soki okutani Lumumba: okuloba nini?" Which isto say: If you were to meet Lumumba right now, what would you say? All

right. I woke up with a start and told my wife about it.

F: I see. (258)

This is what it is to receive the spirit of the postcolonial future. The recordingof Tshibumba's dream, the recording of his passion, is all bound up with Lu-mumba's passion, where passion is not only suffering but an overwhelming aes-

thesis, a massive and surprising sensual experience that happens o you, an

irruption of the outside in its fullness with regard o every sense, where the en-semble of the senses is established by way of each of the senses becoming theore-

ticians in their practice. Tshibumba paints the dream exactly as it was, animationand all, not standing still and all, thereby asserting hat what it will mean to meetLumumba s the taking of a general responsibility, he possibility of a scandal anda chance, for and in excess of Mobutu. All of Fabian's attunement to the perfor-mative aspects of Tshibumba's painting is crucial here but not far-reachingenough. His attention to Tshibumba's rhythm, his performative iming, his filmic

cuts, the way the static frame incorporates movement are all welcome but are allbound up with an aesthetic and political reason hat undermines the notion of cul-ture Fabian s interested n illustrating. You can't talk about performance without

talking about the aesthetic. And when you talk about the aesthetic you've got totalk about it in its interinanimative autonomy vis-a-vis the political. And when

you talk about all that you're not talking about "culture" anymore. And here, thesimple opposition between performance and recording, production and repro-duction, is broken down by the inescapable act of the surplus that is and marksthe aesthetic and the political in their difference and commonality. Fabian s to be



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146 Fred Moten

commended and appreciated or his intuition regarding the presence of truth inTshibumba's work, even in the "vociferous silences" of his truly popular history.But that truth cannot ever be detached from a truly radical aesthesis hat is a matterof danger for the big shots. Tshibumba lets Fabian know that he thought aboutthe future even before Fabian commissioned him to; that thought is aesthetic and

political in Lumumba's spirit, the material spirit of the postcolonial future.

4

So the not in between and the postcolonial, that return now as the question ofthe future, can be thought in terms of the relations between sound, image, andvalue. Marx images the commodity as soundless and the theory of value he putsforward depends upon that reduction-or, more precisely, impossibility-ofphonic substance. He calls upon us to imagine the commodity speaking, ventril-oquizing, because he knows it cannot, knows that if it said something the under-

standing givenits valuation as a function of its silence would be

inadequate.So the

substance of the sound in the image/commodity requires a revision, an improvi-sation of the labor theory of value. And it is important that the sound infuses thecommodity/image/frame and is other than that which would operate on a paralleltrack. This would mark a difference between the sound of the painting and thesound of film that is decisive and momentary to the extent that it quickly invadesthe internal structure of film form and film frame. This aural nfusion of the visual,the very constitution of the visual in and with the aural, each a condition of theother's possibility, ach cutting and in abundance of the other, is, again, a theoreticaldisruption, he natal occasion of new sciences (of value) given in the material inspi-ration of the phonically nfused frame. Tshibumba's work is an exemplary ite of thisoccasion, this improvisation hrough the opposition of

descriptionand

prescription,representational memory and theoretical vision, totalizing allegory and cognitivemapping. It marks an historical and aesthetic compulsion; a compulsion to makeor to produce every day; to produce contradiction, painting, theory; to producethe lyrical, everyday disruption of ethnography, art and history and their not inbetween.6

Notes

I. Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu (later Mobuto Sese Seku) are the central historicalfigures n the Fabian/Tshibumba ollaboration nd in my text. Lumumba, an iconic figure

in the history of postcolonial Africa, was the first Prime Minister of the Congo after ts in-dependence rom Belgium. Lumumba's hort-lived government was forced from office in acoup directed by his former aide, Mobutu, and enabled by the neocolonial nterventions fBelgium and the United States. Mobutu's hold on power asted more than two decades andwas characterized y the most vulgar authoritarian nd kleptocratic xcesses. The Congo isstill n search of the postcolonial promise hat Lumumba has come to embody.

2. The oft-quoted ine is from a poem by Aime Cesaire, Notebook fa Return o My Native Land,that James quotes in his appendix o The Black acobins.He also uses the phrase as a title toone of the volumes of his collected essays.

3. This text and ts author are brilliant nd ndispensable. fI say anything of value n divergencefrom Robinson it is only as a function of his enabling exts and conversations. This essay san attempt o linger n the interrogative pace he opens around he issues of the lyricism andthe origins of black radicalism.

4. It's significant hat Walter Rodney is able to think an equally unlikely emergence of the pro-letariat:

Less than three years after being emancipated rom slavery, he new wage-earningclass was acting in certain respects ike a modern proletariat; nd the first recorded



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Not In Between 147

strike n the history of the Guyanese working classwas a success, eading o the with-drawal of the planters' abor code and the continuation of the moderately ncreased

wage rate. (1981:33)

James makes explicit what Rodney implies: he insistently previous presence of the pro-letariat hat strangely nhabits not only the bourgeoisie but the slave masses. Another socialontology, another heory of history, another dialectic s embedded here.

5. I am in great debt, here and everywhere n this essay, o Nathaniel Mackey's notion of thesexual cut:

Some would say it's not my place to make comments on what I've written, but letme suggest that what's most notably at issue in the Accompaniments' e/she con-frontation s a binary round of works and deeds whereby he dead accost a ground ofuncapturable stations." The point is that any insistence on locale must have longsince given way to locus, that the rainbow bridge which makes or unrest ongoinglyechoes what creaking he rickety bed of conception makes. I admit this is businesswe've been over before, but bear with it long enough to hear the cricketlike chirpone gets from the guitar n most reggae bands as the echoic spectre of a sexual "cut"

(sexed/unsexed,seeded/unsown,

etc.)-"ineffable glintsor

vaguelyaudible

gruntsof unavoidable larm."[...] You got me all wrong on what I meant by "a sexual cut"' n my last etter. I'm

not, as you insinuate, advancing everance as a value, much less pushing, as you putit, "a thinly veiled romance of distantiation." put the word "cut," remember, nquotes. What I was trying to get at was simply the feeling I've gotten from the char-acteristic, almost clucking beat one hears n reggae, where the syncopation comesdown like a blade, a "broken" laim to connection. Here I put the word "broken"in quotes to get across he point that the pathos one can't help hearing n that claimmingles with a retreating ense of peril, as though danger tself were beaten back bythe boldness, however "broken," f its call to connection. The image I get is one ofa rickety bridge (sometimes a rickety boat) arching iner than a hair to touch downon the sands at, say, Abidjan. Listening o Burning Spear he other night, for exam-ple, I drifted off to where it seemed I was being towed into an abandoned harbor.wasn't exactly a boat but I felt my anchorlessness s a lack, as an inured, eventuallyvisible pit up from which I floated, ooking down on what debris ooking into it left.By that time, though, I turned out to be a snake hissing, "You did it, you did it,"rattling nd weeping waterless ears. Some such flight (an nsistent previousness vad-ing each and every natal occasion) comes close to what I mean by "cut." I don'tknow about you, but my sense is that waterless ears don't have a thing to do withromance, hat n fact f anything actually breaks t's the blade. "Sexual" omes into itonly because the word "he" and the word "she" rummage about in the crypt eachdefines or the other, reconvening as whispers at the chromosome evel as though thecrypt had been a crib, a lulling mask, all along. In short, t's apocalypse 'm talking,not courtship.

Forgive me, though, if this sounds at all edgy, maybe garbled at points. My earsliterally burn with what the words don't manage o say. I986:30, 34-35)

6. At one stage n its career, his essay was part of a collaborative ffort n which I was engagedwith Abdul-Karim Mustapha. want to acknowledge he positive nfluence he had on thedevelopment of this work while absolving him from any responsibility or its faults.

References

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari1987 A Thousand lateaus. Translated y Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Derrida, acques1976 [I967] Of Grammatology. ranlated by Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak. Baltimore: ohns

Hopkins University Press.



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