After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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who could change the world.”77
A performance’s end always carries with it the promise of a new horizon. Take James’s description of the iconic conclusion to Charlie Chaplin’s movies: “And you know his famous endings: after all the trouble, you see him walking off into the distance along the road, into the horizon. He has been in a lot of trouble, he has been defeated, but he is still unconquered, and he is going off. And the next time he turns up as bright as ever. His vision of the good life is undying.”78 Following James, Muñoz argues that performance offers “more than a vision of a future moment; it is also about something new emerging in the actuality of the present, during the scene of performance. The stage, like the shop floor, is a venue for performances that allow the spectator access to queer life-worlds that exist, importantly and dialectically, within the future and the present.”79 Performance doesn’t just rehearse a different world, it makes it anew, again and again.
New York, New York. August 21, 1967.
Simone first recorded “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” in August of 1967. As in Taylor’s version, the song’s introductory passages carry us back to church, but with a much faster tempo. In the place of the accompanying double bass, the pianist lends her voice, offering a lyrical content that does not describe the feeling of freedom so much as it narrates the desire to sense a freedom that remains just beyond her capacity to grasp, know, and share it:
I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.
I wish I could break all the chains holding me.
I wish I could say all the things that I should say.
Say ’em loud, say ’em clear, for the whole round world to hear.80
Freedom, for Simone or for Taylor, is not a thing; nor is it an empty, abstract, ahistorical, universal ideal: their music was produced within and as contributions to ongoing struggles for the concrete realization of black freedom. Following their lead, throughout this book I think of freedom less as a point of arrival, or as a right that one possesses, then as an ephemeral sense and a practice of becoming that is performed into being by the body within tight and constrained spaces. In a study of improvisatory dance, Danielle Goldman describes performance as a “practice of freedom.”81 To think of freedom as practice and/or performance (as that which is ephemeral, embodied, and flickering in and out of being) is to understand freedom not as something to be had or used, but instead as something to be collectively improvised, produced, and made by and for the undercommons. As James described it, following Hegel, this form of “freedom is creative universality, not utility.”82
We might say that the freedom named in Simone’s song is marked by a subterranean and black communism. The first verse’s wish to break the chains resonate, for example, with Marx and Engels’s famous directive to the world’s proletarian masses: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” In these two sentences, which Simone most certainly encountered in her studies in Marxism with Hansberry, Marx and Engels offer a vision of a new world where emancipation emerges through common struggle. But the breaking of chains, as Bloch would say, is only a precondition for a life in freedom, not freedom itself. And a precondition to this precondition is the coming together of a being in common (the united workers of the world) to build a new world capable of sustaining freedom and More Life for everyone.
In Marx, this new world liberates the senses as much as it is graspable as sense. For the young Marx, sense plays a critical role in the constitution of communism as much as communism will ultimately achieve the liberation of the senses. In the 1844 Manuscripts he teaches us that sense is the means through which the individual knows or apprehends difference, the other, and the external world: “Each of his [sic] human relations to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving—in short all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective orientation or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of that object.”83
Simone, too, was a theorist of the relationship between sense, the senses, and collective emancipation. At the beginning of her version of the song, her voice is compressed, and it strains as she reaches for the upper shelf where she’s installed the word “wish.” But in the second verse, she returns to “wish,” this time supporting the lyric with more breath, letting the voice reach out to touch, grab, and brush up against the listener with confidence. At this point, the wish for freedom is described in more detail as a freedom to share (out) a sense of the self with the world: “I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart/ I wish I could give all I’m longing to give.” Simone’s longing to share, give, and say articulate a precondition for freedom: the capacity to share a sense of the self with the world in a fashion that is, as Karatani Kojin might say, “simultaneously free and mutual.”84 Sharing in order to support and sustain all life is the mode of exchange common to the commons and it is what is common to all forms of communism.
That Simone’s wish is always articulated from the point of deprivation locates it within the domain of the incomplete. Sharing through sense is always an experience of incompletion, but here incompletion is not a deficit so much as a condition of possibility. The incompletion of sharing is part of what allows plural-beings to exist in a common relationship, to be with each other, without flattening or obliterating the singularity and difference of each other. As Nancy describes it, “Sharing is always incomplete, or it is beyond completion and incompletion. For a complete sharing implies the disappearance of what is shared.”85 While the totalitarian tendencies of historical communism planned for complete sharing, often at the expense or even disappearance of great numbers of the masses that the party was supposed to liberate and work for, a communism of incommensurability is predicated on relations of incompletion and nonequivalence, expressed by Marx most directly in the Gotha Critique: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”86
To the pianist, the ability to share out the self with others and with the world (“I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart / Remove all the buzz that keep us apart”) is interrupted by conditions, or a “buzz,” that individuate the singular subject, keeping “us” apart. The undoing of these divisions would produce a new relationship between the listener and her senses but also reorient those senses toward the creation of a new world in which “you’d see and agree that every man should be free.” Marx effectively describes the whirling vortex of the capitalist mode of production as “the buzz that keeps us apart.” Capitalism individuates and diminishes each person’s senses (including their sense of others), while reducing the individual subject’s capacity for sense to the sole “sense of having.”87 But as he wrote those words in 1844, he could not or would not imagine that for his black contemporaries, the trade in flesh reduced a slave’s senses to a sense of being had. The ontological and historical priority of black resistance that animates black performance is thus fundamentally rooted in a yearning to emancipate sense, to open sense out into a plurality of alternative possibilities of sense for the black body and for black people across the world.
If sense was, as Marx implied, foundational to the definition of the human being, the violent denial, destruction, and negation of the black body’s capacity for sense was one of the master’s primary mechanisms for achieving the dehumanization of black people during (and after) slavery. Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection describes the central role performance played as the masters set about devising and staging scenes of subjection to transmit, reproduce, and reify the dominant racial ideology.88 The masters’ violence was often deployed to negate or control the slave’s capacity for sense, yet the slave’s body went on sensing, even if all she could sense was pain.89 For as James insisted, the slave pushed back by continuing to sense, to feel, and thus to claim an ontological status as a human being: “The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse, and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings.”90 So whether we are following Simone, James, Du Bois, or Marx, the conclusion that we reach might be the same: The emancipation of all people requires the long deferred freedom of black people, people