Session 7: “The Poetic Measures of Marronage”
Thanks, as always, to everyone who made it to the last session of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio and to the many present-absences who shaped the session’s proceedings.
Upcoming Session Date: 17 March 2024
Start Time : 10:30 LA / 13:30 NYC / 15:30 São Paulo / 18:30 London / 19:30 Berlin / 21:30 Dar es Salaam / 23:59 Delhi
End Time: 12:30 LA / 15:30 NYC / 17:30 São Paulo / 20:30 London / 21:30 Berlin / 23:30 Dar es Salaam / 02:00 Delhi
Background Readings for the Next Session:
“Lurking in Swamps, Woods, or Other Obscure Places” from City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763–1856 by Marcus P. Nevius
“The Terrible Beauty of the Slum” from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman
“Exposing the Surrounds as Urban Infrastructure” from The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture by AbdouMaliq Simone
Jeff Wall, After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue
Having spent much of the previous session dwelling upon numerical and statistical measures describing the deathly realities of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide, I asked you all to spend this session troubling the very same measures with me. You all were very obliging, and we troubled these measures from four different directions.
First, we wondered about the degree to which many of the measures that convey the deathly realities of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide conceal more than they reveal. Reading a recent New York Times article titled, “Just How Many People Will Die From Climate Change?”, we noted how callous the writing was. The author was able to rattle off figures in the millions, tens of millions, and hundreds of millions without much emotion. The author did not consider every single life to be an essential thread woven into a delicate globe-spanning social fabric. Being too concerned with quantities dead to consider quality of life amidst so much death, there was little regard for each statistic being not only a person but an integral member of a community.
Going further, the statistical quantity also obscured the quality or manner of death. The author failed to note that each death was a murder by omission, the direct consequence of the maintenance and advancement of regimes of organized abandonment. We returned, again, to a quote from Friedrich Engels to make this observation:
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds […] in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
The statistical character that attends to murders by omission in our time, the fact that such murders don’t target individual persons but dividual populations, is a characteristic that is construed to make murder by omission seem qualitatively less “murderous”, enabling researchers to passively estimate how many are scheduled to passively die.
Second, we wondered at the fact that all of these statistics aren't really meant for us. They are really meant for those whose fingers are at Empire’s remote controls. We read a remarkable passage from the second volume of Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine to orient ourselves in this regard.
Central to the power complex from the beginning was remote control. As long as the main components of the megamachine were human beings, this required doglike obedience from every human unit in the chain of command. Such one way hierarchic order was secured by severe punishment for the slightest disobedience. The transition from this cumbrous and laborious method was facilitated by the introduction of a national educational system, first in autocratic Prussia in the eighteenth century: afterward in France under Napoleon. National military conscription, imposed first by the ‘democratic’ French Revolution, completed this process.
The translation of these sometimes inefficient and recalcitrant human automatons into purely mechanical and electronic units made instantaneous remote control practicable: this was the largest possible gift to centralized authority, not only in government and military affairs, but in the widened operations of the great industrial corporations and financial conglomerations that now increasingly operate on a continental or global basis.
Those fingering Empire’s remote controls in the executive suites of leading government, military, and corporate institutions — and those who serve them as proxies — can make sense of the distinction between a choice that leaves ten thousand, a hundred thousand, five million, ten million, or fifty million dead because they can push the buttons on people and machines to make such choices happen. Those of us who cannot press buttons to move thousands or millions are only confronted by our own powerlessness when regarding such immense figures of death and destruction. Joe Biden might read the New York Times article cited above and feel empowered to take direct action, but I am made to feel as if there is nothing I can do but beg powerful button pushers to take pity on the wretched millions who are scheduled to die.
Indeed, many of us who contribute to the gathering and analysis of such statistics — whether as researchers, minor bureaucrats, or social service providers — do so in order to solicit resources and recognition from those fingering Empire’s remote controls. We are compelled to participate in the production and publication of such statistics as acts of self-belittlement, submission, and supplication to please those who can push the buttons that can dispatch the means to save so many lives. In so doing, we reinforce the privileges of these powerful button pushers, and we reinforce our own positions of powerlessness relative to them.
Third, in light of the above, we had to ask ourselves the deep practical and philosophical question of what purposes measures can serve apart from trivializing the lives of the oppressed and aggrandizing the means of remote control wielded by those in power. It seemed clear to us that without the sorts of measures that we discussed in our last session, many of us would not be able to make sense of the scale and scope of the regimes of organized abandonment and the mass murders by commission and omission that maintain Global Apartheid, nor would we be able to make sense of the regimes of extraction and excess consumption that constitute Planetary Ecocide. Yet, we also wondered whether coming into such knowledge through such measures has done us more harm than good. Aren't there more sensible ways that we might have come into this knowledge?
This brings us to our fourth and final troubling insight. It does not take too much reflection to recognize that the taking of a measure can reinforce the reality that we are taking measure of. Consider the climate scientist who invests their time and energy in applying for grants to engage in fossil fuel intensive travels to the Arctic to retrieve ice core samples and obtain data points to input into a supercomputer, only to more precisely index the degree to which warming has been caused by a society reliant on a fossil fuel intensive economy. The absurdity of this activity, this wasteful search for an increasingly more precise measure of the degree of our desolation struck us as characteristic of many environmental and social scientific endeavors, including many that we relied upon to make sense of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide during our sessions.
We all seemed to agree that it is a mistake to believe that any of our problems of measurement could be solved by fashioning instruments capable of more precise measurements or by developing data processing tools that record, sort, filter, and match measurements with greater accuracy. The agents of Empire would have us believe the lie that it is imperative for us to feed more precise data into our machines and models in order to more accurately predict favorable and unfavorable outcomes.
The truth of the matter is that our choices regarding what to measure, when and where to measure, and how precisely to measure are often responsible for prematurely or belatedly resolving outcomes in favorable or unfavorable ways. What’s more, given the manner in which Empire fetishizes measurement, we must ask ourselves whether, why, and for whom we should or shouldn’t make and take measures at all. Indeed, as Daniel pointed out, we could think of the making of mathematical measures as being akin to the making of linguistic turns of phrase, and, as Sarah pointed out, the poetic turn of phrase makes artful use of emptiness and silence. Perhaps, in a similar manner, we might say that poetic measures make artful use of the immeasurable and the unmeasured.
With all of this in mind, thinking with and through an exchange between Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, we concluded our conversation with some thoughts on the poetic measures of marronage: ways of living and socializing that are compelled to minimize the determinacy of the measured and measurable traces of “impact” and “human habitation” that they leave behind.
To be continued…
