Identity, Ordered Time, and Futurism

Ordered Time and Social Existence

Existence feels irrefutable. We can’t help but operate within it. We recognize our existence because we observe a world that feels undeniably real, perhaps even attributing our own reality to a universe that feels tangibly infinite, able to contain us and so much more. We may disassociate from this truth, belittle its significance, occasionally will our non-existence, or even conflate our own existence with other entities or concepts that are less discernibly real. There are countless interrogations of the truth of existence, many of which attempt to anchor this ontological mode to a signpost of morality that is entirely dependent on the ways of being we already see in our present position in history. The present is dystopic and deeply fraught with suffering, yet, the vast majority of these explanations of our past view our present reality as normative, desirable, and in the process of further actualizing itself in the future. This is the shortcoming of a worldview that has failed to understand how we exist in time that is ordered, arrested, and trapped within an unsustainable trajectory that only promises more suffering. Futurism seeks to liberate us from ordered time by making space for us to build and arrive within a future that encourages us to thrive, providing us with the means to actualize our own intimate understandings of ourselves, our virtues, talents, and our capacity for emphatic love. The goal of futurism is to revolutionize how we exist, leaving behind everything that enslaves us in this dead and decaying present.

More practically, perhaps concretely, we might regard existence as time travel. We embody change as we witness change in the world. We do not experience life as isolated, static, unmoving states that bear no dynamic relationship to each other. We are perpetually placed inside of time and our existence consists of a perpetual perception of entities and objects that also exist in time, traveling alongside us. From this position of temporality, we are left to identify that which is familiar to us in order to orient ourselves in a dizzying matrix of infinite permutations of being — dense simulacrums, placeholders, signifiers, and singularities. Categorizations such as past, present, and future are used to prevent a total paralysis of inaction — petrification before a universe of potentiality.

When we pass between points in time, in our personal histories, we are setting traversable trajectories for ourselves. We are launched through a series of subjections that make up the framework of power between us. Individual subjects and objects are all submitted to us in our cognition of reality, yet, the entirety of each moment in space becomes integrated into ourselves. We are invariably ensnared by language as a dimension of conscious existence, yet our acceptance of this fact seems to preclude an appreciation of how abstract symbols and utterances become fixed enough for us to manipulate. We may imagine an ethereal conception that we hold in common; however, it is not until we find a fitting symbolic object to utilize that it becomes an intelligible container for our experiences in real time. “Real time” is the present moment, the dimension we are always within and attempting to stay abreast of. Insofar as we are given language by a previous generation, we are coerced by language to reproduce it and live within its conceptual parameters.

Unfortunately, our perception of time and space is not allowed to independently make sense of the world around us. Time, as we come to perceive it through the clock, standardized and universal, is brought to us already ordered and structured to reinforce the demands and expectations of those who have a material interest in upholding Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchal hegemony. The materiality of IWSCP always already includes the currency, commodities, property, access to institutions, and the surveillance of a violent state. The degree to which a person can operate within space and time ordered this way is largely determined by how easily they are able to receive positive affirmation and permittance to exist as they appear in relation to the hegemonic order.

Within a matrix of affirmation and rejection, repeated behavioral acts become raw material for erecting linguistic objects that we adopt, utilize, and reproduce as subjects in a social world. It follows from this precondition of conscious existence, that the organization of specific affirmations and rejections determine the intelligibility of social life. Hegemony utilizes systems that structure when, how, and what we experience as an affirmation. Corresponding rituals qualify who can claim the rewards we are authorized to pursue and acquire in our lives. Assimilating our will to the will of an employer qualifies us to spend the money we are given in return, obeying the commands of the police supposedly protects us from death and imprisonment, submitting ourselves to the census bureau legitimizes our identity, and mimicking the appearances we are told are appropriate or acceptable qualifies us to be recognized as valid and worthy of love, relationships, and community. The systems for the rejected are utilized to correct us wherever hegemony identifies us as out of order, queer rather than straight, “uncivilized” or “barbaric.” The sum total of these effects might be regarded as constitutive events or the techniques of socialization we, and our ancestors, have been made to internalize throughout history. The cultural patterns of subjecting humans to specific affirmations and rejections form a landscape for us to navigate in real time.

Constitutive events — the sum total of effects in social life produced by power and ordered time — are the contexts within which we construct narratives and our own personal identities. Identity, in this way, is the intelligible self-report of our experiences — the tale of our time travels. Identity is a report of our vulnerabilities as well as our desires as we have come to understand and relate to them. In all of these instances, we are communicating a myriad of lived consequences before the deployment of power. The assumption that hegemonic forms of power exist such that we must anticipate and expect them as obstacles, demonstrates the social utility of a constitutive event. We may choose to act as though power does not exist, or we can prepare for a possible confrontation with those forms of that are invoked against our behavior where we step out of line, but in either instance we have internalized and accepted the reality of Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. To reflexively orient ourselves around impositions by power dynamics fixed throughout time is precisely the moment where oppression manifests as a bio-power — the technique of inscribing a social order onto bodies. Our bodies are shaped to navigate hegemony’s matrices of subjection.

Adornment, Gazing, and Performativity

Expectation and observance of the law is what produces legality and illegality in our social reality. The police, the courts, the judges, the prison guards, the federal investigators, and the law itself all are positioned in our social reality in ways that allow them to evoke authority and discipline. The precise and stylized language of the state’s legal commands for its constituents embody configurations of power. For those who make up the state’s institutions, they use techniques of assessing a subject’s level of obedience based on the authority granted them by Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy’s requirements of ordered time. From these methods, the state decides what force can be used and simultaneously excused as a result of their legal prescriptions onto human behavior. The various discourses concerned with shaping a positive perception and representation of this violent power aim to cement law as real, valid, and just. The multiplicity of these dynamics all function as separate singularities centered in the points of time within which our consciousness operates. We see a police car, and the sum total of the state’s resources and abilities and expectations come to mind implicitly and explicitly. Our positionality in a world full of objects and subjects is inextricable from our consciousness. It is within these singularities of power that we are compelled to understand each other and ourselves in relation to the morality the state aims to actualize and propagate. Hegemonic discourse in this context fixes its own attention on itself, becoming attached to our interpretation of our senses. All that appears before us, material or virtual, contains its own histories, constitutive events, discourses and potentialities. So we are brought into a social world that is primarily situated within visibility. We operate in a complex world as a subject with a will that is always subjected to affirmations and rejections which, as a totalizing system, constitute hegemonic morality. Our decisions about how to orient ourselves around these dynamics are submitted to our consciousness before we can come to recognize and exercise our own agency. This practical limit of social life is due to the infinite configurations of power that are inapprehensible by consciousness in real time, due to the mechanics of language. Indeed, what is language without time? How we behave when we are in and out of public view, before or beyond the gaze of the state, exemplifies how our agency and will are made superfluous by the consistent presence of hegemonic power.

The capacity to conceptualize another individual’s intentions, thoughts, emotions, and our drive for empathy are all cognitive phenomena our minds visualize and make known to our consciousness via the senses. Our sensory systems in this way can only be known to us as experiences that belong to us in our past, present, or future. In real time, our senses provide us with feedback informing our agency, directing our will. It is precisely this fact of consciousness that has lead bio-power to manifest in so many forms of adornment, gazing and performative modalities that operate in concert with different social power dynamics. Each identity we are compelled to adorn, find within our gaze, or view as an authentic performance stemming from some constructed notion of sex or gender all contain projections and inclusions in series of assumptions made by a given discourse. Each discourse within hegemony is tasked with making its respective concepts, identities, and ideas appear natural within ordered time.

Bodily appearance, experienced in real time as behavior, is dissected by institutional categorizations and discourses that are impregnated with prescriptions of roles and narratives. These notions are attached to bodies through processes that precede recognition — people and their bodies arrive in range of our gaze via pasts that can only be conjectured about when we view them. Visibility allows for these identities and attributes to be regarded as an intelligible sex or gender. The means by which we consciously categorize and interpret what is presented to our senses are thoroughly affected by our socialization under Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. Bio-power transforms our existence into systems of knowledges to which our will and agency is subjected.

Race, sex, and gender are all products of bio-power in that they each are dense sequences of subjections that force bodies into intelligible personhood and identity. Viewed this way, gender seems to be a performance that appears to stem from sex. This false perception is precisely what allows patriarchy to operate at the level of identity in the form of prescribed binaries and gender roles. Performativity, contrast with acting or performing, is the internalization of conceptions about personhood that stratify people and their bodies in ways that allow for hegemony to exist as recurring patterns of bio-power in ordered time. Performativity is the criteria with which we appraise a subject as a product of gender and sex. Visible appearance becomes a malleable raw material for hegemonic power to shape wherever performativity, as we experience it in real time, displaces a person’s actual subjectivity — their own personal intimate relationship with their own consciousness. The goal of our subjectivity is not to perform how we would like to be perceived, adorning caricatures of our audience’s expectations and perceptions of us. It is true that we anticipate a gaze that is not ours and we notice when we are visible before that same external gazing subject. At the same time, this compulsion that informs how we choose to authentically carry ourselves in public space fundamentally differs from how we experience ourselves. Perhaps there are moments where we manipulate this awareness, in the interest of survival or in pursuit of some social reward, but we do not mistake our entire existence for these moments where we are seen and interpreted. The adornment of our identity is that of self-acceptance — how we come to embrace and accept our agency as it operates in concert within a world experienced in real time. Performativity displaces whatever conception of ourselves we may have with the assumption that our bodies and behaviours “perform” gender. This dynamic is analogous to how race becomes intelligible across cultures as a collection of attributes a member of a given race is seen as embodying. The cultural traditions, language, histories, and spatial organization all position our appearance and identification with race and gender. Each of these categorizations of personhood are the results of our existence throughout time within oppressive regimes that aim to shape our social reality through use of our bodies.

Embodying Hegemony

Intelligible ideals, the concepts we are compelled to aspire towards actualizing, serve to exemplify a way of being hegemony expects us to perform to the satisfaction of authority, power, and rulership. Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy makes itself an ideal to be embodied by its subjects in the form of identity. Sanctioned identity is a war between narratives of existence, complete with intricate forms of assumptive logic and morality. What is encouraged to exist is in the service of proliferating intelligible ideals and morality.

If the aggregate behavioral expectations of hegemony outline the boundaries of cultural intelligibility imposed upon our consciousness, we can be said to internalize a panopticon — an ever present gaze compelling us to assimilate to these hegemonic ideals borne out of our constitutive histories and events.

The permanence of these effects of power install a reality which functions entirely off of entitlements that can be normalized, unquestioned where they appear. The appearance of our individual desires or entitlements from the gaze are each requests from power. Normative entitlements of this sort represent the reward for assimilation to cultural hegemony. The completion of this process is represented wherever a specific intelligible ideal is said to be embodied by a body. The permitted finite permutations of civil behavior each contain various transactions of power. In this way, castes, divisions of groups, and classes all absorb the life lived under Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy in addition to the identity narratives that are adorned by and projected onto a body. This enables labor to be managed more easily, where the assimilatory panopticon and normative entitlements reduce the necessity of explicitly negative forms of oppression or behavior correction in daily life. To proudly adorn an identity in the realm of hegemonic visibility is to avow the conditions of personhood that are contained by a larger social discourse about our being.

Inclusion vs. Exclusion

The positive elements of society, the permitted and rewarded, are structural systems of inclusion. The negative elements are an exclusion from the positive system of rewards and establish a notion of invalid personhood. Yet, this exclusion is also an inclusion of a different sort. Exclusion from civility — to be denigrated as subhuman or unruly, is an inclusion within a system of subjections to brutality, impoverishment, imprisonment, death, social isolation, and alienation. The brunt of these violent techniques, which are all inextricably linked to each other in the service of paradigmatic supremacy, is specifically relegated to queerness, blackness, immigrants, and refugees. To be othered by Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy is to become an object, or receptacle, for the subjections that characterize inclusion within systems of oppression. To be objectified in this sense is to be oriented towards suffering and assimilation under the pretense of inferiority; the conditions of destruction and oppression.

Survival in this way is a matter of learning to identify boundaries of acceptance; the limits of the intelligible ideals compel us to make it known to power that our existence and our desires are in line — straight. We are compelled to disavow that which is undesirable for an oppressive and exploitative order: queer, black, non-conforming, brown, non-white. The modes of existing which confront the paradigmatic supremacy of our social reality — the terms of incivility delineated by national borders and cultural practices — must all be disavowed or condemned within the realm of hegemonic visibility. To be visible in ways the normalized ideals IWSCP deems inappropriate threatens and destabilizes its systems insofar as hegemony is not able to recuperate these rogue identities as abhorrent.

Identity is intended to communicate an existing configuration of desires and aversions that are intelligible within language. Indeed, the language, words, and speech-acts which are all claimed and sanctioned by the state are categories of personhood that are especially difficult to repurpose, given that hegemony seeks to coerce us into its own interpretations. Inclusion in these categories is to be incited to avow or disavow the “truth” of an expanding discourse surrounding identity. The discourse on legible identities aims to be totalizing in its disregard for identities that we may recognize as “marginal” or even “invisible.” Yet, this hegemonic reality cannot help but leave margins that invariably become a home for many. The delineation of boundaries between what is true or invalid comes to structure everyday life. These assumptions about identity, personhood, and social position within a hierarchy are merely abstract theoretical techniques of organizing bodies until they materialize as practiced bio-power. These techniques or deployments are made possible by both the structuring of how we access our cognition via language and how we navigate space. Space invested with this purpose requires specific expenditures of time; the hallway requires time spent walking between entrances and exits, the metal detector requires time spent removing items from one’s person, the lecture hall requires time spent sitting before an intellectual authority. Likewise, space permits or restricts particular desires from being sought or actualized, while sanctioned rewards are built into the behaviors, labors, and modes of existing within the hegemonic gaze. In this way, preconfigured desires are sanctioned by space as it has been dominated and shaped by power.

Architecture, so used by Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy, plays a significant role in configuring our social expectations before we have even arrived in that space and time. The intention here requires that our bodies, which are assumed to be indicative of our identity and personhood, must be apprehended by discourses and, as a result, subjected to various types of power. To be made into an object of power then is to become malleable before it; to be malleable is to be made stationary in time and altered in that moment of paralysis. The objectifying consequence of power is to have one’s future divorced from one’s own agency. Adornment, as something that is a compulsory part of survival within hegemony, is an orientation towards a future wherein one may be captured, apprehended by the assumptive consciousness and logic of a gaze positioned by a hierarchical system.

Where gender, sex, and race appear in social discourse as clear categories of identity describing culturally intelligible patterns, behaviors, appearances, and traditions — their deployments also exist as prescriptions. These prescriptions are set into motion when we speak to the ostensible accuracy of these categories in real time. It is true that our very familiarity with such notions are entirely a result of our constitutive histories that are invariably determined by colonization and its successive strategies of exploitation. The totalizing effects of constitutive histories are not immediately observable, even with our attempt to avow or disavow our relationship within a hegemonic social reality.

Inclusion is assimilation to the permitted, or, at least, permission to exist insofar as certain practices of being remain within the boundaries of identity discourse and unable to threaten ordered time and hegemonic space. Exclusion is to be categorized and identified in the margins as “other” or dyssynchronous with order. As a result of this hegemonic system, the progress of time is arrested as a dead future or as a permanent present. Where a hierarchy of race enables consumption of entire cultures by paradigmatic supremacy, gender and sex enable the consumption of individual lives. In this way, positioning maleness and femaleness as a performative dichotomy subjects bodies to a matrix of expectations and roles. Gender and sex, so purposed, forecloses the possibility of existing outside of these strict institutional notions of assigned sex. Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy as a global order bases the entirety of its “rights,” powers, and rewards on these notions of personhood. If we recognize that these power dynamics function entirely within the realm of visibility, we must also understand that visibility functions as a singularity that ensnares us all with necessarily incomplete conceptions of being. These phenomena are erected and codified by the institutions and structural formations of the state, which sanctions, constructs, and preserves the realm of visibility itself. This process is deliberately obscured, shrouded by our internalizations and reproductions of notions of personhood that result from bio-power. We may think of these processes and machinations of exploitation as invisible, unable to be apprehended by our own oppositional gaze. Yet, this is an intended product of hegemonic power under IWSCP. Indeed, our ability to to make these systems visible is the result of our own upheaval against how our bodies are placed in space and time. So, when we speak about our own invisibility and marginality, we are speaking about the unreconcilable inability of hegemonic space and ordered time to truly see and understand us.

Hegemony coaxes us into valuing representation within visibility by expanding its finite categories or by inviting us to be included in a discourse about how its categories, new or old, might better be utilized by us. However, ultimately, hegemony cannot subsume the margins. It can only exclude us from its world of visibility. By acknowledging and accepting our invisibility, we can construct spaces and times for us to problematize the destruction of these systems. More importantly, our invisibility allows us to construct a future that cannot be comprehended by hegemonic conceptions of how time and space are presently ordered. Radical invisibility, then, as a site of operation, is concerned with succeeding ordered time and space by communally investigating potentialities for bringing new constitutive events and subsequent ways of being to fruition. Marginality — communion within liminal space — is a weaponized position for us. Visibility within hegemony relates itself to the margins by denigrating those it would prefer to erase and regard as non-existent, rather than invisible and eluding the hegemonic gaze. Visibility is a coercion intended to make inclusion within ordered time and space desirable.

By contrast, futurism rejects the notion that time and space should be arrested and immortalized as a dead present. Futurism is confronting power with the strength of our subjectivity, our existence, and knowledge of our own constitutive events. By liberating time and space from hegemony, we risk becoming enveloped by new means of arriving in a social world that is presently unintelligible.

Futurism as a praxis is self recognition of our constitutive histories and our relative position within Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. By recognizing that we are invisible and in the margins, we are participating in a gaze that is oppositional, looking at the realm of visibility from outside of it. The future is invisible and within each of us who exist in the margins.

-M.I. Jazz Freeman